Autos Across Mackinac: Former Vacationland Is Resold to BC Ferries
PART 60: From A Priest to A Queen
By Les Bagley

The Sunshine Coast Queen, or "Suzy Q," spent her BC Ferries career sailing between Horseshoe Bay, just north of Vancouver, British Columbia, to Langdale, a ferry terminal across Howe Sound. The run took about 90 minutes each way. (BCF Brochure, author's collection)

For the past year, The St. Ignace News has been serializing Les Bagley's history of Michigan State Ferries, "Autos Across Mackinac." After the Mackinac Bridge opened in 1957, the state ferry fleet was either scrapped or sold. Last week's installment traced the history of the icebreaker Vacationland, from Michigan to Quebec, where she was renamed Pere Nouvel for Fr. Henri Nouvel, an early French Jesuit priest. But after five years service on the St. Lawrence River, the former Vacationland was sold again. The story continues:

The West Coast of British Columbia developed much as did the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, only about a century later. In the 1700s, Captain George Vancouver surveyed the area and the largest island on the West Coast is named for him, as is Canada's largest West Coast city, on the mainland at the mouth of the Fraser River. The population of the region remained mostly native, with a few loggers and gold seekers, until the Canadian Pacific Railroad crossed the continent and reached tidewater in 1885. With the provincial capitol in Victoria, on Vancouver Island, the railroad began a long line of historic steamships to complete the rail-to-capitol connection.

When she entered service, the Suzy Q was the largest ferry in the BC Ferries fleet and their first large double-ender. She was the only ferry BCF ever owned that had two funnels ahead and astern, instead of side by side, and she became the model for the fleet's large double ended ferries that followed in the next decade. (Frank Clapp photograph)

Like the Mackinac Transportation Company, the CPR was slow to react to the advent of automobile travel, and only grudgingly modified some of its ships to take automobiles as cargo. By the 1950s, a few actual auto ferries had been constructed for use on the Vancouver City-to-Vancouver Island run, but the public felt the high fares, infrequent service and disregard for motoring convenience left a lot to be desired.

Sailing across the Gulf of Mexico toward the Panama Canal, the ferry encountered high seas, filling the area on the bow of the spar deck with seawater. Crew, including Don Fransen, took advantage of the situation by converting it into a makeshift swimming pool. (Fransen collection)

In contrast, Washington state, to the south of British Columbia, had an extensive automobile ferry system prior to WWII. The Puget Sound Navigation Company, headed by Capt. Alexander Peabody, had merged most ferry operators on Puget Sound into what was commonly called the Blackball Line. The fleet consisted of mostly second-hand and third-hand vessels, converted to auto ferries, including the former Arnold Line Mackinac Island boats, Chippewa and Iroquois, and the 1903-built former New Jersey sprinter, Asbury Park, more recently converted to a San Francisco Bay ferry, the City of Sacramento.

The platform decks were installed between the car deck and the spar deck. Ramps could be raised and lowered to allow cars to park under them, and wings at the sides could be raised so large trucks could still be carried. This photograph was used by Lake Michigan Carferry when they were considering installing platform decks on the SS Badger. (Washington State Ferries)

Even Blackball's flagship, the 1936-built, streamlined Kalakala, had been built on the burned-out hull of the former San Francisco ferry Peralta. Still, with its silver color and art deco design, it had become a recognizable symbol of Seattle and the entire state.

During WWII, Peabody profited greatly from surging traffic between Seattle and the naval shipyard in Bremerton, on the Kalakala's run. To handle shift changes, Blackball ran three ships as fast as they could turn them, 24 hours a day. Peabody even took a voluntary fare reduction on the route to assist the war effort. But when the war ended, and traffic and profits returned to pre-war levels, he asked for the fares to be returned, and then some, to counteract massive postwar inflation. The Washington State Utility Commission balked, and so, claiming he was losing money without the increase, Peabody tied his fleet up, bringing cross-sound traffic to a literal standstill and stranding thousands of daily commuters.

Modern technology was also employed in the engine room, where controls were centralized in one pneumatically controlled console. Later, a sound deadening booth was added to protect the engineers' hearing. (Photograph by the author)

Washington's governor accused Peabody of blackmail and began proceedings to take over Blackball by right of eminent domain. While the stalemate soon ended, the process was already begun. Washington forced Peabody to sell out most of his ships and terminals, at nearly scrap prices, forming a new authority, Washington State Ferries, in July 1951.

