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The Ottawa Citizen
Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
Mon, 15 Nov 1993, Page 11
Logging boat on the beach. Surplus vessel to be cut up after its sale
By Sean Upton Citizen Outaouais bureau. MEMORIES: Rheal Lafontaine stands aboard the Williamson with smaller logging vessels in the background
The W. J. Williamson, the biggest logging boat to ever sail a river or lake in the Outaouais, will leave the Baskatong Reservoir the way it got here: in pieces. It's too heavy to load on a trailer in one piece and, even if it wasn't, it would be too tall to slip under the hydro lines that cross the highways going north and south. After 49 years on the Baskatong, a man-made lake 50 kilometres north of Maniwaki, Canadian Pacific Forest Products is selling the Williamson along with the smaller logging boats that drove the logs down the Gatineau River to the paper plant in Gatineau.
The log drive stopped in 1991 but the firm has been using some of the boats to clear the river of logs that slipped out of booms and created jams in the river's bays, says spokesman Andre Trudel. The cleanup is almost over and CP wants to sell the nine boats that are left from a fleet that once totalled more than 30, says Trudel.
The Williamson is double the size of most of the other boats to be sold. It is 24.4 metres long, and six metres wide, three storeys high, and made of steel. Its diesel V 12 motor produces 600 horsepower. Its size and weight make it impossible to move in one piece. It will have to be cut with torches before it goes anywhere, says Trudel. "I wouldn't go to watch that," says Rheal Lafontaine, the man who was the Williamson's captain for the last 27 years of duty. "It's the end of an era it's a shame."
He lived on the boat more than he lived with his family in Maniwaki during those 27 years. When he first took the wheel, he and his crew of six lived on the Williamson for four weeks at a time. After they were unionized, they got to go home every weekend. As much as he loves his family, he loved every minute of his life on that boat, Lafontaine says. And he would be happy to take the wheel again now, at 67. "I loved my work a lot. I would have liked to continue ... for a couple of years," he says.
Before becoming captain of the Williamson, Lafontaine handled smaller boats, including the Pythonga, the second largest of the fleet, skippered for most of the last 20 years by his brother, Armand. In all, Lafontaine spent 47 seasons (April to November) on the log drive. He started as a draveur, one of the men who walked on the logs to pry and push them on their way. After two seasons he got a job as a deck hand on a small boat and worked his way up to the helm of the Williamson.
The tug came from Halifax in 1943, where it had served as a harbor tugboat, and was named for William Joseph Williamson, a manager for CP. To make it to the Baskatong, it was cut in three pieces, loaded on a train, then re-welded at the lake. The Baskatong, the largest body of water in the Outaouais, was created by damming the Gatineau, and Gens-de-Terre rivers and smaller rivers and streams.
The Williamson hauled booms of logs from the mouths of the rivers across the lake to the Mercier Dam log-slide that spilled them in to the Gatineau River. It could pull three booms of logs, about 3,500 cords. But for all its horsepower, the Williamson had an average speed of one mile an hour when it was pulling booms. (Faster if there was a tailwind, slower in a headwind.) The Williamson probably won't pull wood ever again. Like the Gatineau paper plant, most mills get their wood by truck; log drives are no longer practical, says Trudel.
CP is hoping to find a buyer and Trudel estimates the boat is worth between $50,000 and $100,000. It might be worth that if it was on another body of water, says Charles Bond, owner of Bond Marine Contracting. He's bought seven of the steel 12-metre logging boats since CP started selling them. They can be moved in one piece. Bond uses them for work on the Ottawa, Rideau and St. Lawrence rivers.
"It's worth zip. It's worth a buck as it sits," he says of the Williamson. "It's going to cost (too) much to take it out." There are skeptics, but CP hopes to sell it to someone who will use it. Marcel Guilbeault, the caretaker at the Lacroix Dam where the Williamson is in dry dock, recently gave it a new coat of silver paint. It was used once this summer when a movie company used it for a period, made-for-television film, be Chant de la Silouette. The movie company had added its own paint job to make it look old and ratty.
Before it is shown on television, the movie will be shown at a theatre in Maniwaki in March. In the audience will be Lafontaine, watching what he thinks was the last-ever voyage of the Williamson. There is no doubt it was its last voyage on the Baskatong.
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