This is the official website for the yacht Fifer built in Coal Harbour, B.C. in 1928. She's 68 1/2 feet long with a 16ft beam. She is powered with two Gardener 6L3's from a re-power in 1935 (from the original twin Hall and Scott gas engines) and two Glennifer gear boxes and still retains her original engine-order telegraphs and many other features that help her retain the charm of a yacht built in the 1920's. When we purchased her in 2010 she was almost a gone girl. Decades of neglect, poor maintenance and ugly decisions regarding major structural repairs left her in a state that was pretty dismal. Our plan when we bought Fifer was to slowly address all the major issues, working triage from the worst on down the list. That's what we've done, and that's what we continue to do.

Our mission was to downsize our lives and leave the farm we bought and raised our three children on for the last 22 years. the kids are all grown, so the land is having less and less hold over us anymore. We lived aboard our 1938 Swedish sloop "Gullmar" for years while we lived in San Diego. We left the boat life for land for our kid's sake. We thought they deserved to grow up on land with the life of stability that a small farm on acreage would provide.  

The goal has been to completely restore Fifer and cruise the inland waterways of Canada in the summer and fall, and live-aboard her full-time in the Puget Sound area. This website is dedicated to telling the story of this beautiful and historically significant vessel, along with the long and sometimes arduous road back to her former glory. 

We have a HUGE amount of tales to tell regarding Fifer, and documenting it all here on this website is my goal. I will be continuing to add more content as the refit is on-going at this time. We have recently hired a new shipwright, it will be great to have some help moving forward. We lost a bit of steam over the whole pandemic. (it's feels like it should be over, but I have a sneaking suspicion it isn't done with us yet) We both got sick right at the beginning of COVID in January 2020. There was no vaccine at that point, and little was known about the virus. Vince got really ill, far more than I did. He got serious pneumonia, and the last affects have been pretty devastating to both our family and Fifer. Work continued on a smaller scale, but nowhere near what we had been accomplishing before. His health was first and foremost in our minds, everything else came after getting to a better place health wise. Before Covid we had planned for a good shipwright friend who we trusted to come up from the Bay Area and help with the haul out which we had tentatively scheduled for summer of 2020. That did not come to pass. He wasn't able to come up due to limitations on travel, we weren't able to move forward because of health concerns. Now that we have finally stabilized and have the energy we are working hard to be ready for an early fall 2022 haul out with a new shipwright. We are hoping for the best. We have learned to roll with the punches, things move as quickly as they move. All of this has taught us both patience, humility and the art of “enjoying the journey.”

Here we are in 2023 already, with promises to update the website in 2022 only to arrive in ‘23 with nothing posted here. It makes me feel a bit less guilty that the reasons are basic, that we have continued our mission of the restoration of Fifer all through 2022 and into ‘23. The only way I can turn my attention to the much-neglected website is that I’m along on a work trip Vince has to Hawaii (don’t feel too sorry for me..got some much appreciated sunshine and warmth) and I can take my hands off the projects and sync up the hundreds of photos of the latest efforts. I am also able to weave together how the work is progressing with words, and there’s been a mighty push on both of our parts to keep moving forward. We were able to live aboard from Spring 2022 all the way to mid-October because of the endless Northwest summer last year. That time really enabled us to get many boxes checked off of our “to-do” list. Some of those things included finally cutting out the very ancient (and last) grungy old tank, this time water that was underneath the galley and crew’s quarters. We now have access to all areas of the bilges that until we owned Fifer have remained hidden. The good news is that we found nothing of great concern….the bad news is that I now have even more bilges to clean and degrease. Oh, joy. Cutting both the 800 gallon fuel tank that was under the dining salon and this last tank forward felt monumental.

We also made Fifer far more livable by refinishing floors and priming and painting walls with proper marine grade paint. These surfaces are temporary, but very welcome and make living where we work so much better. We relocated our sleeping quarters to the aft master stateroom where we intend to be permanently so we can use the guest stateroom as a work storage area for staging tools and materials. This improvement allowed us to have separation between where we work and where we sleep. Might not seem like a major thing, but I can assure you it did make life much easier. It also allowed our somewhat unwilling boat dog a chance to feel more comfortable. Before we moved to the master stateroom Ziggy wanted nothing to do with sleeping in our general area, preferring to sleep upstairs in the main salon. After the switch he happily snuggles up in our bunk with us. That makes him AND me more happy aboard Fifer! That old adage “happy wife, happy life” is a trickle-down theory, as this wife is only happy if the dog is happy.

We are also pleased to announce that the rebuilding of the brand-new stainless steel stanchions and repaired and refinished original teak handrails is complete in the aft, that includes the repaired and refinished toe rails. This enabled Vince to rebuild the aft roof that connects to the new roof we installed over the main salon. We deliberated for a lot of the summer of what to use for the ceiling on the aft roof, and because of some really generous friends and some new friends we found on Craigslist we have settled on extremely beautiful old teak and very old growth, tight-grained Western red cedar. I will be posting a new section of photos and explanations of all of this construction in a new section of the website dedicated to the 2022-2023 happenings. I swear it’s coming soon….if only I could hole-up in paradise a little longer! Stay tuned for that. In the meantime, I want to thank all the people I see out and about who keep up with the project on Vince’s Fifer Instagram. I cannot tell you how much that “ wow, I sure appreciate what you guys are doing,” means to both of us. It’s easy to get wrapped up in all of the day to day craziness and never take the time to focus on what we’ve actually accomplished already! I am also learning how to edit videos, so hopefully I can extend these stories with videos so you all can actually see what we’re up to on YouTube. I’m a little slow on the uptake, but I’m getting there. I’ll let you know when I get that up and going.

If you have any insight, stories, tall tales, big fish stories or just had a memorable experience on-board Fifer, we'd love to hear your recollections! Please feel free to contact us....and thanks to Terry Friesen for his valuable happy memories and great friendship! Terry gave some great insight on Fifer's O'Hanlon period.

In the meantime, lots of love to you all. Thanks for checking in here and there, just knowing you’re out there rooting for us makes the rough days go by more smoothly.