Orcasional Musings | Early ferries? From where, to where, with what?

||| ORCASIONAL MUSINGS BY STEVE HENIGSON |||

If you want to visit an island, you have to take a ferry. So it all hinges on where you can get on, whether it goes to where you want to get off, and what it’s able to carry.

In the 1850s and 1860s, so many small steamboats worked the length and breadth of Puget Sound that they soon became collectively known as “the mosquito fleet.” The entrepreneur captains of these diminutive vessels would pick you up from anywhere and deliver you to anywhere, but you might be limited by boat size as to what you could bring along. And since there was no formal schedule, it was up to you to haggle with any passing captain over price and destination.

By the mid-1870s, there were formal routes, and even schedules. Most of the vessels were of what might be called small-to-medium size, and most of their trips were scheduled because these ships carried the U.S. Mail. At least one mail boat delivered to Orcas Island at least once a week, and it would also carry passengers and freight.

Andrew Newhall, who owned the sawmill near where Moran’s Rosario soon would be, built the Islander in 1904 to carry passengers, freight, and mail to and from Anacortes, three times a week. A few years later, as traffic increased, he built the Buckeye to also do the same thing. Sad to say, neither Islander nor Buckeye lasted very long on the job, and by 1910, they were both gone.

The Jensen Shipyard at Friday Harbor built a second Islander, a yard on the mainland built the City of Anacortes, and they, and a few other small-to-medium-size ships, continued to bring passengers, freight, and mail to and from the various San Juan islands. During the 1920s and 1930s, passenger and freight traffic increased beyond the capacity of even those ships, and, strange to tell, some meaningful amount of both people and legal commercial cargo went hither and yon on the small, fast boats of the liquor smugglers.

The scheduled steamships were nothing like the purpose-built ferries of today. Up top there was a small passenger cabin, and there was a large, rectangular hole in the side which led to the cargo deck. The wharves at both ends of the trip were permanently emplaced, without the ramps that we now use to adjust for the tide. Goods were packed onto flat, four-wheel carts, and these carts were then man-handled into and out of of a vessel’s cargo deck over two parallel planks which were adjusted to suit the distance between the carts’ wheels.

When the first automobiles came to Orcas, they arrived on either Newhall’s Islander or the Buckeye. Each automobile owner had to drive his own car down over those separated planks, into the cargo deck, and then drive it out again at the trip’s destination. It wasn’t a job for the faint-hearted. However, if the auto was being driven by a charming lady, the freight handlers and stevedores were quick to volunteer to do the job for her. On Puget Sound, chivalry was not yet dead.

To be continued….