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The Ealasaid

by Robert Lawson 2022

The Ealasaid at Genoa Bay in August 1988. (Photo from the Robert Lawson collection.)

I owned the Ealasaid briefly from 1988 to 1989 when we lived in Genoa Bay.

The Ealasaid in 1938 (Photo from the Robert Lawson collection.)

She was designed by Halliday and built in Vancouver in 1928 by/for Ken Mackenzie. She was a B–class sloop. Over the many years Ken Mackenzie owned her alterations were made including adding about 3 ft to her stern to increase her heeled waterline length so she would be more competitive as newer, faster boats appeared on the scene.

She was actively raced for many years with great success, even winning the Lipton Cup. The annals of the Royal Vancouver Yacht Club (published 1966) have a good record of her racing history.

The Ealasaid at Genoa Bay August 1988 (Photo from the Robert Lawson collection.)

By 1988 she was a semi–derelict laying at the dock in Pedder Bay where we bought her. We had a wild sail in a strong westerly up to James Island BC. We installed a new engine and cleaned her up and sold her in 1989 to Doug Smith, a Nanaimo boat broker at the time. He continued the refit for several years, sailing with his family in the summer. He sold her to Marina Sacht and her husband and they did more work on her, installing a new teak deck. They sold her to a young man who worked at the Marine Biological Research Station at Departure Bay. He had a new mast fitted, and she was moored there for many years. I last saw her there in 2017.

The Ealasaid at Departure Bay 2017. (Photo from the Robert Lawson collection.)

To quote from this article please cite:

Lawson, Robert (2022) The Ealasaid. Nauticapedia.ca 2021. http://nauticapedia.ca/Gallery/Ealasaid.php

Site News: December 21, 2024

The vessel database has been updated and is now holding 94,824 vessel histories (with 16,274 images and 13,929 records of ship wrecks and marine disasters).

Vessel records are currently being reviewed and updated with more than 45,000 processed so far this year (2024).

The mariner and naval biography database has also been updated and now contains 58,599 entries (with 3996 images).

Thanks to Ray Warren who is beginning a long process of filling gaps in the photo record of vessel histories in the 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 has contributed 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.

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