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The Interior British Columbia Sternwheeler Sicamous
by John MacFarlane 2013
The SS Sicamous on the Beach (Photo from the MacFarlane collection.)
The SS Sicamous is a large sternwheeler built by and owned by the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR) in 1914. She served in Okanagan lake service between Penticton, Kelowna and Vernon. She was most important in transporting fruit from the agricultural communities along the lake to the rail head for transportation to the world. She operated in that role until 1937. She is currently beached as part of a heritage shipyard operated by the Penticton Museum and Archives in Penticton, British Columbia where she functions as a museum, an events facility and banquet hall.
It appears that Penticton’s S.S. Sicamous Inland Marine Museum is operated by the S.S. Sicamous Restoration Society. The Museum consists of two historic steamships, the S.S. Sicamous and the S.S. Naramata. The S.S. Sicamous has been fully restored. The Museum has interpretive and informative displays and exhibits which relate the histories of the ships, as well as the relevance of marine transportation to the communities in the Okanagan Valley. The S.S. Naramata is currently under restoration.
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.