All Hands on Deck

Greater Victoria has a thriving marine service industry. It just needs enough skilled workers 
to keep it afloat.

Marine sector job opportunities
Philbrook’s Boatyard owner Drew Irwin says the business could add a night shift, due to surplus demand, if it could find more skilled workers. Photo by Jeffrey Bosdet.

At the bustling Philbrook’s Boatyard in Sidney, owner Drew Irwin and project manager Jamie Hansen are stickhandling a full slate of more than 60 work orders. Jobs range from the straightforward plumbing of a new toilet to multi-month refits of pride-and-joy classic yachts. 

Saying “no” to a customer is hard to do for any business, but that’s the current reality at Philbrook’s. The phone keeps ringing with more than enough demand to keep the company’s 200-plus skilled technicians and tradespeople busy.

“If we had more people we could add a night shift and still be turning away customers,” says Irwin, who joined Douglas magazine for a Zoom interview from London after completing a transatlantic sailing adventure with five others aboard a 72-foot Oyster yacht. 

A surplus of demand is either an enviable problem to have or a limiting frustration. Either way, it’s an indicator of the many untapped employment and entrepreneurial opportunities in Victoria’s thriving — yet somewhat unsung — boat-building and maintenance sector. 

Skilled labor shortage issue
Philbrook’s Boatyard owner Drew Irwin. Photo by Jeffrey Bosdet.

From Rowboats to Subs

Given its 25,725 kilometres of rugged coastline, it’s not surprising that British Columbia has a vast “blue economy” — comprising everything from fisheries to ocean tech to marine services like shipbuilding — and just keeps on growing. According to the Government of B.C., the maritime economy already contributes $7.6 billion to the province’s GDP and 43,000 jobs. Of those jobs, 22,000 are in the industrial marine sector, many of them right here. Greater Victoria has a 130-year history of shipbuilding, refit, repair, maintenance and supply-chain activities and is, among other things, home to Esquimalt Graving Dock, the largest on the west coast of the Americas.

Among the more than 40 Greater Victoria-based companies involved in the marine service industry are big players like Victoria Shipyards, owned by Seaspan, Canada’s largest private marine transportation company. Its 800 workers are deep into a contract with the federal government to modernize a fleet of four Victoria-class submarines, a 1980s vintage diesel-electric variety of submarine built in the United Kingdom. On the other end of the spectrum are innovative boutique companies like Whitehall Rowing, founded in 1987 by Harold Aune and Marie Hutchinson, which designs and builds all-weather rowing boats with the sort of sliding seats normally found in racing sculls.

Philbrook’s is one of the big players. It has a history as storied as the weathered mast on the Dorothy, a 30-footer built in 1896 at the James Bay boatyard, where the Inn at Laurel Point stands today. (This classic boat had a dozen owners before it was donated to the Maritime Museum of British Columbia, restored, then relaunched in 2023 as the oldest sailing vessel in the Pacific Northwest.)

Following the Second World War, Eric Philbrook and Ernie Butler launched a company that made cabinets and wooden Venetian blinds. In 1947, they caught the “boat bug,” according to the Philbrook’s website’s colourful company history, and built the 31-foot Bonnie Lou. The company went on to build and repair commercial boats throughout the 1950s. Then, in the mid 1960s, Philbrook’s scored a big contract to build two 65-foot Fisheries and Oceans Canada patrol boats from the keel up.

In 1971, the original founders sold to new owners, who tooled up for a production run of a 39-foot sailboat design dubbed Fast Passage. They would build and sell 36 of these sailing vessels during their 16-year run, while growing the repair and refit side of the business. The year 1987 saw another ownership change when Hal Irwin, a Toronto accountant, and his son Drew bought the company and moved west. By that time, Philbrook’s was primarily a boat repair, refit and restoration specialist. (The company completed its last keel-up new boat build in 2003.) Over the following decade, the company experienced huge growth. 

“In the late ’90s we went from 30 employees to more than 230 employees,” Irwin says. 

Roughly two-thirds of Philbrook’s business comes from American owners in the Seattle area, Oregon and California. They’re generally affluent. They know and love their boats and are willing to spend to keep them shipshape. And anyone who buys a boat quickly learns that it requires constant and often expensive maintenance.

Victoria boatyard entrepreneurial opportunities
Robert Abernethy of Abernethy & Gaudin Boatbuilders. Photo by Jeffrey Bosdet.

Painstaking Workmanship

Abernethy & Gaudin Boatbuilders and its small staff of 12 also serves a well-heeled, private-boat-owning demographic, mostly dwelling in the Victoria region but also in Puget Sound south of the border.

It’s a hot July afternoon at the company’s Brentwood Bay boatyard. The smell of wood shavings mingles with the sharp scent of solvent in a cluttered shanty that buzzes with activity. Two craftspeople are finishing a new transom made of gorgeous, auburn-hued teak on a boat that’s out of the water and on the rails. It’s one of countless details in a painstaking two-month restoration of this sleek, wooden power cruiser, one of roughly 100 that were built by Vancouver’s Grenfell Yachts back in the 1960s and early ’70s. 

Owner Bruce Reid, of Sidney, is a Grenfell aficionado. His grandfather had a Grenfell and his son is also a proud owner. Reid now holds the rights to the design. One look at the work being done on his 35-foot, B.C.-made wooden beauty and it’s immediately clear that quality trumps cost on this restoration.

After fielding a few phone calls, Jean Gaudin wanders down to the dock with a retired couple who have made a surprise visit to check progress on their sailboat refit. It’s getting a bunch of new woodwork, including new gunnels currently being planed to perfection by a technician.

