The handliner replica project has found a home next to the Bank of Montreal in Sechelt.
The public can watch every phase of the construction of this wooden heritage boat between 11 a.m. and 4 p.m. Wednesday through Sunday. The Bank of Montreal has generously donated use of this site.
Support for this project has come from the provincial government, Howe Sound Pulp and Paper, Sunshine Coast Community Foundation, Bank of Montreal and Home Hardware. Other contributions have come from community individuals with a passion and interest in wooden heritage boats.
Assembly for the jig, the form used to construct the boat, is near completion. Work on the boat will begin next week.
Sechelt boat builder Larry Westlake is using traditional methods and materials, with plans from one of the few remaining handliners in existence, which was built by Hubert Evans and is on display at the Sunshine Coast Museum and Archives (SCMA) in Gibsons.
Evans was a respected Canadian author who fished in the 1930s to feed his family and survive the Depression.
The handliner replica will be launched in Gibsons on July 30. Accompanied by other handliner replicas and small wooden heritage boats, Westlake will begin a two-week journey to Lund, touching in at communities along the way that have a history of handliner fishery and at traditional fishing sites. Community festivals are being arranged for the launch in Gibsons, Sechelt, Pender Harbour and Powell River. Festival dates and journey itinerary will be announced in the near future. Handliners were usually double-ended rowboats about 14 or 15 feet long that trolled (or sometimes jigged) for salmon entirely under the oar power of a single fisher. The majority were designed and built between 1900 and 1939. At one time they numbered in the many hundreds between Alaska and Oregon, with a major concentration of activity in Georgia Strait between 1900 and WWII. Of these many hundreds, only about a dozen are still known to exist, the majority from the Sunshine Coast.
The SCMA hopes the Handliner Replica project will result in a fleet of handliner replicas being built in B.C. coastal communities with annual migrations to celebrate our heritage of small-boat fishing. Handliners are perfectly suited to recreational rowing and family use, as they are designed to be very seaworthy, easily rowed at trolling speeds and easily handled by one person.
