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Lake Michigan Maritime Marginalia, Volume 1, Number 3

A Rather Ordinary Life

        The Jean R. led an uneventful life after her brush with disaster in 1934. Despite the effects of the Great Depression, she earned the Rodals a relatively decent income. When World War II came, she avoided being requisitioned by the Maritime Commission for duty as a tug, fireboat, or picket boat, fates that befell many other fish tugs including the other two Smith-built fish tugs, the Chambers Bros. (requisitioned in 1942 for conversion to a fireboat at Racine for use at Indiana Harbor, which never materialized) and the second Jeka (cut down to a towing tug used by the Navy at Chicago to assist the sidewheel training aircraft carriers USS Sable IX 81 [a Greater Buffalo 223663] and USS Wolverine IX 64 [a Seeandbee 211085]).

The Jean R. at Work and at Rest, Frankfort

Figure 26.   The Jean R. in Frankfort Harbor, circa 1935, in conditions must have reminded the Rodals of that fateful March morning when the Jean R. fetched up at the breakwall.    Figure 27 below shows the vessel in a far more halcyon pose, at her dock during the summer sometime during the early 1940s. Clearly, her outward appearance changed not at all while she remained with the Rodals following her rebuilding. Both photographs courtesy of Mrs. Jean Smeltzer.

        The next major event in her career occurred in June 1946. With the retirement of the family patriarch, Louis, his sons assumed each half ownership of the Jean R. It appears the sons at that time decided to replace the vessel’s antediluvian steam plant, built in 1909 by Chicago’s Marine Iron Works, with a more fitting mode of propulsion.   The Rodals purchased a two-year-old Kahlenberg 120-hp Diesel that had previously propelled Roy Nelson’s 1935 Milwaukee-built steel fish tug H. W. Hocks 234604.   Apparently, according to Otto's daughter, Jean, for whom the vessel was named, her grandfather "hated the sound of a Diesel," was a "steam" man, and insisted that the steam plant of the Frances C. be placed in the Jean R., explaining, perhaps, why the Jean R. was the last steam fish tug built on Lake Michigan (and probably anywhere on the lakes).   The re-engining took place at the Smith yard, but a glitch ensued:   When the engine was placed into the hull, it was realized that the engine bed had been constructed too low, meaning the engine crank and propeller shaft did not correspond, necessitating a new bed to be built.

Towards the End of Rodal Ownership

Figure 28. A very nice shot, taken from an old Kodachrome slide, it appears, of the Jean R. at her dock at Frankfort, probably in the 1950s. Note that her distinctive high funnel has been cut down, indicating that she is now powered by her second-hand Kahlenberg. Photograph courtesy of Mr. and Mrs. Clinton Smeltzer.

For the next fourteen years the Jean R. dutifully plied her trade for Ludwig and Otto Rodal out of Frankfort harbor, until, in 1960, she was sold to Ralph Cross, of Cross Village, north of Harbor Springs, Michigan, on Lake Michigan’s far northwest coast. For a variety of reasons, including the scourge of the lamprey eel, fishing had fallen precipitously in northern Lake Michigan, and the Rodal brothers thought it a good point at which to retire from the profession. They only realized $5,000 in the sale, reflecting the depressed state of the fish business at the time.

The Dalgord Years

Figure 29. The Jean R., no longer a part of the Rodal family, now owned by Everette Dalgord, and shown at Waukegan, Illinois, in 1972, not long after Dalgord acquired her from Ralph Cross. Figure 30 below shows her laid-up at Manistique awaiting a buyer. Both photographs by and courtesy of Robert Grunst.

