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Early Navigation Buoys on the British Columbia Coast

by John MacFarlane 2016

Port Hand Buoy (1896) in Victoria BC. (Photo from the John MacFarlane collection. )

These two old–style navigation buoys can be found near the Canadian Coast Guard Bas in Victoria BC.

Port Hand Buoy (1896) (construction detail) in Victoria BC. (Photo from the John MacFarlane collection. )

Starboard Hand Buoy in Victoria BC. (Photo from the John MacFarlane collection. )

Port Hand Buoy in Port Alberni BC. (Photo from the John MacFarlane collection. )

Port Hand Buoy (construction detail) in Port Alberni BC. (Photo from the John MacFarlane collection. )

Port Hand Buoy (construction detail) in Port Alberni BC. (Photo from the John MacFarlane collection. )

I wonder if there are other old buoys on display in British Columbia? We’d like to hear about them.

Author’s Note:

After publication we received further information and pictures.

Starboard Hand and Port Hand Buoys at Prince Rupert. (Photo from the Mike Wright collection.)

To quote from this article please cite:

MacFarlane, John M. (2016) Early Navigation Buoys on the British Columbia Coast. Nauticapedia.ca 2016. http://nauticapedia.ca/Gallery/Buoy_Old.php

Site News: January 14, 2025

The vessel database has been updated and is now holding 94,957 vessel histories (with 16,337 images and 13,935 records of ship wrecks and marine disasters).

The mariner and naval biography database has also been updated and now contains 58,599 entries (with 3998 images).

My thanks to Ray Warren who is beginning a long process of filling gaps in the photo record of the vessel histories in the vessel database. Ray has been documenting the ships of Vancouver Harbour for more than 60 years.

Thanks to contributor Mike Rydqvist McCammon for the hundreds of photos he continues to contribute 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.

Thanks to John Spivey who is beginning his 4th year of fact checking all of the entries in the vessel database.

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