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| Whatever Happened to those "Modern" Sternwheelers? |
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| Answers to some modern-day mysteries |
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 | | | Empress Sternwheeler |
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By Peter Marsh
Several boaters have asked me if I know what happened to the two modern sternwheelers that ran week-long cruises on the Snake and Columbia Rivers. Sailors and river watchers from Astoria to Lewiston enjoyed the sight of these two craft with their sternwheels flinging spray-even if they were diesel, not steam-powered. But when 2009 dawned, history had repeated itself: these modern sternwheelers had apparently disappeared from the Inland Empire.
America West
Luckily, I have been following the building and operation of these intriguing vessels from their earliest days, so I put together this short history of their misadventures. The 230' Queen of the West was built in 1995 by Nichols Brothers on Whidbey Island for America West line of Seattle.
Although it was designed to resemble a 19th century steamboat complete with a long bow ramp, it was propelled by modern diesel engines--but with a real reciprocating arm to turn the sternwheel. It arrived in Portland full of promise, but the engineering challenge of rotating the sternwheel by direct hydraulic pressure against a piston (using fluid instead of steam) soon proved to be more difficult than expected!
The owners were forced to hire a tug to escort the Queen--and push when needed--for the rest of the season. That winter, the drive system was completely replaced with a conventional rotary hydraulic motor on the axle of the sternwheel. That fixed the problem,
Some sailors might say this was a bad omen, but it wasn't design so much as operation that would bedevil the Queen and its bigger sister ship in the next decade. The marketing plan for the sternwheel cruises was to follow in the wake of the old-time steamboats, which played a big role in the development of this region in the late 1800s.
A hundred years ago, you could "hail a steamboat anyplace" on the Columbia or Willamette Rivers. Sternwheelers did all the work that today is done by buses, trucks and trains carrying goods and passengers. Just like the old timers, the modern sternwheelers stopped at many small river towns from Astoria to Clarkston, Idaho. They all benefited from the weekly visits when a full complement of passengers would disembark and explore the town.
The Rise and Fall of American Classic Voyages
America West changed hands in 1999 and became part of American Classic Voyages, an overly-ambitious company whose fleet grew to include a full-size foreign-built cruise ship re-flagged under a special act of congress and re-fitted at the Portland Shipyard for work in Hawaii, a river cruiser also built at the shipyard on an existing barge hull, and two 1,900-passenger 840' cruise ships under construction in Mississippi, with $387 million in guaranteed Maritime Administration loans.
American Classic went under after 9-11, crushed by the drop in travel and debts that totaled of $452.8 million. The fleet was split up, and the next owner came from the Gulf states. They were hit by Hurricane Katrina in 2005, which wrecked the entire season, and never recovered.
But things were actually going well in the northwest! The 360' Empress of the North, had arrived in 2003 and had been well received by the cruise agents. Its powerful sternwheel was well-engineered--it was turned by a 1,000 hp electric motor on the hub of the wheel, with a custom Lufkin reduction gear to reduce the output from 1,000 rpm to 15rpm or less.
The wheel looked as if it was the driving force, but actually transmitted only 20% of the 5,000 hp put out by the four Caterpillar V-16 diesels. The rest went to a pair of Z-drives under the stern that also provided steering.)
Although it was designed for the inland waterways, the Empress of the North was seaworthy enough to make passages on the Pacific, and combined summer trips along the Inland Passage to Alaska with Columbia River cruises in the winter. But the Empress crew soon found that navigating the Columbia Gorge was at least as tricky as the winding Alaskan channels!
Their misadventures began when they hit a submerged ledge in the lock of the Ice Harbor Dam on the Snake River in late 2003, and continued with the very public grounding off the Port of Washougal in 2006. (I drove up there and joined the crowd along the shore gazing at the stranded ship.)
Both times, the passengers had to be evacuated, the trip cancelled, and the ship dry-docked. Nonetheless, the Coast Guard inquiry found no serious issues and, with the Lewis & Clark bicentennial years bringing in plenty of customers, the two boats appeared to be running a profitable business, and overcoming the perception that they were "accident prone."
