Britannia Heritage Shipyards
Richmond, BC Canada
GIKUMI was built to tow logs for the Telegraph Cove sawmill. She also served as a coastal pilot boat and cargo vessel all along British Columbia’s coastline before becoming B.C.’s first whale watching vessel in 1980.
Built: 1954, Bisset & Gilstein, North Vancouver
Gross Tonnage (t): 43.12
Net Tonnage (t): 29.32
Construction Material: Wood
Vessel Length (m): 16.15
Vessel Breadth (m): 5.00
Vessel Depth (m): 1.89
Engine: 1 x Caterpillar 3406 Diesel, 310 Horsepower
Speed (knots): 11.0
Propulsion Method: 1 x 50 inch 3 blade
Shaft: 3 inch aquamet
Gear: Twin disc MG514, 2.7/1
Genset: 3 cylinder Yanmar with 8.5 kw Kohler
THE SILVER ANN, a 33-foot wooden gillnetter, lived a hard life fishing off the west coast of British Columbia. She battled the elements for years, but held strong until the day an electrical shortage caused her pumps to fail, sinking her at the dock where she was moored. When she was pulled from her watery confines she was piled up in the shipyard and left for several years. The city of Richmond acquired her in 2001 and donated her to the Britannia Heritage Shipyard Society. For the next four years she sat outside Richmond Boatworks in the Britannia Heritage Shipyards, uncovered, filling with rain, buried in leaves, aging more with each passing season.
Now, two shipwrights and a handful of volunteers are restoring the Silver Ann. They are using the same techniques and tools that Sadajiro Asari used in 1968, when he built the boat for Richmond fisherman George Osaka. Asari, who once owned Kishi Boatworks on Richmond’s Sea Island, was in his late seventies when he built the Silver Ann. Asari put a lifetime of boat building experience into her construction.
“The labour and craftsmanship to build a boat like this was pretty exceptional,” says Colin Duffield, one of two shipwrights involved in the Silver Ann restoration. “It took [Asari] five months to originally build it. We’ve been working on it a year and a half now and we’re not even half way done.”
The Silver Ann signified the end of an era for the Britannia Shipyards. It was the very last boat built on the site and when it was launched, 60 years of boat-building history was launched with it.
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