On 6 April 1960 Ralph Cross assumed ownership of the Jean R., and brought her to Lake Huron, where she fished out of Alpena for the next eleven years. While fishing was declining on Lake Michigan, the natural predator of the chub, the trout, had almost disappeared on Lake Huron some time before the lamprey devastated Lake Michigan's trout, resulting in a booming chub population in Lake Huron, which Cross harvested out of Alpena for a decade with the Jean R. Cross also operated boats out of Charlevoix and Rockport. On 28 August 1970, Cross sold the vessel to Everette Dalgord of Waukegan, Illinois for $6,500, $6,000 of which was financed by Cross and paid off a year early, in 1974. Dalgord brought her back to Lake Michigan and fished her out of his home town. When Dalgord acquired her, he effected some changes in the boat. First, since she had been known as a rather poor sea boat because of her narrow beam, Dalgord filled her bilge with roofing paper and poured concrete into it as a means of providing ballast to improve her sea handling characteristics. Second, in 1971 the crankshaft of the twenty-seven year-old Kahlenberg broke, and Dalgord had a 125-hp Caterpillar D13000 Diesel installed at Waukegan, purchased from Art Swaer for $1,000 and removed from a Lake Erie fish tug Swaer had bought. In a conversation I had with Dalgord a few years back, he said that even in winter fishing out of Waukegan, after the addition of the concrete ballast, the Jean R. proved a "livable, big, and comfortable boat." With the uncertain future of the commercial fishery on Lake Michigan, Dalgord decided to concentrate upon his dairy farm operation in the Upper Peninsula, and brought the Jean R. to Manistique, where it was put up for sale in March 1975. He sold the boat on 20 April 1976 for $15,000 cash to Gerson Borges of what was then the prominent Lake Erie fishing town of Vermilion, Ohio, and Borges sailed her to Lake Erie that day. Exactly three months later, the direct connection of the boat with her original owners was severed when the Coast Guard officially recognized her change of name from Jean R. to West Bay, a name the significance of which escapes me, unless it refers to the western portion of Sandusky Bay, about thirty or miles west of Vermilion. In addition to the West Bay, Borges also operated the 43-foot steel tug Betty J. 237455, built in 1938 at Erie, Pennsylvania. The year he purchased the Jean R., Borges repowered her at Cleveland with a 6-71 Detroit Diesel. At some point, probably the late 1970s, Borges added trawling capabilities to the West Bay by installing a large A-frame toward her port stern for handling the huge, bag-like trawling nets used to capture smelt from Lake Erie. Trawling was an unheard-of technique on the lakes until the early 1960s or so, when the costs of labor-intensive gill netting escalated and school fish like alewives and smelt became attractive commercial products.

As the home of the Kishman Fish Company, one of both Lake Erie’s and the Great Lakes' longest lived fishing concerns, Vermilion as late as the early 1980s had a distinctive aura about it as a town with deep roots within the fishing industry, its fishing fleet docking but yards from the city's downtown. Gill net tugs like the West Bay fished primarily for yellow perch; by the time the Jean R. arrived at Vermilion, Ohio gill net tugs were harvesting over a million-and-half pounds a year, evidence of a fairly vibrant fishing industry. Quickly, though, that would change. Given their independent spirit, commercial fishermen on the lakes had always riled, to varying degrees, over governmental attempts to regulate their profession: Closed seasons, net mesh regulations, banned species, catch limits, and a host of other state-instigated restrictions galled commercial fishermen since the industry’s inception in the late nineteenth century, but by the late 1960s another threat appeared that would, for the most part, end the lakes’ rich commercial fisheries tradition.

Not the Prettiest Sight: The West Bay at Cleveland

West Bay at Cleveland 82.jpg (171311 bytes)

Figure 31. The West Bay sits in the Cuyahoga River at Cleveland in August 1982. Clearly, the A-frame off her port indicates that she had been converted to a trawler, a popular type on Lake Erie. However, at this point she appears to have been stripped of her electronic equipment, indicating that she had not worked in some time, and that there were no expectations she would. She is decidedly unkempt and dowdy in this sad view. Note, however, that the sheer of her hull, diminishing subtly towards her stern, is still intact, and that she still has her round stern. This would change considerably in her next incarnation at the Keweenaw. It also appears that there is some damage to her aft superstructure, indicating that, perhaps, she did have a run-in with a self-unloader while sitting in the Cuyahoga. Š1999, William Lafferty photograph.

By the 1970s the governments of the Great Lakes states, particularly those of Wisconsin and Michigan, felt the significant pressure of the sports fishing lobby to make the Great Lakes the playground of the recreational fisherman, a quest that made any type of commercial fishing anathema to the weekend angler. Especially after the wildly successful stocking of Lake Michigan with Coho salmon, it became manifest to state governments, especially those states for which tourism was a major component of their economies, to do all to encourage recreational fishing and to discourage, through regulation, legislation, or downright enmity, commercial fishing of the lakes. As a result, the once great commercial fisheries of Lake Michigan quickly receded into but a ghost of their former selves, the result of governmental policy that had surely encouraged Everette Dalgord to abandon the business in 1975. The State of Ohio followed suit: Realizing that its only truly major tourism region is the Lake Erie shore, especially the archipelago of islands in the western basin between Sandusky and Ontario's Pelee Island that yield excellent fishing, the state in 1984 banned all gill net fishing and purchased the fishing licenses of all thirty-eight commercial operators who fished west of Huron, approximately at the midpoint of Ohio's Lake Erie shoreline. The end of commercial fishing in Ohio was at hand. On 29 April 1985, Borges paid off a $20,000 mortgage he had taken out on the West Bay from Lake National Bank (paid-off two years late, it appears, testimony to the financial straits the state had placed its commercial fishermen), and two days later the Coast Guard dropped the West Bay from documentation. The concluding part of this "anatomy of a fish tug" discusses my attempts to determine whatever became of the Jean R.

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Š1999, William Lafferty

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