Prince Rupert has a long history of shipbuilding, from military vessels built for the Second World War to the fishing and pleasure crafts that sail the West Coast today. Of the boats built here, Mike Collins has built hundreds.
“If I would have known how many boats I was going to build, I would have started to keep track,” Collins said with a laugh. “So I can only estimate somewhere around 480 boats.”
Building so many boats, or any at all, wasn’t part of Collins’s plan. But after graduating from high school in Prince Rupert, where he’s lived since 1971, Collins became a sheet metal apprentice. At the time, the fishing industry was booming with hundreds of seiners and gillnetters working along the coast. Most of them were wooden, but they started changing parts to the lighter aluminum.
READ MORE: Heart of Our City — Norm Ostrom is a fisherman with two loves
“I started at the perfect time. I’ve got experience that nobody starting now would ever get,” Collins said.
One of the owners he worked for was an avid outdoorsman who started building riverboats for himself. The fishing industry was still going well, but a recession was starting, so Collins helped them out. Then, in 1982, the work dried up and Collins was laid off. He worked at Canfisco for several weeks before joining Northwest Welding. That’s when he began building boats on his own since he was the only one at the company who knew how.
He started with skiffs and his biggest project to date, The Charles Hays, patrols the Prince Rupert harbour. The ships commissioned by Western Canada Marine Response are being worked on in the shop, and the University of Victoria’s marine research boat is stored there for the winter.
Of course, Collins also built his own boat, Celtic Dawn, a 28-foot cabin cruiser with in-board diesel. He’s spent 140 nights on Celtic Dawn, which he takes along the coast to capture the North Coast’s abundant wildlife with his camera. He especially likes taking photos of bears, making sure he stays a safe distance away and doesn’t interfere with the bear’s space. He captures them as natural as possible, without knowing a human is there.
His favourite photo was taken by a passing boat. Eight humpback whales were bubble-net feeding as a seagull swooped overhead. In the background, you can see Collins, his wife and their dog on Celtic Dawn. He and the photographer exchanged photos they had of the whales with each other in the background. It’s the screensaver on his desktop at work, and dozens of photos of boats he’s designed are hanging framed on every wall in his office.
“To me, it’s about being out on a boat. It’s not as much about fishing and photography, it’s also about waking up in the morning anchored in the fog, waiting for the fog to burn off,” Collins said. It’s this time of the morning, and his late wife’s Irish heritage, that inspired Celtic Dawn’s name.
READ MORE: B.C.’s first whale watching boat now calls Prince Rupert home
He gets attached to each boat he works on. Until he built more than 300 boats, Collins could remember every customer’s name for every boat. At Broadwater Industries, Collins takes all the phone calls for boats and stays with a customer through the pricing, quoting, designing and building. He does a little bit of everything, guiding the flat sheets of metal and customers’ ideas to life.
“You have to put so much of your heart and soul into it to make it right. We always treat them as our own personal boat, although a customer actually gets it,” he said.
Collins describes himself as picky when it comes to boats, so when one is ready, he’s sure of it.
“I had a customer come in and looked at the pictures. He looked at me and said, ‘You’re not a boat builder.’”
When Collins asked what the man meant, he said, “You build people’s dreams. People dream about having a boat one day and they finally get one because you build it to their custom, what they thought about.”
Collins smiles as he thinks of the compliment.
Dreams take a lot of work, and Collins has worked 10 hours a day for 40 years, eight regular hours and then going back to make sure everything was perfect. In 2013, Collins started teaching himself how to use 3D design software. He’d always drawn his designs by hand to convey his ideas, but AutoCAD lets him place the customer in the design by scaling it to their measurements. You can see the rendering through the model human’s eyes, showing them exactly what their boat will look like before it’s even started.
“For me, it’s not so much about building boats anymore. I enjoy the design work, but probably what I enjoy most is meeting people who are going to get them,” he said.
Each customer must pick up their vessel from Prince Rupert, and Collins and the people who worked on the boat take it out for a sea trial so the new captain can ask questions and get familiar. This is the fun part, Collins said, and it’s much more personal. While some businesses only make a handful of models, each one Collins works on is custom-built.
“Now, because I’ve been doing this for so long, I treat every boat like it’s my last one. The last one has to be perfect.”
