Rhinegold’s Centenary

By Mike O'Brien, member #319, and Wayne Hartrick, member #856

36' 1911 Vancouver Shipyards

Her lovely canoe stern leaves barely a ripple on the water as she slides along at a graceful eight knots heading for her shed at the Royal Vancouver Yacht Club where she has been berthed for most of her one hundred years. Colonel Colin Ferrie kept her there for the duration of his ownership of almost 60 years and her present owner, Wayne Hartrick, continues to have covered moorage at RVYC.

Rhinegold is a rare example of an almost unaltered and intact power boat built at a time when "gas powered launches" were a rarity. She was a social hit for her owner, Maxwell Theolopolis Davies III, son of a wealthy English family who sent him to the logging outpost of Vancouver with his own cook and valet!