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The Amai Contractor

by John MacFarlane 2022

Side view. (Photo from the Nauticapedia collection.)

I was recently gifted a box of photographs from Bob Fiorello that came from the John Manly Ltd. shipyard in New Westminster BC. They had been commissioned as part of the vessel construction process and were created by photographic contractors – the Stride Studios (Charles E. Stride). I scanned all the images because they are of small working vessels that seldom attract any attention in the threads of social media. I have gifted the originals to a permanent home at the Vancouver Maritime Museum but I will share some of the series that give good coverage to those vessels.

This image of a small vessel, the Amai Contractor, presents a bit of a mystery. It was apparently never registered (although it shows New Westminster as her port of register) so may have been built for an American customer.

Stern view (Photo from the Nauticapedia collection.)

To quote from this article please cite:

MacFarlane, John (2022) The Amai Contractor. Nauticapedia.ca 2022. http://nauticapedia.ca/Gallery/Amai_Contractor.php

Site News: May 08, 2024

The vessel database has been updated and is now holding 92,807 vessel histories (with 15,646 images and 13,442 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!

My special thanks to our volunteer IT adviser, John Eyre, who (since 2021) has modernized, simplified and improved the update process for the databases into a semi–automated processes. His participation has been vital to keeping the Nauticapedia available to our netizens.

Also my special thanks to my volunteer content accuracy checker, John Spivey of Irvine CA USA, who has proofread thousands of Nauticapedia vessel histories and provided input to improve more than 11,000 entries. His attention to detail has been a huge unexpected bonus in improving and updating the vessel detail content.

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