The Spirit of Chemainus
The National Fisherman, 177
Western Mariner Article
Western Fish and Seafood Magazine Article

The Spirit of Chemainus

Alec Spiller's interpretation of a Glousterman Sloop design "The Spirit of Chemainus" was featured in multiple pages of the "B.C. Ferries Exploring British Columbia's Coastal Waterways". This photograph was taken by John L. Bernard.

The lines of this ship were obtained from one of Chapelle's books and the Smithsonian Institute.

Every wooden boat constructed or rebuilt by Commodore's Boats uses the most modern epoxy bedding compounds. This fact enables old designs to be able to outlive the originals.

The National Fisherman, 177

Spiller is a young boat builder with some old-fashioned ideas. One of these ideas is that you are successful in the boat building business by working hard; the other idea is that wood boats make the best boats.

Spiller has been studying marine design where he applies has begun to apply his skills at his boatyard at Dodge Cove, across the harbor from Prince Rupert. The Wall family had run it since the 1920’s and during those years it turned out almost a thousand boats, most of them salmon gillnetters and trollers.

When we stopped by Spiller was finishing a project that almost tripled the value of the customers boat.

Western Mariner Article

The decks, fore and aft, on their 1921-built, wood tug, the Viking King, were leaking so Dorothy and Ken Mackenzie gave Bo Spiller of Commodore's Boats a call. Initially there to assess caulking up the deck seams, Bo quickly discovered that the fir planking and deck beams beneath were so deteriorated from dry-rot that a basic re-caulking was out of the question. Eventually it was discovered that the stern structure had been falling over the years, such that the sheer there had dropped about six inches.

So a stern rebuild was agreed upon and commenced. But when Bo and his crew attempted to find sound structure further forward to splice the new construction into, there was none there. Not only that, freshwater had been steadily seeping in through the decks around the perimeter of the deckhouse and that, combined with the lack of steel support under the side decks, had wreaked rotten havoc causing the house to sink several inches, port and starboard. “Get the rot out!” was the direction from the Mackenzies. “Keep going: you can’t stop now!” So the crew did – right up to the stem.

In a nutshell, and as the photos following illustrate, the Viking King’s structural framework was renewed stern to stem, including: stem, horn and ring timbers; decks, deckbeams, coamings and hatches; shear clamps, new frames in the stern and sistered frames forward of the aft engine room bulkhead; bulwarks and cap rails; three-quarters of the hull planking. Poplar Island Marine was subcontracted to jack the house up five inches port side, three starboard, and install a supporting, steel frame bulkhead which bears on the hull frames midships, under the Caterpillar engine.

To their immense credit, the Mackenzies wished the restoration to be authentic to the Viking King’s original structure and appearance. That’s invariably a recipe for more wood, more time, more money. But the Spillers used the best wood for the job (yellow cedar instead of fir for the structure timbers) and believe in the modern materials such as the Thiokol-based bedding compounds. “You’ll never keep these old rigs tight,” say Alec Spiller, Bo’s dad and lifelong boatbuilder in proven, West Coast construction materials and methods. “So keep the freshwater out with good bedding compounds and use the cedars for their rot-resistance”.

Ten thousand hours and 80,000 board feet later, the Viking King is restored to a condition that will easily see her past her first century mark on the B.C. coast and primed to take on many more years to come. As Bo Spiller commented, “It’d be a hell of a time pulling her apart now!”

Western Fish and Seafood Magazine Article

Text and Photos from this article by David Rahn.

The Spiller brothers always seem to have interesting building and restoration projects underway, and this Spring is no exception, with several jobs ongoing in a variety of materials, including a stem to stern restoration on a classic wood tug for Harken Towing. Just in front of that huge project, tucked away almost out of sight, is a smaller, more modest rebuild that should be of interest to many small-boat fishermen. Here Bo is widening Calvin Siider’s aluminum gillnetter/shrimp trawler Maile III by adding two sponsons to the outside of the hull. The objective is to increase stability and working area and at the same time, in true Spiller fashion, Bo’s giving the boat a new flared bow and a more graceful sheerline.

The sponsons are built up from a series of small bulkheads welded at regular intervals along the shear and extending down to the chine. Up forward the bottoms of the bulkheads start off level and then gradually take on a few degrees of downward twist as they reach the stern. This serves to increase the submerged volume, and therefore the buoyancy, at the after end, just where it’s needed most.

When everything is welded in place, the boat will gain 22” on each side. Most of the spaces in each sponson will be voids, filled with foam flotation. However, in the mid-section, Calvin has opted to add a small extra fuel tank to each side, plus he’ll use the adjacent bay as a storage area accessible from the lazarette. Just forward, “as an afterthought,” Calvin wants a pair of small live tanks for holding his shrimp, and perhaps some salmon. Bo is also going to add 20” or so of deck off the stern to further increase the working space, and a corresponding extension on the bottom of the hull to increarse the apparent waterline and hopefully win back some speed without increasing the boat’s overall length or displacement.

The biggest challenge for a project of this type is fairing the new work into the old and getting the whole thing to look “right,” as though it was designed and built that way from the start. In this case, Bo Spiller is giving the Maile III a graceful flared bow that’s very reminiscent of the signature wooden trollers the Spiller family launched out of the Wahl yard in Prince Rupert. On this boat though, instead of plating the bow fore-and-aft in the same manner as the sponsons, Bo has chosen to fair it into the existing hull use relatively narrow, aluminum “planks” set on the bias. The method is more time consuming, but the narrow planks take the compound curves well, eliminating the hard “stepped” look that so often results. The final appearance clearly matters to Bo and he’s determined to give Calvin back a better liking boat than he started with. If all goes according to plan, it will be a double win for this super-wide, Sointula-based vessel.