Gibsons Coun. David Croal is hoping to get council’s approval to set up a working group to look at ways to preserve some of the town’s TV history.
Croal, who worked on The Beachcombers series and retired from the CBC shortly before the last municipal election, is expected to put forward a motion at the Nov. 5 council meeting to create “a volunteer working group … to establish funding and logistics for the relocation, restoration and housing of the Persephone boat and jet boat.”
“There is a need to preserve the Persephone,” Croal told Coast Reporter, but also a need to preserve the other items in The Beachcombers collection at the museum, much of which can’t be displayed or properly catalogued and stored because of a lack of space.
The second part of Croal’s motion would see the working group also explore “the expansion of the existing Sunshine Coast Museum and Archives facility.”
Croal said the hope is to eventually reunite the two iconic boats from the series as part of a new exhibit on The Beachcombers and Gibsons’ history as a TV and movie production location at an expanded museum.
Although she needs work, the Persephone is already owned by the Town and sits on display at the Five Corners intersection in Gibsons Landing. The owners of the property are expected to apply to develop it soon, so the boat will have to moved.
The state of the Persephone also caught the attention of Nelson-based professional painter Doran Amatto, a frequent visitor to Gibsons, who approached the Town this summer offering to give Nick Adonidas’ trusty coastal workhorse a bit of TLC.
“This boat, The Beachcombers, is akin to Wayne Gretzky, the Tragically Hip, maple syrup, Bob and Doug McKenzie… Anything that people from other places think is Canada, to me, that boat and the show represents that,” Amatto told Coast Reporter at the time. “It’s the Nanaimo bar of boats.”
Getting the black jet boat used by Robert Clothier’s character Relic is another matter. What happened to it after the CBC production office in Gibsons closed has been a subject of intense speculation.
“Everyone has their own theory,” Jackson Davies, who played Constable Constable, said in 2018 while sharing stories with Beachcombers fans visiting from Ontario. “It’s one of these things where you have urban myths. I get something every once in a while from someone who says they heard it was up in Powell River or some place. We should have hung on to that one.”
Insiders have also pointed out that there was more than one boat on the Sunshine Coast built to the same design, leading to a few false sightings over the years.
Croal said the project with the museum would be part of wider efforts to mark significant anniversaries for The Beachcombers – the 30th anniversary of the wrap party which is coming up in 2020 and the 50th anniversary of the program’s debut, which is in 2022.
He already put out some feelers about potential funding from the Island Coastal Economic Trust during the Union of BC Municipalities meeting in September and told his fellow councillors afterwards that “they were gung-ho to work with us on that project.”
– With files from Sophie Woodrooffe
