Wednesday, February 03, 2016

A Page from Vancouver Island's Maritime History - the BCP45




It's a bit of Vancouver Island history. The seiner, BCP45, came out of the Burrard drydocks in 1927 and plied the coastal waters for salmon until 1994. It changed hands frequently but spent much of the latter half of its service life operated by First Nations crews from Quadra Island.

In 1958, a documentary crew caught a picture of BCP45 at work in the Seymour Narrows near Campbell River.



That photo landed BCP45 a place on the reverse of Canada's $5 bill from 1972 to 1986.


Today she sits, safely restored, at the Maritime Heritage Centre in Campbell River.



4 comments:

  1. Somehow I landed on the National Posts page, and I, as one, ever looking for others opinions,continued to read. I have never come across such bigoted crap in my life. I am ashamed to be a Canadian. I am a child of refugees. I have never been radical about ànything . This piece of feces masquerading as a newspaper should be decried as a nantional (sic) disgrace!

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  2. .. sweet.. thanks for that.. great marine history - a la west coast ! A huge fave of mine !

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  3. @ Astone - not sure about the NatPo reference but you can find that sort of barrel-bottom commentary on just about anything they publish. Yes, in the ranks of Canadian journalism, NatPo - along with the rest of the PostMedia cabal - is a genuine disgrace. Let's hope it is finally on its way to a quick death.

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  4. @ Sal - those old boats still soldier on. I even looked at one that had been converted for pleasure use. The problem is there's so much accumulated fish oil in the wood from the better part of a century of fishing that it can take a lot of getting used to. A lot of them have been lost to storms and accidents or when they got top heavy with wet nets on the drum but someone knew what they were doing when planks were laid over ribs (back when "ships were made of wood and men were made of iron")

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