Victoria yacht refit specialists
Robert Abernethy of Abernethy & Gaudin Boatbuilders works on the details of a wooden vessel at its boatyard in Brentwood Bay. The company’s small staff of 12 largely serves a private-boat-owning clientele. Photo by Jeffrey Bosdet.

“My dad was designing and building boats, so I kind of grew up around it,” Gaudin says. “I worked at Jespersen [Boat Builders] for six years on many different projects and I learned a lot.”

In 1999, Gaudin teamed up with Rob Abernethy to launch a business. Their boatyard has been busy ever since. This past spring they opened a second facility in Sidney, realizing that they were outgrowing their space on Brentwood Bay’s picturesque and historic waterfront.

Gaudin pauses when asked if he and his partner want to continue growing their business. He says he’s content with the current scale, which already has him spending more time on admin and less on the tools than he would like. But even if Abernethy & Gaudin wanted to expand, finding shipwrights and skilled craftspeople wouldn’t be easy.

“It’s not a common profession. They’re usually avid boaters,” Gaudin says.

Even if Jean Gaudin wanted to scale up his boutique boatbuilding business, it would be a challenge to find the skilled craftspeople.

A Bespoke Training Centre

Attracting new talent is an industry-wide challenge. Philbrook’s Boatyards identified a labour shortage in the marine service and boatbuilding sector decades ago. At the time, nobody was offering apprenticeship training specific to their industry. Recognizing this gap, in the early 1990s, Philbrook’s owner Drew Irwin and several other companies approached Camosun College with the idea of starting a marine service trades program. The basket of skills required to work on boats is huge and diverse — electrical, mechanical, woodwork, painting, rigging, composite and steel fabrication, onboard systems and all the other specialities of interior and exterior restoration and service. The challenge was that the number of graduates needed was insignificant compared to other, more familiar trades like carpentry and plumbing. It was a tough sell.  

“We needed 30 [graduates] a year and they wanted 300,” Irwin says.

In other words, most post-secondary institutions felt the math didn’t make sense for them to invest in developing a new speciality program. 

So in 1995 Philbrook’s and nine other industry partners decided to address the issue themselves and form Quadrant Marine Institute, a privately funded marine service training centre.

Marine apprenticeship training programs
Philbrook’s Boatyard employs more than 200 skilled technicians and tradespeople. Photo by Jeffrey Bosdet.

The program had its first student intake in 1996. Now nearing its 30th anniversary, Quadrant is currently managed from a small, nondescript office in the heart of the action at Canoe Cove near the Swartz Bay ferry terminal. It’s the perfect place to be, surrounded by companies involved in all aspects of marine service including Jespersen Boat Builders, Canoe Cove Marina & Boatyard, and more than 20 other businesses. 

“Despite British Columbia having thousands of kilometres of coastline, the marine sector is not on the general public’s radar,” says Shelley McIvor, Quadrant’s managing director, who was a chemist by profession and a sailor by hobby before joining Quadrant in 2015. 

Besides managing the marine service technician apprenticeship program and marine service manager training and certification, McIvor spends a lot of time doing outreach at high schools, job fairs and with government officials in an effort to raise the industry’s profile. She also manages partnerships with more than 100 marine service businesses on Vancouver Island and the Lower Mainland (selling the importance of taking on apprentices to time-stressed owners is part of the job). Despite the age-old tradition of shipbuilding and ship maintenance, it wasn’t until 2011 that SkilledTradesBC (formerly the Industry Training Authority of B.C.) recognized marine service as a distinct trade.

In 2017 and 2018, Quadrant conducted an industry scan that included detailed interviews with 100 companies employing 1,450 people. Though the numbers are dated, the scan was revealing. Of the participating companies, roughly 75 per cent were focused on the pleasure craft market and two out of three reported that they were turning down work because of a lack of skilled workers.

Marine trades career growth
Photo by Jeffrey Bosdet.

Despite the efforts of Quadrant and its industry partners, the employee shortage persists. Among trades, marine service is like the jack of all trades. One day, a technician might be installing new rigging on a sailboat, the next repairing a composite hull damaged by a rock strike. Variety is the spice of this job and it appeals to a certain type of person. Getting the message out to the right candidates remains the challenge.    

“We want to train people who enjoy variety and have great problem-solving skills,” McIvor says. “I would say that nearly every single one of our employers is hiring right now.”

The blue economy has created 43,300 jobs in B.C. — many of them here in Greater Victoria — and adds $7.6 billion to the province’s GDP.

Great Potential

Those employment odds certainly appealed to Nicholas Guns. So did the nature of the work. The 18-year-old is in the first year of a four-year marine service technician apprenticeship through Quadrant. He’s learning a wide variety of skills while earning a good wage at Delta Marine Service, where he was busy this past summer retrofitting new electronics and doing metalwork and fabrication on several Fleming yachts.

“The marine industry is so broad and all the paths have great potential,” says the self-assured teenager. “Every day I come in, there’s a new challenge or task that I’ve never done before. The learning is always an entertaining challenge and keeps my brain focused. And it’s been nothing but great training and coaching from the skilled trades people at Quadrant.”

Guns already has his career path well mapped out. In three years, when he finishes his marine service apprenticeship, he plans to hit the books again and pursue his Red Seal heavy duty diesel mechanic certification. 

This kind of motivation and energetic youth is something that Drew Irwin of Philbrook’s would love to see more of in his line of business.

“If we could hire six or even four skilled people today, that would be a dream for us,” Irwin says.