Chris-Craft Yacht

Chris Craft Chuckanaut

Michigan native Chris Smith started building boats for his friends in the late 1800s and he adopted the name Chris-Craft in 1930. Originally catering to wealthy customers, Chris-Craft appealed to middle class boaters when it became one of the first mass producers of pleasure boats in the 1920s. Their boats were often made from mahogany and had a distinctive look that stands out even today (white hull, mahogany superstructure). Although the company has changed hands it is now known as Chris-Craft Industries (incorporated in 1962). Old boat aficionados still love these older vessels and many can still be seen afloat in British Columbia Waters. They are always "head turners".

A list of the British Columbia vessels built by the Chris-Craft Corp. can be found in another section of The Nauticapedia.

Nauticapedia

Site News: November 2, 2024

The vessel database has been updated and is now holding 94,538 vessel histories (with 16,140 images and 13,887 records of ship wrecks and marine disasters). The mariner and naval biography database has also been updated and now contains 58,599 entries (with 3989 images). Vessel records are currently being reviewed and updated with more than 35,000 processed so far this year.

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.

Also my special thanks to my volunteer content accuracy checker, John Spivey of Irvine CA USA, who continues (almost every day) to proof read thousands of Nauticapedia vessel histories and provided input to improve more than 14,000 entries. His attention to detail has been a huge unexpected bonus in improving and updating the vessel detail content.


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