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Pixies Dream – A Shipbuilder’s Yacht

by Captain Tony Toxopeus 2017

Pixies Dream with her builder George Fryatt (Photo from the Toxopeus collection. )

I met George Fryatt just before he passed away when I surveyed his beautiful wooden yacht called Pixies Dream (named for a reference to his wife).

He was probably responsible for building more boats, ships and tugs than just about any other smaller–sized family shipyards than any other in Vancouver. Bel–Aire Shipyards

Every plank screw and nail were his work, it was an unbelievably beautiful boat, absolute perfection

George Fryatt (Photo from the Toxopeus collection. )

William George Fryatt was born August 17, 1922 in Vancouver, B.C.,and he passed away at Surrey Memorial Hospital on December 2, 2009 at the age of 87 years.

Fryatt started Bel–Aire Shipyard in 1956 originally building wooden hulled boats in a rented facility at the foot of Cardero Street at Coal Harbour, in Vancouver BC. The site had been previously occupied by A. Linton & Co. Ltd., and next door to William R. Menchions Boat Yard. In 1963 he built a new facility at the foot of Columbia Street in North Vancouver at the north east end of the Iron Worker’s Memorial Bridge. It was at this location, that Bel–Aire Shipyard went into the construction of steel vessels. George built everything from tugs, barges, research vessels, off shore vessels. He sold the property to A.B.D. Enterprises Ltd. who currently carry on shipbuilding there.

To quote from this article please cite:

Toxopeus, Captain Tony (2017) Pixies Dream – A Shipbuilder’s Yacht. Nauticapedia.ca 2017. http://nauticapedia.ca/Gallery/Pixie.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.

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