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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: May 07, 2024
The vessel database has been updated and is now holding 92,798 vessel histories (with 15,646 images and 13,431 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.