Our Name
“In 1519, Portuguese navigator Ferdinand Magellan, in the employ of Spain, began a journey across the Atlantic Ocean to seek a western route to the Spice Islands via South America.
After braving perilous seas and navigating through what are now known as the Straits of Magellan, his small fleet entered an unfamiliar ocean in November 1520. He called this body of water pacific, due to the calmness of the water at the time (‘pacific’ means peaceful).
When Magellan and his crew entered the Pacific Ocean after their long journey, they thought that the Spice Islands were close at hand. Little did they know that their destination remained thousands of miles away. The explorers had ventured into the largest ocean on Earth.
Covering approximately 155 million square kilometers (59 million square miles) and containing more than half of the free water on Earth, the Pacific is by far the largest of the world’s ocean basins. All of the world’s continents could fit into the Pacific basin.”
Our Motivation
To build clean spacious feeling mobile cabin for people to travel the world in and use as a base camp for whatever gets them outside.
Our Owner/Architect/Builder
Shaun Kelly is a Pacific Northwest native and adventurer. He grew up on a sailboat built by his father in Seattle and in the San Juan Islands. His father Mike Kelly later became a well known wooden houseboat builder in the Seattle area. Following in his father’s footsteps of entrepreneurship taking what he has learned from building houseboats with his father and designing user experiences for tech industry he started PACIFIC VANS. When he isn’t designing or building vans he is biking, sailing, traveling, snowboarding, backpacking or bikepacking with his wife and two boys.