Peabody was forced to find something else to do. He took his remaining few ships, including a new flagship, the 1947 built Chinook, and moved north into Canada, poking into bays and backwaters, looking for places to establish new ferry routes. The most promising was from Horseshoe Bay, north of Vancouver City, across Howe Sound, to the town of Gibsons, or Gibsons Landing, on the Sechelt Peninsula, which some people called British Columbia's "Sunshine Coast." He also began a run to compete with the CPRs Vancouver-Victoria service, from Horseshoe Bay to Nanaimo, further up Vancouver Island.

No longer efficient, the Sunshine Coast Queen was laid up with other ferries at Deas Dock, near Vancouver, and offered for sale. It would be several years before a buyer was found, and it turned out she would never sail as a ferry again. (Frank Clapp photograph)

In 1958, much like had happened to Washington state after WWII, a strike against Canadian Pacific Steamships focused on how vulnerable the British Columbia economy was to loss of service to Vancouver Island. The government of British Columbia decided to enter the ferry business, but instead of buying out CPR, it authorized construction of two new ships of its own. Launched in 1960, the fleet, consisting of the Vancouver and Victoria of "British Columbia Ferries," or BC Ferries (BCF), became an almost instant success.

Soon, the public clamored for even better service, so additional ships were ordered. Since the ships of the CPR fleet were all named "Princess" something-or-other, BC's premier decided, if "they could have princesses, then our fleet should be queens." The ships of the BC Ferries fleet would subsequently be named "Queen of" whatever cities or routes they served. The first two ships were renamed Queen of Victoria and Queen of Vancouver.

Meanwhile, Peabody's operation was facing difficulty. The older, nearly derelict ships he'd been left with by Washington state suffered severe maintenance problems on the Howe Sound run. As traffic increased, the smaller vessels couldn't handle the demand, so Peabody transferred the City of Sacramento, rebuilt with WWII destroyer parts, dieselized for better efficiency, and renamed Kahloke, to the run.

Still, as he was aging himself, he didn't object when BC Ferries offered to buy out his firm, Blackball of Canada, in 1961. This time, he received a fair price and retired from the ferry business. BC Ferries renamed Kahloke the Langdale Queen and paired her with the Chinook, now renamed the Sechelt Queen, to handle increasing traffic on the Howe Sound run. (Langdale was a new ferry terminal built somewhat south of Gibsons, to cut several miles off the route.) Both ferries were repainted in a light blue and white BC Ferries scheme, but received little or no other modifications.

But BCF found the two to be only a stopgap measure. Traffic across Howe Sound increased monthly, as more people discovered the Sechelt Peninsula offered a much better standard of living, just slightly apart from Metropolitan Vancouver. By 1967, BC Ferries faced a system-wide capacity crisis, with new tonnage needed immediately.

British Columbia Premier, W. A. C. Bennett, heard a huge automobile ferry was for sale in Quebec on Canada's East Coast. It was bigger than any ferry the BC government owned. At only $1.69 million, the 15-year-old Pere Nouvel cost almost $2 million less than new construction, and it was available immediately. British Columbia shipyards and their unions screamed the purchase was taking away their work, but Bennett wasn't to be deterred. He instructed BC Ferries to send a hand-picked crew to prepare the vessel for the trip west.

A conference was held to rename the new vessel. She would serve Howe Sound between Horseshoe Bay and Langdale, near Gibsons on the Sechlet Peninsula. The names "Langdale Queen" and "Sechelt Queen" were already taken. That left "Gibsons Queen," but that presented a significant problem: Just before the purchase, a member of the BC Parliament named Gibson had been caught in a homosexual affair. The name "Gibsons Queen" became much too embarrassing to use. Instead, like "Cloverland Queen" which she might have been named before, the ferry was given the nickname of the area she would serve, and she was designated the Sunshine Coast Queen, even before her new crew arrived in Quebec.

Taken to the shipyard in Luzon, the crew, under the direction of BC Captain Robert Montgomery and her Quebec chief engineer, Roland Racine, began preparing for a long ocean voyage. Supplies were loaded, her end doors were secured tightly, and, as much as possible, she was made ready for whatever the ocean might throw her way. Her side-loading doorways were removed, and the areas they occupied were plated over. In the future, the ferry would only load from the bow and stern.

