Philip Spaulding's Ferries.

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About Philip Spaulding's Ferries.

Philip F. Spaulding of Seattle (1913-2005) was one of America's last great civilian naval architects, active from the early 1950s till his retirement in the mid 1980s. He was one of the last people in the business to work the old fashioned way, with slide-rules, t-squares & triangles; he attached as great an importance to beauty and passenger comfort as to efficiency; and he was legendary in the seafaring community for the enormous pride he took in his creations: festooning passenger spaces with ornate builder's plaques, launch dedication plates, and framed blueprints. Many of his boats show a midcentury streamlined modernist influence, and are instantly recognizable as his. Though he designed many kinds of vessels, including tugboats & cargo ships, his passion was for ferry boats. Today, many of his boats still carry passengers along the West coast of North America, some of them close to fifty years old. In many of the ports they serve, his vessels have become iconic, inspiring an amount of devotion from their passengers & crews which is rare these days.
Among his designs:

-The Blackball ferry Coho, which has been crossing the straights of Juan De Fuca between Port Angeles, Washington & Victoria BC continuously since 1959, and which Spaulding considered his greatest work.

-The Sidney, Burnaby, V, & C classes of BC Ferries--14 boats in all: their entire fleet for the first two decades of their existence.

-Seven ferries for the Alaska Marine Highway system.

-The 'Jumbo class' Washington State ferries Walla Walla & Spokane.

-The three Golden Gate ferries Marin, Sonoma, & San Francisco, which have been working on San Francisco bay carrying passengers between the city & Marin county since the mid 1970s.

This group was started in order to collect photos of all of his boats still in existance, and to build an appreciation for them, using them as muses for creative maritime photography. I'm hoping we can track down some of his lesser known designs. Most of his ferries have oval shaped builder's plaques prominently displayed in the passenger areas. On his early boats, the plaques read "Philip F. Spaulding Associates", as on the Coho. On boats built after 1972, when he merged his firm with his long time competitor's, the plaques read "Nickum & Spaulding"