Ambassadors International Takes the Plunge
Still, I don't think you would have been prepared to stake your life savings on the predicted boom in river cruises. But that was exactly what Ambassadors International, a southern California corporation with several travel companies, did in January 2006. They had devised the brilliant plan of combining the sternwheelers on the Columbia and the Delta Queen Steamboat Company of New Orleans under the flag of the Majestic America. Line.
Ambassadors, you see, was based in Newport Beach, California at the heart of the real estate bubble, and was undoubtedly feeling that retirees, the target age group for river cruises, would always have increasing home equity to spend on vacations…..
Ambassadors fleet totaled five sternwheelers, making it the country's largest river-cruise line. But it also took on all the debt....
Between A Rock and a Hard Place
It wasn't long before the two northwest boats were back in the spotlight in ways that weren't so positive. In May 2007, the Empress of the North, hit the headlines for a fourth time when it struck a charted rock north of Juneau, Alaska and sat there until suitable vessel arrived to evacuate all the passengers. Federal investigators found that the officer in charge of the ship at the time was a 22-year-old "fresh out of a maritime academy with no formal knowledge of Alaska waters" who was 36 hours into his first voyage with the company!
It required extensive repairs to the bottom and one Z-drive in the Ketchikan dry-dock and was out of service for two months. That meant refunds galore, and not surprisingly, the owners announced a significant financial loss for 2007.
Their solution was the kind of "strategic planning" that was also being highly rewarded at banks and financial companies all over the country. They would borrow even more money and spend heavily to upgrade their ships' furnishings to attract more upscale clientele.
Ambassadors had totally failed to anticipate that sales might be slowed by the higher prices--which were raised again to cover higher fuel costs. Then, on April 8, 2008 a fire broke out in the engine room of the Queen of the West above The Dalles Dam.
Again, a tug had come to the rescue: It was Tidewater's Challenger, which tied off its load of three barges near the dam and hurried to the scene. The tug guided the disabled sternwheeler to the northern riverbank. "The Queen of the West was beached in a controlled manner in the vicinity of Maryhill State Park, where the passengers were off-loaded safely over the vessel's bow ramp," the Coast Guard said in a statement.
The authorities treated this as a serious emergency: Klickitat County personnel were on scene to organize the evacuation to a nearby hotel, a Washington Department of Ecology team took steps to prevent oil pollution, a Coast Guard small boat and shore team arrived from Portland to begin a preliminary investigation, and a to make sure all was well, a helicopter from Air Station Astoria arrived at first light!
The Queen of the West was towed to the Portland Shipyard, where the engine room had to be completely re-wired and refurbished by Vigor Marine. It took two of the busiest months of the season before the ship was approved to re-enter service.
On April 28, Another negative for Majestic America was the loss of the historic 285' Delta Queen's certificate to offer overnight cruises on the Mississippi. Because of its wooden superstructure, the 82-year-old steam-powered sternwheeler has been operating for the last 40 years under an exemption from the U.S. Congress, but the latest attempt to renew it was voted down.
So Majestic America's business plan was in shreds even before the economic downturn began to effect bookings for 2009. The companies stock had fallen from almost $50 to 25 cents! "In hindsight . . . I acknowledge that no matter how well structured or how little capital was required, our investment in the domestic river boat business was a very bad investment," admitted Joe Ueberroth, the company CEO. "We flat-out got it wrong. Our investment in the domestic river cruise business has caused deterioration of shareholder value and has put a real strain on the other three good businesses within Ambassadors."
By December 2008, the Empress of the North was taken over by the U.S. Maritime Administration due to unpaid debt and was laid up along with the Queen of the North and the Columbia Queen. Another indebted vessel, the 436-passenger American Queen on the Mississippi also ended up in the hands of the government. The historic Delta Queen.is now a floating hotel in a semi-permanent berth in Chattanooga, Tennessee.
So that was how the brief "sternwheeler revival" on the local rivers ended. The Empress of the North and the Queen of the West remained tied to the dock, although American Cruise Line-an east coast company-has bought the Queen at auction. Changes in the economy had killed off the original sternwheelers and their modern successors.
However, we still have two sternwheeler keeping the old spirit alive: the steam steam tug Portland, owned by the Oregon Maritime Museum and permanently berthed downtown; and the Port of Cascade Locks modern sternwheel tourboat that stays in the gorge in the summer and occasionally ventures down river to Portland.
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