The West Coast Maritime Museum

by John MacFarlane 2021

West Coast Maritime Museum

The West Coast Maritime Museum at Tofino BC (Photo from the John MacFarlane collection.)

A trio of nautical history enthusiasts (Rod Palm, Ken Gibson and Len Clay) established the West Coast Maritime Museum in Tofino BC. I recall visiting this establishment a couple of times while I worked with Parks Canada in the 1970s and 1980s. It presented artifacts and photographs to the public but did not last long as a viable entity. The fate of the collection is not known and the memory of it has been almost forgotten.

West Coast Maritime Museum

The building has gone through several identities over the years as a whale centre, tour agency and handicrafts museum. (Photo from the John MacFarlane collection.)



To quote from this article please cite:

MacFarlane, John (2021) The West Coast Maritime Museum. Nauticapedia.ca 2020. http://nauticapedia.ca/Gallery/West_Coast_MM.php

Nauticapedia

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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