Tour boat tales: Another ship sinks and more talk of a Hamilton Harbour hovercraft
Last week, I wrote about the last remaining tour boat on Hamilton Harbour.
The tiny, 12-passenger, Hamilton Waterfront Trust-owned Hamiltonian carries the legacy of the golden age of big steamers that ran between Hamilton and Toronto, and other destinations, through the late 1800s to the mid-1900s.
It left me with a couple of questions: With all the recreational and residential development in the West Harbour in recent years, is the time right for a passenger vessel revival on the bay?
And what happened to those big steamers from long ago? It turns out there is quite a story with one of them, the SS Macassa, that operated from 1888-1927. I'll get to that shortly.
I took the first question to Ian Hamilton, the president of the Hamilton-Oshawa Port Authority. The authority's predecessor, the Hamilton Harbour Commission, ran passenger vessels in the past, most notably a 44-metre steel paddle steamer also called the Hamiltonian.
It operated from 1944 until it was destroyed in a fire in 1952. Over its service life in Hamilton, the ship carried more than one million passengers primarily between the foot of James Street North to the Burlington Canal and Lasalle Park.
Hamilton says the port authority is thinking about getting back into passenger service in the harbour.
I believe for a number of reasons there will be a bit of a renaissance of those types of activities," he says. We are working with a number of companies, one in particular, to introduce a hovercraft, moving back and forth between Niagara, Oshawa, Toronto and Hamilton."
He didn't give other details. The hovercraft idea has been talked about before - between Hamilton and Toronto as well as between Niagara and Toronto - but has never been able to get off the ground.
Hamilton says a hovercraft is just one possibility to enhance passenger service in the harbour and the lake.
There is lots of opportunity, with the gentrifying of the north end of Hamilton, to introduce more recreational passenger craft. We would love to play a role in that, be it a supporting actor or a main actor ... I think the time is right to take advantage of those things."
I also wondered what the folks at Hamilton Waterfront Trust had to say.
The trust - that is mandated to expand public use of the West Harbour - had financial challenges operating the 200-passenger Harbour Queen from 2006 until 2015. The vessel was sold the following year and operated in the harbour for dinner cruises and other events for two or three years under private ownership before ceasing operations through the pandemic.
Werner Plessl, the executive director of the waterfront trust says, Based on the experience of operating the Harbour Queen, I think the harbourfront has to get a little busier."
He says the West Harbour has come along way. Before 25 years ago, there was virtually no public access. Now there is more than six kilometres of shoreline that is city-owned, maintained and publicly accessible."
But there is still a lack commercial activity through shops and various other things."
Once they start going in, we'll probably see more people on the waterfront and maybe there will be more opportunities for operating boats," he says.
He believes a 100-passenger vessel offering dinner and lunch cruises would be most viable.
But that would still be a far cry from the days of big steamers such as the SS Turbinia that operated in the early 1900s that could carry more than 1,500 passengers. The SS Modjeska and the Macassa could manage several hundred people. They all went out of service in the 1920s.
Last week I talked to a recreational diver and underwater photographer from Hamilton named Stuart Seldon who was able to fill me in on what became of the Macassa.
After 40 years of doing runs between Hamilton and Toronto under various owners it was sold to Owen Sound Transportation Co. Ltd. in 1927 to operate in Georgian Bay.
It did not go well.
The vessel was renamed the SS Manasoo, and Seldon says, In ship lore, it is bad luck to change the name of a ship. It was not Manasoo for very long."
In September 1928, the steamer foundered in bad weather off Griffith Island in the bay with 16 lives lost. Five people survived. The steamer was carrying 115 head of cattle when it sunk, and they all perished.
Most believe the livestock shifted in the storm causing the ship to capsize, but Great Lakes shipwreck author Cris Kohl says he believes the real culprit was a leak in the hull.
The stern submerged first embedding into the ground leaving the bow suspended above it. A 1927 Chevrolet Coupe was found on board.
Kohl, along with Minnesota shipwreck hunters Jerry Eliason and Ken Merryman, discovered the Manasoo wreck in June 2018 less than a kilometre from Griffith Island in 64 metres of water. It took four days of searching using sonar technology.
Seldon says many other divers, including himself, have since learned of the location and have visited the 54-metre wreck over the past few years.
It's probably one of the most beautiful shipwrecks that I ever dived on. The bow is quite intact. And so is the wheelhouse. You can see the compass and the clock," says Seldon who has visited the site six times.
One odd finding, he says, is a pair of railings on a staircase in the wheelhouse. For some reason one railing is covered in zebra mussels whereas the other has none.
The thinking is that at some point in the past, one of them was replaced with a different metal that somehow repelled the mussels. But some people think the lack of mussels is because of a ghost regularly walking up and down the stairway holding onto the one railing. It's, of course, a little silly."
He says the cold fresh water of Georgian Bay has helped to preserve the wreck. In salt water it would not have fared nearly as well.
The steamer probably would have done even worse had it not ended up submerged in water. The ship, built in 1888 in Glasgow Scotland, most certainly would have been scrapped by metal salvagers by now, as was the fate of so many other vessels from that period of time.
The Manasoo - or Macassa, as it is remembered in Hamilton - may have sunk. But it ended up being preserved - at least for now.