The Nauticapedia

Site Navigation:

• Searchable Databases

  • Biography (People) Search
  • Vessel (Ship) Search

• Articles Archive

  • Pacific Nautical Heritage...

    • Vessels & Ships
    • Marine Industry
    • Nautical & Maritime Heritage
  • Gallery of Light and Buoy Images
  • Gallery of Mariners
  • Gallery of Ship Images
  • Gallery of Ship Wrecks
  • Gallery of Monuments and Statues
  • Gallery of Nautical Images
  • Gallery of Freshwater Images
  • Gallery of New Books

  • Canadian Naval Topics…

    • Reserves
    • Admirals
    • Vessels
    • Interesting Topics
    • World War II
  • Nautical History Videos
  • UNTD
  • British Columbia Heritage
  • Arctic and Northern Nautical Heritage
  • Western Canada Boat and Ship Builders
  • Gallery of Arctic Images
  • Reflections on Nautical Heritage
  • British Columbia Heritage

Site Search:

Looking for more? Search for Articles on the Nauticapedia Site.

Early Navigation Buoys on the British Columbia Coast

by John MacFarlane 2016

Port Hand Buoy (1896) in Victoria BC. (Photo from the John MacFarlane collection. )

These two old–style navigation buoys can be found near the Canadian Coast Guard Bas in Victoria BC.

Port Hand Buoy (1896) (construction detail) in Victoria BC. (Photo from the John MacFarlane collection. )

Starboard Hand Buoy in Victoria BC. (Photo from the John MacFarlane collection. )

Port Hand Buoy in Port Alberni BC. (Photo from the John MacFarlane collection. )

Port Hand Buoy (construction detail) in Port Alberni BC. (Photo from the John MacFarlane collection. )

Port Hand Buoy (construction detail) in Port Alberni BC. (Photo from the John MacFarlane collection. )

I wonder if there are other old buoys on display in British Columbia? We’d like to hear about them.

Author’s Note:

After publication we received further information and pictures.

Starboard Hand and Port Hand Buoys at Prince Rupert. (Photo from the Mike Wright collection.)

To quote from this article please cite:

MacFarlane, John M. (2016) Early Navigation Buoys on the British Columbia Coast. Nauticapedia.ca 2016. http://nauticapedia.ca/Gallery/Buoy_Old.php

Site News: March 24, 2025

ANOTHER MILESTONE REACHED

The vessel database has been updated and is now holding 95,326 vessel histories (with 16,457 images and 14,217 records of ship wrecks and marine disasters).

The mariner and naval biography database has also been updated and now contains 58,600 entries (with 4,003 images).

My thanks to Ray Warren who is beginning a long process of filling gaps in the photo record of the vessel histories in the vessel database. Ray has been documenting the ships of Vancouver Harbour for more than 60 years.

Thanks to contributor Mike Rydqvist McCammon for the hundreds of photos he continues to contribute to illustrate British Columbia’s floating heritage.

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

Thanks to John Spivey who is in his 4th year of fact checking all of the entries in the vessel database, one-by-one.

---