CBC BC News | By Bethany Lindsay | Oct 15, 2017

 

Pair wants to convert former floating McDonald's into a 'Deep Ocean Discovery Centre'

Vancouver's McBarge, that long-neglected relic of Expo 86, may soon be setting sail for a new life as a deep sea museum and conservation centre.

The hulking 57-metre vessel has been sitting in a secure yard on the Fraser River in Maple Ridge for the last two years, having two decades' worth of graffiti and damage from illicit partiers wiped away.

The McBarge last saw legal visitors in 1986, during its famous stint as a McDonald's restaurant.

But owner Howard Meakin and diving industry pioneer Phil Nuytten want to open the hatches once again. They plan to transform the McBarge into the "Deep Ocean Discovery Centre," a floating display of vintage diving technology and interactive exhibits about the Pacific Ocean.

"We want people to love the ocean, and before you can love something, you have to know about it," Nuytten told CBC News.

One idea would see television screens connected to underwater cameras stationed in various locations around Metro Vancouver, so visitors can get a closer look at sponge reefs off Whytecliff Park or cruise ships travelling under Lions Gate Bridge.

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The centre would also be home to Nuytten's vast collection of antique submersibles, diving suits and other equipment, as well as his company's atmospheric diving system the Newtsuit, and high-tech successor the Exosuit.

That collection features several groundbreaking pieces of equipment developed in British Columbia, including the Pisces-class submarines and Atlantis Submarines' tourist submersibles.

"It's very well known in the global underwater community, as we call ourselves, that B.C. is a sort of cutting edge technology centre, a mecca — but almost nobody in B.C. seems to know that," Nuytten said.

Sophisticated Indigenous technology

But local innovations in underwater exploration began thousands of years before any Europeans set foot in North America, and Nuytten — who is Métis but was adopted into the Kwakiutl First Nation — is planning a strong focus on technologies used by coastal First Nations.

"It's surprising how sophisticated the stuff that they designed and built to do things underwater [was] — how sophisticated that is even compared to what we have today," he said.

One example of that technology is the tool developed by the Nuu-chah-nulth of Vancouver Island to harvest dentalium shells. These shells were used as currency across North America during pre-colonial times

The Nuu-chah-nulth's device allowed a harvester standing in a canoe on the water's surface to pluck one of the mollusks from the ocean floor, 10 or 20 metres below. Nuytten has built replicas of the tools that will be included in the centre.

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