As a finishing touch, before she left the shipyard, her funnels were repainted "BC Blue," and the BC Ferries emblem, a dogwood blossom, was attached where the "N" and the "S" had been. Otherwise, there wasn't time for repainting, and the newly renamed Sunshine Coast Queen left Quebec, without the benefit of a formal rechristening ceremony, bound for the Panama Canal.

The new name caused immediate confusion. One radio operator asked, "What's a Sunshine Cold Cream?" and she was regarded with suspicion by a U.S. Navy ship off Guantanemo, Cuba, which couldn't find the new name in any published guides.

Crossing the Gulf of Mexico, she encountered the edge of a summer storm, rolling and pitching in seas like shed never seen before. Captain Montgomery did his best to head her into the waves, but 40- foot crests battered the ferry, and some reports said the crewmen found themselves walking on the bulkheads and overhead. Green water lashed at the pilothouse.

When the weather finally cleared, the crew found scuppers in the forward spar deck had clogged, leaving the area in front of the lounge in nearly three feet of seawater. As the sun came out, the crew promptly set up lawn chairs and turned her into BC Ferries' first ship with a built-in swimming pool.

Making only a brief refueling stop at Cristobal, in the Panama Canal Zone, the Sunshine Coast Queen began a nine hour transit to the Pacific Ocean. Canal tolls are based on a ship's cargo. Since she was empty, canal inspectors decided to charge based on the tonnage of the next cargo she would likely carry. Captain Montgomery went over the modifications BC Ferries planned once the ship arrived in British Columbia, and the inspector scratched his head. "Near as I can tell," he concluded, "if we charge that way, we'll have to pay you to use the canal."

The trip up the Pacific Coast along Mexico and the United States took almost two weeks. Off the mouth of the Columbia River, Captain Montgomery was hailed by the Astoria, Oregon, Coast Guard station, which spotted the vessel on long-range radar.

"Identify yourself," demanded the female radio operator.

"We're the Sunshine Coast Queen," Montgomery answered in his heavy Scottish brogue. When the operator pressed to find out what kind of ship the vessel was, by asking, "And what are you, Captain?" Montgomery couldn't resist. "Darling," he replied, "I'm a great big ferry!"

When she arrived at Deas Dock, the BC Ferry's maintenance base just south of Vancouver, the paint shop crew found out just how big she was. As they watched the ruststreaked vessel arrive, she backed her forward screws to enter the tight basin. A blade struck the rock fill left over from building an underwater highway tunnel. The painters scrambled for cover as she threw up boulders the size of Volkswagen Beetles. Later, in drydock, hardly any propeller damage was found.

After a quick touchup at Deas, Sunshine Coast Queen was taken to McKay-Cormak Shipyards in Victoria, where she was modified into the ultimate passenger and auto ferry, per BC Ferries specifications. The contract comprised 150 pages. The blueprints took up an entire room. Since she would no longer need overnight accommodations for crew or passengers, many of the cabins, including the captain's suite on the spar deck, were removed to enlarge passenger space. New stairways were installed where crew-only access was before. The original wide staircases leading from the car deck to her end lounges were removed to make room for platform ramp hydraulics on the car deck

The platforms, mounted at a mezzanine level between the floor and ceiling of the 14.5-foot car deck, provided parking for 30 additional cars. The outer lanes folded up for more over height truck space. The ramps could be raised with cars on them, so more cars could be parked below.

Instead of the original Great Lakes Engineering Works builders plates, which had hung in the nowremoved lounge stairwells, a "conversion plate" was mounted on the bulkhead surrounding the stairway to the forward pilot house.

It read, "Sunshine Coast Queen Conversion, 1967" instead of the year she was originally built. The original plates somehow migrated to the engine room, where they were stacked behind the chief engineer's desk.

Actually, the "stairway to the forward pilot house" would also be a misnomer. The ladder inside the compartment was removed to provide space for soft drink canisters in the snack bar/cafeteria installed in the forward lounge. The Pere Nouvel bar was removed to provide dual cafeteria serving lines.

