Just Pulled In: Coal Harbor Marina - Part II

"Tamsen" OMW?

There is an interesting story behind the Kuulakai aside from it being one of the few remaining Miki tugs. Do you know what is happening with it now?

Now owned by CANADIAN BLACK COD FISHING CORP. the Kuulakai was once called the Lloyd B. Gore and towed logs here on the coast for years. She was built by NORTHEAST SHIPBUILDING CO. QUINCY, MASS.

Interesting bit of news from October 4, 1995 ...
This unusual case concerned whether a commercial fishing licence could be seized under the provisions of the Customs Act. The facts of the case were that the fishing vessel "Lloyd B. Gore" had been spotted by the U.S. Coast Guard returning from the South China Sea. The vessel was tracked and was ultimately seized with a cargo of marijuana. The vessel and her commercial fishing licence were subsequently declared forfeit. The vessel had a value of $85,000 and the licence had an estimated value of between $300,000 and $400,000. The Court of Appeal held, however, that the licence was not a "conveyance" under the Customs Act and was therefore not subject to forfeiture.

Sad news;
One of Kuulakai's sisters the Florence Filberg burned to the waterline on July 3 at Eliza Point, Vancouver Island. She had been beached there for quite some time after dragging her anchor in one of our 40-45 knot wind storms.

A couple of photos of the two in their glory days...

There is far more to the story and the people behind it than the cut and paste Brian got off the web. The "new" ownership is interesting though, I suspect it is the same owner but a shell company.

It's one of those 6 degrees of separation things as well. Back in another time I was working for a Canadian tugboat company and we used to load fuel barges at (as far as I can remember) the foot of Thurlow (?) There was a fuel terminal there as well as a railcar loading facility where we loaded tank cars for the pulp mills on the Island.

I used to see the Lloyd B Gore sitting direlect near the rail dock and always wondered what would become of it. A few years later I was working for a Vancouver company called International Hydrodynamics. We had a temporary operations base in Lunenburg NS and hired a couple of local divers for our support ship. These guys were real characters. I wish there was room to write the whole story here but it is a novel all by itself ... a hell of a sea story involving salvaging WW2 shipwrecks using liberated RCN explosives, salvaging the power cable to an island while it was still in use ... but far too long to write about here.

Anyway, those guys were fantastic divers, incredibile seamen, and real characters by any definition. We trained them as submersibile pilots and kept them on after the NS operation was over and they came back to Vancouver with the rest of us. One of them, Tim J, bought the Gore as a liveaboard salvage boat. He thought it might be good for the occasional fish packing trip as well and he bought a black cod license when you could get one for almost nothing.

To make a long tale short, Tim also thought the long legs of a Miki made for a good cargo boat and took it to Thailand for a load of local agricultural products. The results of that adventure are referenced in the piece Brian pasted but the "rest of the story" is better. It seems that the cod license they couldn't take away was worth a fortune and could be rented out while Tim was a guest of the Crown. He made more money doing that than he stood to make off the run, and since nobody wanted to buy an old wooden tugboat the Crown had to maintain it in his absence (unlike being left to rot as US authorities do) and he was able to buy it back at a very reasonable price.

I had lost track of the boat in the past few years and was not aware of the name change but the name of the currently registered owner leads me to think the final chapter in this story is yet to be written

Is that speedboat photo at Pitt Lake?
Outmywindow...did you see this leaving port?

Were there any BIG trout? Looks like a beautiful setting with the old homesteads.

The water here looked a little more blue when we took photos of Odessa!!

"Odessa" looks funny with the EC135 on the back. but in the real photos...she looks interesting in the water. What I find more interesting is the very sizable tender on her aft sundeck fitted with an outboard engine. Not a sight that is as common as it used to be with tenders aboard yachts, everything is all inboard nowadays it seems.