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Vessels Built by the Deltaga Boat Works Ltd.

compiled by John M. MacFarlane 2015

Deltaga Boat Works Ltd. advertisement (Photo Western Fishermen Magazine.)

The Deltaga Boat Works Ltd. was located in Sunbury, Delta BC on the Fraser River. It was originally established by Kumetaro Tsumura from Prince Rupert BC. Kumetaro was born in Japan, and came to Prince Rupert in a sailing ship in 1899 from the Wakayama area of Japan. He was already a skilled boat builder on his arrival. Kumetaro worked for a time as the Master of the fish boat J.L. Card before opening his own boat yard.

During the Second World War the whole family was interned, passing through the assembly at Hastings Park in Vancouver, moved on to road camps in the Slocan Valley and finally on to Ontario. This was a painful period which the family endured stoically. In Ontario Kumetaro worked at the Richardson Boat Works in Meaford Ontario before moving together to Toronto. His son Kei relates that his father, anxious to keep building boats, constructed one in the basement that required the foundation to be breached so that it could be extracted. Once the Federal Government allowed Japanese Canadians to return to the coast (around 1949) the Tsumura family joined family members, veterans of Second World War service in the Canadian Army, who were already located there.

Together they purchased 7 acres in Sunbury, Delta, on the Fraser River and constructed a full shipyard there. In Delta, Kumetaro worked with his four sons (Andy (Isao); Johnny (Teiji), Sub (Suburuo) and Daniel (Kei) and his two daughters (who worked in the office) Mary (Sachi) and Grace (Takeo). Johnny trained as a naval architect in the USA. He was highly skilled and designed all the vessels built by Deltaga Boat Works Ltd.

The first boat built was the Phantom Thrush which was a planing hull gill netter in an adaptation of a sport boat. This created quite a stir on the coast as all previous gill netters had been displacement hulls. The early boats were wood planked. They experimented with fibreglass over wood in what Kei Tsumura recalls as the first attempt on the coast to build a glass fibre hull fish boat. Soon most vessels they produced were glass fiber hulls.

The early customers included a lot of Japanese fishermen wishing to resume careers fishing on the coast. Kei Tsumura acknowledged that at first there was a harsh bad feeling toward the Japanese who had returned to the coast. But he says: "You are tested by the quality of the work you do" and soon they saw that the prejudice was diminished and orders started pouring in from a wide part of the marine sector. The company was very productive and he says that one year they produced 50 vessels. Most were fishing vessels: gill netters, trollers and drum seiners. They also produced a number of small racing boats and a class of specially designed fish boats for use on Great Slave Lake.

Kei Tsumura spent a year running his own gill netter and another season working in the crew of a troller. He had other ambitions though and returned to Toronto to write for the Star Weekly magazine writing feature articles, some of which drew upon his experiences as a fisherman on the Fraser river. He then was appointed as editor of the New Canadian, the national Japanese Canadian newspaper in Toronto.

Deltaga Boat Works Ltd.

Author’s Note: This is a partial list (work in progress). I am indebted to Kei Tsumura (4th son of Kumetaro Tsumura) who generously shared his memories and knowledge to make the history narrative more accurate and complete.

Vessel Images: Can you help us fill gaps in the vessel images in the database? If you have pictures of missing vessels that you have taken and would be willing to contribute to the database to make it more complete all our users would be very grateful. Please send them to admin(at)nauticapedia.ca

Note to Reader: Vessel names containing Roman numerals in parentheses (e.g. Floater (II)) indicates more than one vessel in the database with the same name. The numerals in parentheses are NOT part of the vessel name but are used to distinguish one vessel from another in the database.

To quote from this article please cite:

MacFarlane, John M. (2013) Vessels Built by the Deltaga Boat Works Ltd. Nauticapedia.ca 2013. http://nauticapedia.ca/Articles/Vessel_Builders_Deltaga.php?Page=3

Site News: April 25, 2024

The vessel database has been updated and is now holding 92,359 vessel histories (with 15,634 images and 13,293 records of ship wrecks and marine disasters). The mariner and naval biography database has also been updated and now contains 58,616 entries (with 4,013 images).

In 2023 the Nauticapedia celebrated the 50th Anniversary of it’s original inception in 1973 (initially it was on 3" x 5" file cards). It has developed, expanded, digitized and enlarged in those ensuing years to what it is now online. If it was printed out it would fill more than 300,000 pages!

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