Lake Michigan Maritime Marginalia, Volume 1, Number 3
Figure 8. The Rodal sailing boat Queen is shown entering Frankfort harbor sometime between 1901 and 1909. This photograph can be so dated, since the edifice in the background is the Frontenac Hotel, opened by the Ann Arbor Railroad Company in 1901, while the Queen ceased fishing for the Rodals with the delivery of their gas boat Petrel in 1909. The Frontenac burned to the ground in 1912, and was not rebuilt. Photograph courtesy of Mrs. Jean Smeltzer.
Fishing at Frankfort: The Rodal Family
In the late nineteenth century, Lars Rodal did what many of his young countrymen were doing: In 1887, at the age of seventeen, he left the family farm in the Trondheim region of Norway and emigrated to the United States to start life anew, drawn to the northern Great Lakes region where the similarities with Scandinavia in geography and climate attracted waves of immigrants from that part of Europe. Lars settled in a small but growing Michigan village just below the base of the Leelanau peninsula on Lake Michigan, Frankfort, and traded his former rural life for that of a fisherman, a profession with immense promise in that locale at that time. He also traded his distinctly Norse first name for the more "American" Louis. He married another Norwegian immigrant, and the sons she gave him followed their father into fishing. The father and his sons, Otto and Ludwig, began with a single-masted, Mackinaw-derived fishing boat, the Queen. By 1909 it became evident that if the family were to continue in the fishing business, they must make concession to progress and supplant the Queen with a powered vessel. That year, Louis Rodal contracted with Manitowoc’s famed Henry Burger to construct a relatively diminutive 28-foot gas boat powered by a 20-hp Kahlenberg engine. Named the Petrel 207559 after the sea bird, the Petrel served the Rodals for over sixteen years, fishing primarily the area northwest of Frankfort, below the Manitou and Fox Islands.
A Typical Gas Boat: The Rodals' Petrel
Figure 9. The Petrel in her original configuration, in the harbor at Frankfort. Her lines are classic gas boat (similar to the Roughrider shown before), while her forward deck is dominated by part of her net-lifting apparatus. William Lafferty Collection. Figure 10 below shows the Petrel late in her career with the Rodals: A pilothouse has been added, substantially altering her profile, echoing, perhaps, her owners' quest for a "bigger" boat, which would be realized in 1926 when the Petrel would be traded for the Gleason Brothers' Frances C. Photograph courtesy of Mrs. Jean Smeltzer.
In 1926, the Rodals decided to acquire a larger boat, and, as far as I can ascertain, a straight swap was done with Frank and Henry Gleason of Saugatuck, wherein the Gleason Brothers acquired the Petrel and the Rodals assumed ownership of the Gleason’s forty-foot steam wooden fish tug Frances C. 214269. The Frances C. had been built by Saugatuck boat builder Hank Perkins in 1916 and named for Frances Comey of Saugatuck; the craft spent her career fishing out of Saugatuck until the Rodals brought her north. It appears the rationale for the swap was this: Even after a new channel was cut in 1906, alleviating a torturous turn in the Kalamazoo River to reach Saugatuck, the harbor channel was, and may still be, notorious for quickly filling with sand, reducing its depth precipitously at times and making for a sometimes dangerous entry over the bars when the seas and wind kick up. Meanwhile, Saugatuck fisherfolk like the Gleasons had very little distance to cover in reaching their fishing grounds, sometimes just off the beaches north of Saugatuck. On the other hand, although blessed with a deep, well-protected and well-maintained harbor (primarily because of the importance of the Ann Arbor ferry traffic), the Rodals had to sail the deepest area of Lake Michigan around Point Betsie and, as the better fishing grounds drifted farther north, up into the the Manitous, a long, hard pull in a twenty-eight foot boat like the Petrel. Newer and bigger than the Petrel, the Frances C. proved better adapted to the fishing conditions the Rodals experienced, while the Petrel was more ideally suited to fishing out of a harbor like that at Saugatuck.
Over the next three years, the Frances C. underwent some minor rebuildings to make her a more efficient gill net tug, but in 1929 the Rodals determined it was time to construct a new vessel. In the fall of that year, the father and two sons contracted with the Leathem D. Smith Dock Company of Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin, to build a state-of-the-art steel fish tug for the family.
©1999, William Lafferty