Photo credit: Dave Roels (www.daveroels.com)
HISTORY LESSON
A short history of boom boats By Lea Edgar
Librarian/Archivist, Vancouver Maritime Museum
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Sidewinders, pond boats, dozer boats, and log broncs. So many names for such a little tug!
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idewinders, pond boats, dozer boats, and log broncs. So many names for such a little tug! Yet these tiny but tough vessels have been largely overlooked when it comes to tugboat history. The term “boom boat” only began appearing in the industry media shortly after the Second World War. In British Columbia, the term appears to first be used by John Manly Ltd. when he completed the welded steel boat Glendale Prince for BC Forest Products in 1947. In fact, the Glendale Prince may have been the first Canadian boom boat. Before boom boats existed, log drivers had the dangerous task of walking the logs on the water, sorting them with a pike pole and stacking them at the log lift. Boom boats were designed to make short work of this precarious job. They crash into and shuffle the logs for hours, herding them into place. Today, people enjoy watching these little boats sorting logs by bobbing, bumping, spinning around, and generally showing off their unique manoeuvrability.
Plain Jane II built by John Manly Ltd. in 1960.
There have been several prototype boom boats built over the years. Early designers included H.C. Hanson of Seattle and Robert Allan Ltd. of Vancouver. The earliest models were wooden-hulled, however, they couldn’t stand up to the strenuous requirements of the job. It wasn’t until the advent of welded steel hulls that the widespread use of boom boats really took off. An early, locally designed model was called the “pod bottom” boat. Its lower hull was much smaller than the upper hull, giving the boat lots of waterplane area for stability, but also the least underwater volume for optimum manoeuvrability. Many boat builders, such as John Manly Ltd., West Coast Salvage, Mac & Mac Manufacturing, Vancouver Steel Fabricators, and Alberni Engineering, to name a few, have been active suppliers of boom boats in B.C. The average boom boat measures approximately 16 feet long, eight feet in the beam, and four feet deep. The typical gross tonnage is a mere three tons. The
Image courtesy of Dave Weldon.
18 BC Shipping News December 2013/January 2014
two most common types of boom boats are dozer boats and sidewinders. Dozer boats have conventional drives with a single screw and the propeller near the rear of the vessel, whereas Sidewinders have a 360-degree rotating steerable drive in a cage near the front. The development of boom boats over the last 50 years was largely influenced by the drive design. Initially fitted with gas powered engines driving a single propeller, diesel engines became standard by the mid-1950s. By the 1960s, right angle-drives became available. Early on, companies such as Olympic Foundry and Hydro Drive Corporation in Seattle designed and built the drives. The Original Olympic 360-degree Drive was first produced in 1969. Rendell Tractor built several sidewinder boom boats with both Hydro Drives and Olympic Drives. In 1973, they bought the rights to manufacture the Olympic Drive. In 1975, Rendell Tractor redesigned the drive, changed its company name to Summer
Expo 86 Boom Boat Ballet.
Image courtesy of Rebecca Bollwitt.