Opinion: What happened to Relic’s houseboat?

I got the text on a Saturday: “Relic’s houseboat is not at the wharf. Do you know what happened to it?” 

For those without a TV or who, like me, were not yet alive during the show’s run, Relic was one of the beloved characters of CBC’s long-running show, The Beachcombers, which recently celebrated the 50th anniversary of the airing of its first episode on Oct. 1. Not that I need to tell you, local reader. 

But here it was, a new mystery tied to the Beachcombers’s local legacy — or was it? A quick call to David Croal, who worked on the show once upon a time, reveals Relic’s float is not missing, because the houseboat in question is not, and has never been, Relic’s. 

The one-room floathouse where Relic lived was called the Chuckchi on the show. It’s what rose from the ashes of the boat Relic called home in season one, after that boat burned in a storyline. Since then, the Chuckchi went through several iterations and rebuilds. In one episode, the house appeared with blue siding and a white picket fence. In behind-the-scenes photographs Croal showed me, the simple shack of sorts has a green roof and sits on a wooden platform. It looks like the kind of house a child might draw. In the photo, Relic (or rather actor Robert Clothier) sits on a rocking chair out front. When filming, the floating home was shown at Smitty’s Marina, but otherwise stored at the government wharf. The interior was actually a set, the house float being too small to shoot in.

By comparison, the float at the centre of this mystery was slightly larger with a different roof, red doors and a canoe instead of Relic’s rocking chair. It has no resemblance to the misidentified float, says Croal — except perhaps proximity. 

But now the float doesn’t even have that in common with the Chuckchi. A call to the harbour manager at Gibsons Landing Harbour Authority, Chris Lougheed, reveals that the vessel is privately owned, and recently had some work done to make it more seaworthy. He said it departed not long ago for a privately owned island near Plumper Cove. “So it hasn’t gone far.” 

The confusion, Croal says, comes from a local tour guide. From there, the tale was repeated often enough and to enough people that fiction became fact. It almost plays out like an episode of the show. 

And so the word of mouth that often gets passed around small towns turned out to be fable, at least this time. Sometimes the wild goose chases we come across take longer to track down, but it’s always interesting to find their source. Here at Coast Reporter, it can keep us busy, but that’s part of the job — we always love chasing a good story, although we only print the ones that turn out to be based in fact. But when it comes to the fictional world of the Beachcombers, which borrowed real-life backdrops of our community, it’s easy to see reminders of the show that captured hearts around the world. (As explored in the debut episode of a new Sunshine Coast-based podcast by Sophie Woodrooffe, Coasters. Check out the first episode!) 

While Lougheed said he doesn’t get many questions from the public, tourists do stop by his office to ask about another Beachcombers star: the location of the Persephone. Fans came from Germany, Taiwan and Japan this summer, he said, to see what they could from the Beachcombers. Lougheed points them in the direction of the Sunshine Coast Museum and Archives, where a Beachcombers display sits proud among the community’s history. 

The Persephone will eventually resume her public perch somewhere in Gibsons, and there’s desire, I’m told, to reunite her with Relic’s jet boat — but that’s a goosechase for another day.