Fraser River Logs
Posted By Alan Haig-Brown on August 4, 2008
On the Kuskokwin and the Mississippi a major challenge for boat handlers who will maintain a harmony with the flow of the river is staying off the riverbank when going downstream. On both those rivers the towboats push on the back of the barges. But there are cultural influences in boat handling as well. Years ago a tug captain in the estuary of Seattle’s Duwamish River pointed 
out a big Canadian tug docking a huge barge on the towline, while the U.S. boat that I was on had “made up to the hip” or tied bow and stern of the tug to a point near the stern quarter of the barge. “Down here we handle a barge in a tight space by making up like this, but those Canadians like to work it off the stern like 
that,” he said. He went on to surmise that perhaps Canadian docks were stronger and would allow a barge to be brought up against them with more force. I wondered if it was that on the Canadian west coast there were no long river in which to tow as there are in both the Lower 48 and Alasaka. On the Fraser River in British Columbia, Canada, as on the Chao Phraya River in Bangkok, Thailand, the tugs share a culture of pulling their tows both up- and downriver. When towing in the lower 20 miles or so of these two rivers, the tugs accord themselves with the sea tides. This is especially true when towing upstream when the extra push of a flood tide makes a huge difference in the ability of the tugs to make their way upriver, but they also tow downstream with the ebb tide.
North Arm of the Fraser River on Google Earth
On the Fraser River this has its own challenges. In May of each year the snowmelt on the mountains of British Columbia feeds the freshet on the river. The roiling brown waters carry tree limbs and whole trunks down past the condominiums and high-rises that line the waterfront in New Westminster, 20 miles upriver from the sea. The river then wends its way through the deltas and deposits its silt there. Even in freshet the sea’s flood tides push up the river past New Westminster and slow the river’s currents, but the ebb tide gives added urgency to the river’s bloated flows, which suck water and boats at a vicious pace through greater Vancouver’s numerous bridges. For the log-towing crews on the Fraser River, spring brings some of the most challenging conditions of the year.
For most of the twentieth century and still to some extent in the twenty-first century, tow-boating in B.C. has meant moving logs. From the earliest steam tugs to the latest diesel-powered twin-screw vessels, the challenge has been to move floating logs fast enough to beat the currents and weather but slowly enough so that the booms are not pulled apart and logs lost. The greatest concentration of sawmills has along the lower 30 miles of the Fraser River although in the new millennium these are fast being supplanted by log exports from the port of Surrey Fraser. For perhaps 100 years the Fraser has developed specialized “yarding” tugs to move the booms around to storage or from storage to sawmills and ships.
Harken Towing is one of several firms on the river which specialize in log towing. Their fleet of boats has grown from the little Harken I, with her 165 HP 671 “Jimmie”, which still serves ceremonial duties and is maintained in perfect condition for sentimental reasons. The working fleet ranges from boats like the Harken 5 with twin engines delivering a total of 500 HP to the beamy 43-foot twin-screw Ken McKenzie churning out a powerful wash from the stern with 1,000 HP.
These boats are the tools, but it is the skilled crews who really move the booms on the river. In the seasonal freshet the routine challenges are enhanced. A typical rail bridge is the one at Queensborough, which joins the top end of a large delta to the mainland. Routinely kept in the open position, the swing span provides an 85-foot-wide passage with trestles extending to either shore. Down -bound, a tow must hold tight on the condo-flanked boardwalk along the river’s north shore. With a large tug towing on the head of the boom, three or four more take positions along the sides of the boom. Alternately pushing with their bows or towing with short lines on the side boom sticks, they guide the boom’s sinewy length into and through the narrow gap between the bridge pylons. Barges have been known to miss the mark and knock bridges out of service. But the danger for booms is that if they are to wrap themselves around a fixed object they are likely to break apart, dumping their bundled logs into the river currents and creating a major clean up job. With some individual logs valued at several thousand dollars, a heavy responsibility rests with the operator’s river sense. Tim MacKenzie, Harken’s president, who still likes to get out on the river, explains: “Us older guys like to line-up the tow rather than power through the bridges. You get the tow set in a nice gradual bend to make it around the corner. If you give it too much power you’ll just straighten it out. It is easier to use a little power for a longer way than to try to power your way out of trouble. You can tell the guys that have come up off the boats with only 165 HP.”
Captain Ed Norrie, who has twenty-five years on the river, explains the role of the captain on the lead towboat: “Coming down through the bridges, the head boat is always responsible, but once you are part way through the bridge, you can’t see your assist boats anyway. You’re responsible to decide if you have enough assist boats or if you should hire extra boats. Sometimes we crash and the boom breaks on the bridge’s steel cladding. Then we have to run around to gather up all the logs and put them back together. It is especially hard at night when no beach combers are allowed out unless you call them, so most times we collect up the logs ourselves.”
With millions of dollars worth of wood tied to pilings, called dolphins, along the riverbanks, there are a number of regulations enforced by the port authorities. To prevent the temptation of theft, beachcombers who operate small fast aluminum towboats, are also limited to working only the daylight hours. They must also be licensed to recover lost logs, which they can only sell to an authority of the major log owners.
