Celebrity visits, capsizes and even a riot – it’s all happened in the city that’s made bathtub racing a world championship sport.
The Great International World Championship Bathtub Race marks its 50th milestone this July.
It’s a race that’s collected its share of stories since tubbers first throttled out of the harbour and across the Strait of Georgia in 1967.
Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip visited the city in 1971, seeing the World’s Largest Bathtub make its debut, and a four-lap race in the harbour with 22 tubs competing for the Queen’s Plate. Actor John Wayne also anchored his yacht in the inner harbour that year, at the height of the Bathtub festivities and was made an honorary governor of the Loyal Nanaimo Bathtub Society, according to the organization’s book A Salute to 25 years of Tubbing Tradition.
A few years later, in a “freak accident” Nanaimo’s pirate mayor Frank Ney almost became the first serious tubbing casualty when his flare pistol inadvertently fired aboard his yacht, the Blue Girl. In 1975 the mayor tried – and failed – to make a peace bid among a 300-strong mob, the book shows. It called it a “black day for Nanaimo and tubbing celebrations” with the mob hurling rocks through shop windows, including a Cavan Street liquor store.
“It wasn’t a riot – it was just about a riot,” said Bill McGuire, commodore for the Loyal Nanaimo Bathtub Society, who said Ney was close to reading the riot act but never did.
It saw a tightening up of liquor regulations and more policing, he said.
There’s also been capsizes. The worst weather conditions in the history of the race were chronicled in A Salute to 25 years of Tubbing Tradition, which called tubbers great race survivors. Fifty-eight people registered for the start, but seven failed to get our of the harbour, 28 sunk, pulled out or returned to the city before they reached Entrance Island and another 18 sank or pulled out before they could get to the Lower Mainland.
McGuire, whose ties to the race date back to 1968, said as high as 50 per cent of the tubs sank in the harbour in the early days, when there were hundreds of tubs, escort boats and people trying to watch.
The race steps into its 50th year, with its share of changes. You will no longer see the annual boat burning in the harbour as a sacrifice to the bathtub gods, and racers can build their tubs from any material so long as it conforms to the general shape and design of an old-style, roll edge bathtub, rules show.
In 1967, racers had the choice of crossing the Strait of Georgia in a genuine metal or porcelain tub or a fibre glass or plastic boat moulded from one.
The routes have also changed from a crossing to Vancouver’s Kitsilano Beach to a start and finish at Maffeo Sutton Park.
But in 50 years, the race continues to draw thousands of spectators, who take to the shoreline to watch the tubs and as McGuire puts it, the race is now a part of our culture in Nanaimo.
“That’s a big credit to the organizers and the people who have been involved to have such an impact and to go 50 years is something we never envisioned either,” he said.
