Brian McLoughlin:
CLASS OF 1968
Richview Collegiate InstituteClass of 1968
Etobicoke, ON
Humber Valley Village Junior Middle SchoolClass of 1963
Etobicoke, ON
Brian's Story
Life
After Ronnie Cairns decided that I was wasting my time and his at Richview and sent me packing, I got a commercial helicopter license. A surfeit of returning Vietnam pilots created a dearth of jobs and I ended up in Banff as a desk clerk/taxi driver/ ski instructor.
I finally got a flying job with a British firm servicing oil rigs in the North Sea. I was then transferred to SE Asia, again supplying oil rigs in the South China Sea from Kuala Terengganu in W Malaysia to Kota Kinabalu in E Malaysia.
After a couple of years I had my fill of ex-RAF toffee-nosed upper class twits and joined a former Peace Corps volunteer on a traditional Thai junk sailing the Indian Ocean and S China Sea, hauling lumber, rice and hippies throughout Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia. After three years of that I left the ship and got a job with a company that did precise radio navigation for mapping seismic ocean surveys for oil exploration. This took me from the Gulf of Kutch on the India/Pakistan border to the Sea of Japan near Hakodate, and everywhere in between.
Burnout again and I went back to Kuala Terengganu in Malaysia, which had come to be a home base of sorts. The island in the river (Pulau Duyong) was famous for its unique salt junks. I...Expand for more
purchased a derelict one and, while keeping it essentially traditional, made it seaworthy and put an engine in it.
While anchored in Pataya Beach in Thailand I ran into the woman who I would eventually marry, several years later. She had inherited a partially finished Thai junk, based on a Thai fishing boat hull, that was being built in a very low tech local yard. Her boy friend had died and she ended up trying to finish it. Having a lot of local knowledge, I became involved in helping complete the ship. I then took my junk back to Kuala Terengganu, returned to Thailand and sailed the ship with Bonnie and three other idiots to Seattle via Alaska. A lot of stuff happened in between, but that is another story.
I ended up in Port Townsend, on the Olympic Peninsula where I worked in a bronze foundry, and then started a landscaping business which morphed into an excavation company. In the late 80's I started building houses which I did until 2008.
I live on acreage outside of town, I have Peruvian horses and am involved with showing them. I volunteer with our Film Festival reviewing documentaries and doing graphic design for signage. This year neither is happening, for obvious reasons, My contact is makloklin (at) icloud (dot) com.
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