Master at the Texada Island Company standing by to tow the loaded scow behind her. The black diamond on her stack is the insignia of the Marpole Towing Company .
A later Moscrop-designed tug, the SS Master, was built in 1922, a turning point in towboat technology , when coal was already giving way to oil for boiler fuels and steel was beginning to replace the wooden hulls of Douglas fir. A mediumsized towboat for her day, the 70ft Master was one of the last wooden-hulled steam towboats built in British Columbia. Although , like Ivanhoe, she was engaged in the lumber trade, she also towed coal barges from the east Vancouver Island ports of Nanaimo and Union Bay , and rock-primarily limestone, sandsto_ne and granite-from more northerly ports such as Haddington Island, Jervis Inlet and Hutt Sound . Master logged more than a million miles during her forty-year career, and several thousand more since becoming a heritage vessel operated by the SS Master Society. Despite these vast distances covered, she did not undergo a major refit until 1982, her sixtieth year. The twenty years in non-commercial use had been more devastating than all her previous years of hard work. In 1962, when she was retired and purchased for use as a working artifact, the Master met all standards necessary for operation after only nine months of volunteer restoration. When the present rebuilding program began, the two decades of make-shift repairs had allowed dry-rot, rust and corrosion to significantly reduce her seaworthiness and her boilers had failed.
As she ran less, the long lay-ups without heat from her boilers allowed the wood to become saturated and more exposed to dry-rot. Finally , at a shipyard where she was undergoing minor repairs, she was placed in a shallow berth where she took the bottom on a zero tide and lay over on her beam-ends . No one noticed her predicament, and on the flood tide she failed to right before the sea poured in through her open seams . The Master Society ' s despair of trying to maintain the ship piecemeal compelled them to a more thorough approach that would restore her essentially to her original structural condition. Although that decision presented seemingly insurmountable problems , there was no alternative. The strong conviction of Jim McDonald, a director of the Society and overseer of the restoration, and his ability to engender resolve in the chief engineer, Dick Smith , and the chairman, Bill Bowes (later succeeded in that capacity by Andy Blokmanis) brought a complete turnaround in the attitude towards saving the ship. With the help of an ever-growing core of volunteers and with the services of shipwrights and boilermakers (many long retired from their trades) , SS Master once again sails her home-trade waters as a living example of the heyday of steam navigation in British Columbia . The Ivanhoe and Master represent a technology and an industry that have vanished from the region . Together, they are vivid reminders of those energetic early days-not so long ago--in the development of the Pacific Northwest. J,
Mr. Hagelund is the skipper of a replica of the Beaver now operating at Expo '86 . He has been involved with the SS Master Society since 1963 .
At right, Master on the ways in a local shipyard being set up for hull scraping and painting. This particular effort, undertaken in the late 1970s, was completed in 48 hours by members of the SS Master Society. Below she is seen as she was before her most recent restoration. Ivanhoe, below right, in February 1927. The " K" on her stack is the insignia of the Kingcome Navigation Company, the marine service of the Powell River Company. Photos courtesy the Vancouver Maritime Museum.
SEA HISTORY, SUMMER 1986
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