Other regulations limit the size of log tows on the smaller, but heavily traveled North Arm of the Fraser. In non-freshet times the boats can tow 32 sections of logs with one assist boat and 36 sections with two assist boats. Each section is defined by the four 66-foot boom logs, called sticks, that surround it and are joined by heavy seven-foot-long boom chains with a ring on one end and a toggle on the other. These chains are passed through a six-inch hole drilled near the end of each boom stick.
On one tow down the main arm of the river and out across the Gulf of Georgia to Vancouver Island, Capt. Norrie towed 147 of these sections arranged seven across and 21 long. He was on the 1,000 HP Ken MacKenzie with a single assist boat. The booms won’t take much weather, so seas should be less than two or three feet for the nine hours that it takes to cross the 12 miles of open water. Tim MacKenzie explains that matching power to boom movement is tricky: “We towed those 147 sections at 1.7 knots. You can move a lot of wood at that speed but to get four knots you would have to triple the power and only take a small boom. I guess it comes down to the hull speed of a boom.” he laughs.
During the spring freshet, tows are limited to 15 to 20 sections, not just for the dangers going downstream but for the challenges of towing up bound. At all seasons, tows are taken down with the added speed of the ebb and upriver with the help of the flood tide. On a typical late May day, Norrie ran light with the 1,000 HP Harken tug Grannie Hutch downriver to the boom storage grounds inside the long jetty that protects the mouth of the North Arm from winter southeasters and summer westerlies. Booms are delivered here from up-coast logging operations after being brought down-coast on log barges and made into booms in the nearby Howe Sound. Other logs wait here to be taken out of the river to sawmills on Vancouver Island. With a sheet listing the numbered boom sections from his dispatcher, Capt. Norrie and his single deck hand Larry Tatosky begin making up the small tow that they will take upriver. Their assist boat, the 500 HP Harken No. 6, helps out. Other boats are making up tows in the same area in order to catch the next flood tide upriver.
The sheet from dispatch gives the booms’ location by numbered dolphin and identifying-number boards. Totosky, carrying an aluminium pike pole, heads out onto the booms to detach the boom chains that secure them to their neighbours. In this warm weather he works in shorts and skips over the logs on caulk boots whose sharp sole-spikes grip into the slipperiest of logs. Falling in between logs and being swept under the boom has cost more than one boom man his life. In most cases the deckhand is younger and takes a clear delight in his ability to practically walk on water. Totosky is no exception as he demonstrates one more way of being in touch with the river’s power. In summer, the job takes a strong pair of legs and a quick agility. In winter the river remains open but, “The icy logs aren’t too bad with caulk boots,” Capt. Norrie explains, “but the chains and water are cold. Then when the ice comes and you have to bust it up to get at the chains, that is tough.”
With the several sections made into a single boom, the long tow back upriver begins. The river water breaks over the lead logs and churns its way back through the bundles in a dance that mates the coastal forests with the coastal river. Even with the full flood, the waters on the lower river continue to flow down and the tow up the first 20 miles of river will take six or seven hours. With the seven sections in this small tow, the 500-HP Harken 6 hooks onto one of the boom chains halfway back on the tow. “If you have a big tow with two assist boats of the same power, you put them opposite each other and far enough back to take some of the load,” says Capt. Norrie. “If you put them too far back they will bunch the boom up. If one is more powerful than the other you put it a little further up on the boom to balance its power with the tow.”
Yarding logs on the Fraser is more a matter of feeling the power of the river currents with the power of the tugs and keeping the two in balance. As river levels rise and tidal lifts vary, this balance calls for a constantly changing formula. A typical tide on the southern B.C. coast will rise ten to twelve feet. At lower river levels, this means that the Fraser River surface will rise higher than the 15-mile-long surface of Pitt Lake a short distance up a tributary from the main stem of the Fraser some 25 miles up from the sea. “When that happens, the tidal flow into Pitt Lake sucks you up the river,” says Norrie. “Once you pass upriver past the mouth of the Pitt, the tidal force slows.”
Working with a river that can suck you upstream, working with tugs that have huge horsepower for their size, working with tows that can flex, bend and break, and working with the variables in the float level of different species of logs — all of these combine to make a particular type of towboating that is central to the history and, with care, to the future of B.C. maritime life.
Pushing has never blended well with towing on the coast where the heavy seas of the open water make pushing difficult. Nowadays with sophisticated coupling systems pushing in open water can work well, but this technology was not available in the past.
So you are probably right when you refer to the long American river systems as to why they prefer to push while the BC towboats prefer to tow.
Hello all
The North Arm has a vibrant history and just lately i found a log on the beach that had come loose from a boom the laog with its stamp at the base of the tree measured 12′ and 4′ at the base happened to be a CMT “culturally modified tree” and i was wondering if the forestry company might know where this tree came from.
I do have photos of the tree which now lies beached on the North Arm of the Fraser River.