Success at Sea Cavalcade

This year, the Sunshine Coast Museum & Archives hosted the Heritage and Hand-Crafted Wooden Boat Festival on Sunday, July 25th. With the help of Larry Westlake, 19 small wooden boats were put on display in Holland Park for visitors to Sea Cavalcade.


There was a constant flow of people admiring the selection of boats and chatting with the boat builders. Under the SCMA tent, the Hubert Evans Handliner acted as our off-site exhibit. This historic handliner is on permanent display in the museum.

During the day, visitors were given an opportunity to vote on their favorite boat in the show. The crowd responded with enthusiasm. At around 3:30 in the afternoon, the ballots were counted and the winner announced. Art Perry was given the People's Choice Award for his beautiful Cedar-Strip Chestnut Prospector Canoe to the delight of the audience.

The Handliner replica "Anna" also participated in the Sea Cavalcade parade on Saturday the 24th as the Sunshine Coast Museum & Archives float, accompanied by Jon Hird, Larry Westlake, and Phil Jones.

Thanks to everyone who came by, watched the parade, or had a boat in the show! We hope to see you again soon.

Coming up - Heritage and Hand-Crafted Wooden Boat Festival!

This year's Sea Cavalcade will feature the return of the museum's Heritage and Hand-Crafted Wooden Boat Festival! Come on down on Sunday, July 25, to see a unique collection of new and vintage handmade wooden boats from all over the Sunshine Coast. They'll be shown from 10:00 AM to 4:30 PM on the flat, easy-access Sunday market area in Holland Park in Lower Gibsons, within view of Gibsons' historic harbour. There'll be something there to please everyone with an interest in boats, handcrafted woodwork, or local history and traditions.

If you have a small (under 18 feet) wooden boat that you'd like to include in this exhibition, contact the organizer, Larry Westlake, as soon as possible! He can be reached at 604-885-0744, or at info@larrywestlake.com. You can also pick up registration forms right here at the Sunshine Coast Museum & Archives.

We'd love to see you down here.

Digitize!

This has to be one of the most satisfying tasks I've taken on here at the museum:


Missing from the picture are the three boxes of cassette tapes that I'm digitizing, using the equipment pictured here! The cassette tapes contain recordings of oral history interviews that date back to 1978. The interviews were conducted by Elphinstone Pioneer Museum (Gibsons' original museum and an SCMA precursor) staff and volunteers, and feature the voices of an array of long-time locals, many of whom are no longer living. There are stories about logging, fishing, homesteading, housework, schoolteachers, one-room schools, social life, and much more. They're absolutely precious - and vulnerable, too. Cassette tapes don't last. The tape is extremely fragile (especially when it's old), the mechanisms inside them can get all gummed up. They're not a stable medium for storing such important information.

So, one by one, I'm digitizing these old cassettes. The tape deck in the picture is equipped with a USB connection. A cable connects the deck to the computer, which records the sound coming out of the tape deck using a simple, free program called Audacity. Once the tape's played out, I save the sound file in both .wav and .mp3 format, burn the works to a DVD, and voila - accessible oral history!

It's a fairly time-consuming job, since everything has to be recorded in real time, as the tape plays back. No shortcuts here. But things are coming along pretty decently. So far, nearly half of the cassettes have been digitized, and about a third burnt to DVD. Well. Now we need some folks to transcribe a few of the interviews that never were transcribed before! Can you use a computer? Can you type quickly and accurately? Send us an email! We'd love to hear from you.

George & Charlotte Gibson Day 2010

Last Saturday we celebrated the 124th anniversary of the Gibson family's arrival in Howe Sound, and it was a whopping success! Thanks to Super-Valu for the outstanding cake.


We had a great turnout - over eighty people, many of them, no doubt, attracted by the chance to meet George and Charlotte themselves.


The crowd was a mixture of longtime locals and newer arrivals. There were even a few descendants of George and Charlotte (the real ones) in attendance.


Curatorial Assistant Matt Cavers presented a slide show on the history of Gibsons. That's him pointing out the old flume at the mouth of Langdale Creek.


A good time was had by all! See you next year for the 125th anniversary!

Summer is creeping up on us!

May 11th already! - we apologize for our recent silence in the blogosphere. We're still here, in case you worried. In fact, we've been too busy to get to the computer.


What's new at the museum? Well, the first thing I should mention is that we're throwing a George and Charlotte Gibson Day open house, just like we do every year. George and Charlotte Day is an annual event commemorating the arrival of the Gibson family to West Howe Sound. It's now 124 years since they got here, over which time the town of Gibsons has grown from a small collection of houses and shacks by the forest's edge to a pretty modern place. We'll be celebrating the growth of our town with tea and cake, live music, a slide show presentation on the history of Gibsons, and - who knows - maybe an appearance by George and Charlotte themselves. The event is on Saturday, May 22, from 1:00 until 4:00. Send us an email (scm_a@dccnet.com) or give us a call (604-886-8232) if you have any questions!


As I type, museum board president and volunteer extraordinaire Jon Hird is building a display in our temporary exhibit space. The display celebrates the centennial of Canada's navy with a selection of maritime memorabilia from the SCMA's collection. It should be together by the end of this week, so come on by and have a look!

There are several big jobs ongoing right now. As I mentioned in our last post, we're working to organize and revitalize the museum's oral history program. Things are coming along with that - we're taking stock of what we have (and we have a lot) and getting ourselves organized to resume interviewing. We still need volunteers to assist with several jobs. We're looking for interviewers (must have good people skills, enjoy conversation, etc.) and transcribers (must be a quick typist and be able to spell accurately). If you're interested, please drop us a line!

That's it for now. See you in the museum!