For additional storage, an enclosure was built over the open bow spar deck. Accessible through the former outside door, the enclosure

further restricted the limited visibility from the forward pilothouse. She became the first carpeted

ship in the entire fleet as her pubic areas received custom carpeting, featuring the BC Ferries dogwood emblem.

For compatibility with the system's existing aprons and wing walls, 20 foot rounded extensions were added to her bow and stern, increasing her overall length to 400 feet. Workers widened her guards by 18 inches, increasing her overall width to 78 feet. The anchor pockets and the guides below the lifeboats were enlarged so things above wouldn't hang up on the wider rail.

Below decks, a single, pneumatically controlled console combined all engine controls. No longer would commands have to be given between two identical engine rooms. While the rooms remained, just two men, and even one in an emergency, could control all four Nordbergs. A surrounding sound-deadening booth was later added.

The conversion cost more than $606,000 and took nearly a year. At last, in May 1968, Sunshine Coast Queen was taken to Horseshoe Bay to enter service. Bedecked with flags and banners and sporting a crew of sailors and Coast Guard inspectors in their finest dress whites, the ferry slipped into what local sailors called "Cardiac Cove" for dedication ceremonies.

At best, the terminal Peabody first developed, Horseshoe Bay, is a tight squeeze for a big ferry. The east side of the basin, adjacent to the ferry slips, is a solid rock wall that towers high above the water. To the west, a pleasure boat marina, hidden behind a low point, discharges careless boaters right into the ferry's path. Visibility is restricted from outside the cove, and captains have to approach the entrance cautiously. If anything goes wrong on the approach, or a pleasure boater gets in the way, there is no place else to go. Still, the ferries make hundreds of landings there each year with very little trouble.

On Sunshine Coast Queen's first trip, however, it was the departure that caused problems. In a case of déjà vu, several dignitaries on her car deck got their dress whites drenched with rusty water when part of her sprinkler system drained as she rolled into a turn on the inaugural voyage.

Her first regular master was BC Ferries Captain Alan E. White, a veteran of the Howe Sound route. He, along with Captains Thomas Hercus and Henry Stuchberry, directed three crews in rotating shifts of five mornings, five afternoons, and then five days off. Abbreviated "SCQ" on BC Ferries internal memos, crewmembers quickly picked up on the pronunciation of the spelling and began calling her the "Suzy Q." It became a fond appellation for the remainder of her career.

Running with her consort, the Langdale Queen, (formerly Asbury Park, City of Sacramento, Kahloke), the Sunshine Coast Queen, (formerly Vacationland, Jack Dalton, Pere Nouvel) quickly became a passenger favorite. While most professed fondness for her, she did cause consternation with her crews, including Capt. White, who made a particularly hard landing in Horseshoe Bay one year to the day after she went into service.

The pneumatic controls on her engines required extra care when reversing the direct drive diesels. If they were thrown into reverse too fast, before the propellers had come to a stop, the electromagnetic couplings could be thrown into neutral by popping a protective circuit breaker. Overzealous engineers could suddenly leave the boat moving ahead with no way to slow down until the breaker could be reset several seconds later. In White's case, those precious seconds caused the ferry to plow into the apron, causing considerable damage. The apron buckled as it pushed into a half of the bow door. The door collapsed off its track onto a VW Beetle parked in front of the car deck. Fortunately, the driver was late getting back to his car. Apron support structures bent and crumbled. A crane had to lift the bow door off the auto, and the slip was out of service for several weeks. Other than a scratch on the door, and having to rehang it on its track, the ferry was undamaged.

"She was built as an icebreaker," White later said. "Without too much trouble, we could use her as an asphalt cutter. I expect we could probably have put her 500 feet up Main Street in Horseshoe Bay."

On another occasion, a relief captain had gone to dinner at the crew's mess table, just below the after pilot house gangway. The mate in charge of the boat had gone back into the chartroom behind the wheelhouse to talk with the captain through the open door at the bottom of the stairs. Only the quatermaster at the helm was paying attention as the ferry approached the towering rock wall that made up the east side of the Horseshoe Bay Terminal.

Traditionally, helmsmen only speak to the officer on the bridge about navigation in an emergency, figuring the officer knows what he's doing. But in this case, the sailor could hold his tongue no longer. As the rock cliff towered above the pilot house windows and the ferry headed at full speed for it, he finally cleared his throat, and croaked, "Ah.. sir.. We're here!"

