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Vessels Built by S. Madill Ltd.

compiled by John M. MacFarlane 2015

David Hill–Turner states "Sam Madill moved from Manitoba to British Columbia after Wthe First World War. A blacksmith by trade, he set up his own company in the early 1920s. After the Second World War, he bought a shipyard and went into producing small tugs and boom boats until the 1960s. They are best known internationally, however, for their mobile spars and yarders that were used in the forest industry. Norm Madill,Sam’s son,was one of the first certified stick welders in BC. He departed Nanaimo c.1964 in a former missionary boat, built himself a steel yacht in Holland and sailed for many years. Chuck Madill managed the company."

Author’s Note: This is a partial list (work in progress).

Vessel Images: Can you help us fill gaps in the vessel images in the database? If you have pictures of missing vessels that you have taken and would be willing to contribute to the database to make it more complete all our users would be very grateful. Please send them to admin(at)nauticapedia.ca

Note to Reader: Vessel names containing Roman numerals in parentheses (e.g. Floater (II)) indicates more than one vessel in the database with the same name. The numerals in parentheses are NOT part of the vessel name but are used to distinguish one vessel from another in the database.

To quote from this article please cite:

MacFarlane, John M. (2015) Vessels Built by S. Madill Ltd. Nauticapedia.ca 2015. http://www.nauticapedia.ca/Articles/Vessel_Builders_Madill.php

Site News: April 14, 2026

The vessel database has been updated and is now holding 102,241 vessel histories and the mariner and naval biography database has also been updated and now contains 58,625 entries. The vessel database also includes 17,072 wreck records and 17,332 images.

Recently Bill Clearihue (Toronto), Kyle Stubbs (Seattle), Captain George Schneider (San Diego), Tad Roberts (Gabriola Island) and Don Feltmate (Nova Scotia) have all joined the team as research correspondents.

My thanks to Vancouver photographer Ray Warren who is beginning the long process of filling gaps in the photo record of the vessel histories in the vessel database. Ray has been documenting the ships of Vancouver Harbour for more than 60 years.

Thanks to our chief Canadian contributor, Mike Rydqvist McCammon, for the hundreds (approaching a thousand) of photos he continues to contribute to illustrate British Columbia’s floating heritage.

My very special thanks to our volunteer IT adviser, John Eyre, who (since 2021) has modernized, simplified and improved the update process for the databases into semi–automated processes. He provides advice whenever needed. His participation has been vital to keeping the Nauticapedia available to our netizens.

Thanks to John Spivey (our long term U.S. contributor) who is in his 6th year of fact checking all of the entries in the vessel database, one-by-one. This has resulted in thousands of updates (beyond counting) and corrections which might never have occurred without his intervention.

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