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"The Love of His Life" – The Epic Journey of the Kazu Maru
by Lynn Salmon 2014
The Kazu Maru on display on the waterfront at Prince Rupert BC. (Photo from the Laura Yerex collection. )
When I lived and worked in Prince Rupert in the early 2000s I was always intrigued by a 27–foot Japanese fishing vessel housed and displayed near the waterfront. The vessel itself was nothing special to my untrained eye but it’s story was captivating, spanning the Pacific Ocean on an unintentional journey from Owase Japan to the northwest coast of Canada.
The Kazu Maru on display on the waterfront at Prince Rupert BC. (Photo from the Laura Yerex collection. )
In September 1985 Kazukio Sakamoto took his vessel, the Kazu Maru, out to fish in local waters. Tragically neither he nor the boat returned home. A year and a half later the Kazu Maru was found in Skidegate Channel (the body of water that separates the north and south islands that make up Haida Gwaii) by the DFO patrol vessel Sooke Post. It was quickly established that the overturned vessel had been a considerable time at sea.
Eventually the Kazu Maru was taken to Prince Rupert where she was restored and an open shed was built for display. A plaque nearby commemorates her voyage and a park surrounds the shed, built as a dedication to all mariners whose lives have been lost at sea. Sakamoto’s wife referred to the Kazu Maru as ‘the love of his life’ and indicated he would have been happy to know the little craft was part of a park honouring mariners, recognizing the danger of a life at sea.
Coincidentally, the two cities of Owase and Prince Rupert had become ‘sister cities’ in 1968 so it’s perhaps appropriate that this stoic little craft should find its way across the seas to her ‘second home port’ of Prince Rupert.
To quote from this article please cite:
Salmon, Lynn (2014) "The Love of His Life" – The Epic Journey of the Kazu Maru. Nauticapedia.ca 2014. http://nauticapedia.ca/Articles/Kazu_Maru.php
Site News: April 19, 2024
The vessel database has been updated and is now holding 92,229 vessel histories (with 15,629 images and 13,195 records of ship wrecks and marine disasters). The mariner and naval biography database has also been updated and now contains 58,616 entries (with 4,013 images).
In 2023 the Nauticapedia celebrated the 50th Anniversary of it’s original inception in 1973 (initially it was on 3" x 5" file cards). It has developed, expanded, digitized and enlarged in those ensuing years to what it is now online. If it was printed out it would fill more than 300,000 pages!
My special thanks to our volunteer IT adviser, John Eyre, who (since 2021) has modernized, simplified and improved the update process for the databases into a semi–automated processes. His participation has been vital to keeping the Nauticapedia available to our netizens.
Also my special thanks to my volunteer content accuracy checker, John Spivey of Irvine CA USA, who has proofread thousands of Nauticapedia vessel histories and provided input to improve more than 11,000 entries. His attention to detail has been a huge unexpected bonus in improving and updating the vessel detail content.