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| Originally Posted by OutMyWindow ... all I saw was an interesting boat. Doing a quick search, there is an interesting history to her and others.
Brian, that's movie material, thanks for sharing. |
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
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