The mate returned to the pilothouse just in time to realize the crisis. Spinning the helm hard to the right, he then grasped the telegraph handles and rang all four engines to full astern. Realizing something must be wrong to suddenly back so quickly, an inexperienced engineer panicked and threw the controls astern before momentum of the propellers could be brought to a stop. The circuit breakers on the electromagnetic couplings popped, and the ferry drifted quickly ahead for what seemed an eternity. The bow smashed through the first wooden pad guarding the rock cliff, but the blow was enough to divert the ferry to the second pad. It, too, was demolished as the ferry slid along its face. The friction was just enough that by the time the engineer got the Nordbergs restarted, and the bow engines reversed, the Suzy Q had incredibly made a perfect two-point landing at the wing walls.

The apron was lowered, the cargo of autos unloaded, another load boarded, and the ship sailed on her next scheduled crossing. Maintenance people were left to repaint the two-foot-long scratch on her otherwise-unblemished side, and to contemplate how to repair the half-million dollars of damage left to the slip in her wake.

After that, BC Ferries crews had standing orders to approach Cardiac Cove on dead stop, to see which way the Suzy Q would go, and then, and only then, advance her in for a landing.

At one point in her career, passengers complained when the galley switched from stainless and china to plastic utensils and paper plates. When asked why the change, a galley worker replied, "the hippies steal them."

But for the most part, Sunshine Coast Queen was a resounding success. Over the years, additional modifications were made to the ferry. The most visible were installation of larger windows directly in front of the pilothouses, helping to somewhat alleviate West Coast captains' dislikes for "Great Lakesstyle" windows.

(The one on the bow was right behind a huge vent from the galley range hood one deck below. The window sucked in fumes of whatever the cafeteria was cooking, making the bridge crew either hungry or ill, depending on the occasion. The one on the stern wasn't so bad.)

Larger scuppers were installed along the base of the car deck, and ventilation openings were cut higher up to help dissipate auto exhaust. But after a decade in British Columbia, parts for the 25-year-old ferry were becoming harder to find. The Nordbergs began to show a little smoke. For a rebuild, BC Ferries bought the entire power plant in Pennsylvania, breaking down those identical Nordbergs as spare parts for the Suzy Q.

To extend engine life, the fleet office directed her engineers to run her at less than full speed. The Suzy, with her broad beam and heavy icebreaking hull, had never been particularly fast to begin with. Weighted down with extra ballast to match her with other BC Ferries at the terminals, she was slower still. And when an Arab oil embargo in the early 1970s shot diesel fuel prices skyward, her speed was reduced even more for economy.

Meanwhile, traffic demand across Howe Sound continued to grow. As an experiment, BC Ferries first modified their single-ended "V" class ferries, like the Queen of Vancouver and Queen of Victoria, by cutting them in half and adding an additional mid-section between the bow and stern. Afew years later, they were enlarged again, this time by raising the upper deck and installing an entire second car deck between. The company commissioned naval architects to design a new set of double-ended, double decked ships, much like the Sunshine Coast Queen, only much faster and much larger. To be designated the "C Class," these ferries would have nearly twice the capacity of the enlarged Suzy Q.

As the first of these came on line in early 1976, it appeared the Michigan ferry's days were numbered. But when her scheduled replacement accidentally grounded on another route, she was given a reprieve.

Finally, time caught up with the former Vacationland. In December 1976, the Queen of New Westminster arrived. The Suzy Q's original master, Capt. A. E. White, and much of her original BC Ferries crew, were with her to the end. As they transferred their gear to the new ship, they also took ashore Suzy Q "souvenirs," including life rings and jackets, her builders and engine plates, and even the ship's bell, engraved "Vacationland 1951," which ended up in private collections.

Now surplus, the Sunshine Coast Queen and her consort, the Langdale Queen, were taken to "ready lay up" storage at Deas Dock on the Fraser River. Ultimately, they were offered for sale through Crown Assets Disposal, attracting quite a bit of interest, but no serious buyers.

The Sunshine Coast Queen's final period of lay up had begun.

Next week: The ultimate demise of the remaining Michigan State Ferries.

Copyright 2008 by Les Bagley. All rights reserved.