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Vessels Built by Barrie Farrell.

compiled by John M. MacFarlane and Barrie Farrell 2015

Barrie Farrell’s Recollection of Boat Building

I worked at Seair Marine Ltd. as the only employee and built a dozen or so Vancouver 27 sail boats that were sold as being ‘built by Seair Marine Ltd.’. Seair finished quite a few of my Farrell kit boats. Seair went through bankruptcy proceedings but managed to keep going with the one 27’ mould. Ralph Rolston, who owned Seair, when he saw one of my boats that they had finished, would say "I built that boat". And sure enough I don’t see any of the boats they finished on the list of the ones I built.

I worked in partnership with Roy Gibson at Pender Harbour for a while and I built a dozen or so 14’ runabouts and a couple of 18’ cabin boats. Roy Gibson wasn’t a boat builder but they were sold under his Adams River Timber Co. name.

I went down to Westport WA USA and designed a 27’ gillnetter, built the moulds and three boats for them. One was a regular gill netter and the other two were bow pickers with water jets. I was working for a guy who wanted to start building "Farrell boats". When I got home from Westport I found that Palmer Boats had flipped a Farrell 34’ and stolen a mould from it and was in production. I just said, "to heck with them. l’ll build a bigger and better one". So I designed and built the 37’ moulds. While I was building the mould at Westport then Art White from Snowball Boats came along and wanted a 37’ mould also. So I built two moulds and then later when I built the 29.5’ and 32’ moulds Art White wanted them too. Art White lengthened a 37’ to 40’ and took a mould off it. We had an agreement not to sell in the other’s country.

In Pender Harbour, in the 1960s, I sold my 34’ mould to Jack Currie in North Vancouver and went to work building them for him. I think we built about 18 boats and I think they were sold under the name ‘Jackson Boatworks’. My involvement was never mentioned and I never got credit for the design. When l was 19 years old I designed and built Sea Song on Nelson Island BC. She was a 24’ deep draught planked cod boat. I didn’t have any power so I built it all by hand.

When I was 15 years old I was working at the Alberni Shipyard for Bill Osborn (brother of Bob Osborn of Osborn Propellers) and I was living in Parksville. I built a 23’ plywood hull in our backyard and sold it to be finished by someone else. I had a week off so I built 5 pram dinghies and sold them all within a week. I built 3 boats at Westport and two 18’ inboard speed boats for Vic Gooldrup. Back in the late 1950s and early 1960s there was the Banana 2 and the Nice Breeze sailboat Zed Fling which was 27’. Faster, a 24’ vessel was wrecked in a storm while on delivery and not yet licenced.

I created a full set of moulds for a 2’ model of my 37’ boat, and built a few of them. I created a fully rigged combination troller/gillnetter model and with the help of Ron Burchett we made it RC (radio–controlled). It was exhibited at EXPO ’86 in Vancouver BC along with Ron’s other large working RC models.

Boats that are listed in the Canada List of Shipping as having been built by Farrell Boats (1977) Ltd. were actually built by Don Picalo who took over Farrell Boats when l got caught by the high interest rates of the 1970s and I was having financial difficulties. He ran the company for a few years and then went broke. But there are quite a few boats on that list that I built. I think that might have been because guys who bought boats from me as kit boats and finally got them finished wanted to license or register them and they needed a builders certificate and went back to Picalo for them. I’ve picked out seven boats on their list that I know I built: Cloud Burst; Ravenwood: Golden Isle; Kalaloch; Romance R: Silver Fox; and White Pointer. I’m sure there were others but I don’t know what their names were.

Besides the boats that were built under my name I built about 24 for Seair Marine Ltd., 25 row boats, 18 boats for the Jackson Boatworks, 14 boats for Roy Gibson (Adams River Logging), and 20 other miscellaneous vessels. There were a number of boats in addition to the list. I can’t remember the names of the boats I built for Joe Mickleberry (a 15’), Dick Wise (a 16’), Lloyd Hass (a 16’), Wilf Harper (a 20’ tug boat), Terry (who had Cardinal Boat Moving a 37’), Chris Kristmanson (P.R.), Thelma Newick (17’ cabin boat), Len Larsen (15’), Mr. Duck (Port Alberni 32’), Bill Berry (Sayward 32’), Howard Gray (a 37’) Mat Isherwood (Port Alberni 32’).

Some other boat builders bought boats from me. The Vestad family were well established boat builders but they ended up buying four boats from me, and even the dad Oley got one. Bruce Tasaka (Prince Rupert) bought a 32’ kit boat from me which he finished for himself for fishing.

Vessels Built by Barrie Farrell Boats

Vessels Built by Barrie Farrell while employed by Seair Marine Ltd. (Vancouver ’27s, Ralph Rolston, owner)

Vessels Built by Barrie Farrell Boats Ltd.

Vessels Built by Farrell Boats (1977) Ltd.(Farrell designs mostly built by Don Picalo but some by Barrie Farrell (see history above))

Vessels Built by Barrie Farrell Boat Co.

Vessels in the Small Craft Register Built by Barrie Farrell

Author’s Note: This is a partial list (work in progress).

Vessel Images: Can you help us fill gaps in the vessel images in the database? If you have pictures of missing vessels that you have taken and would be willing to contribute to the database to make it more complete all our users would be very grateful. Please send them to admin(at)nauticapedia.ca

Note to Reader: Vessel names containing Roman numerals in parentheses (e.g. Floater (II)) indicates more than one vessel in the database with the same name. The numerals in parentheses are NOT part of the vessel name but are used to distinguish one vessel from another in the database.

To quote from this article please cite:

MacFarlane, John M. (2015) Vessels Built by the Farrell Family. Nauticapedia.ca 2015. http://nauticapedia.ca/Articles/Vessel_Builders_Farrell.php

Site News: December 29, 2024

The vessel database has been updated and is now holding 94,901 vessel histories (with 16,289 images and 13,934 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 3997 images).

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 beginning his 4th year of fact checking the entries in the vessel database.

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