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Tofino local restoring Japanese fishing vessel

“It’s a skookum boat.”
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Tofino local Shayne Sadler smiles next to the Japanese fishing vessel he’s restoring while holding photos of the vessel’s 1999 christening that were sent to him by its original owners. (Photo - Nora O’Malley)

A Japanese fishing vessel that was swept away during the 2011 Tohoku tsunami is being put back together after a tumultuous, 7,500-kilometre journey to Tofino.

Lifelong Tofitian Shayne Sadler discovered the 24’ fibreglass boat around the Esperanza Inlet, on May 8, 2014, and began restoring it last winter.

“I’m a fisherman, so I do a bit of beachcombing when I’m up the Coast fishing in the springtime. I always go beachcombing looking for glass balls and stuff. This is much bigger than a glass ball,” Sadler told the Westerly.

“I just saw this boat and thought, ‘Wow, this is too cool. I can’t just let it get smashed up and wrecked on the beach. It’s gotta come home.’ I didn’t really have any plans at that point. I just thought ‘I’ve got to take it home and, if I start fixing, I’ll fix it.’ It’s such a neat thing to find. I’m trying my best to keep most of the lettering and everything as original as I can.”

He said the long, narrow vessel was full of gooseneck barnacles and badly beat up when he found it.

“You can see where they had a tiny, little outboard motor on it at one time but, when I got it, there was one bolt sticking out and everything was torn off. The motor was gone,” he said.

Retrieving it was no small task for Sadler who shovelled it off the beach it had crashed upon and bailed it out both times it flipped over during his tow.

“I went to tow it up to Esperanza from this beach. I just got started and a half-hour into my tow, the thing submarines and flips upside down out in the sloppy weather,” he said.

“I towed it in behind an island, jumped out, got behind the stern of the boat, jumped onto the hull of the boat and got a hold of a float that was sticking out of the side of it, used the hydraulics and rolled the boat back upright.”

Once he had it secured in his workshop, he reached out to the Ucluelet’s Nakagawa family and Francis Nakagawa helped him track down the boat’s original owners in Japan.

“All she had was the lettering. I hadn’t even given her the rest of the pictures. She started googling and figuring out where it came from. She found out the town it had come from, found out who owned the boat originally, phoned them and talked to them directly,” he said.

“They were quite thrilled that somebody was trying to fix it at least and that it wasn’t completely ruined. Not that they have any intention of bringing it home or taking it back.”

He said the owners are in their 70’s and sent along photos of the vessel being christened in 1999. He plans to keep in touch with them and send photos of his progress.

“I know exactly what it looks like and who owned it and now I’m in the process of repairing it. It’s quite banged up. It’s been a fun project,” he said.

“It’s fun. It’s kinda neat to see what can come across from that kind of distance over to here. I quite enjoy fixing this thing up…It’s a skookum boat. It’s designed so that everything self-bails. If you leave it out in the rain, the water just runs off of it. It doesn’t fill up with water like an open boat would.”

He added he’s not sure what he’ll do with the vessel once it’s restored.

“I don’t want to make any money on it. I’d just like to see the thing get used again,” he said. “I have an oyster farm so, maybe, I’ll use it for running back and forth to there.”



Andrew Bailey

About the Author: Andrew Bailey

I arrived at the Westerly News as a reporter and photographer in January 2012.
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