By James Heinz

In 1960 the Port of Milwaukee had a problem. Fallen trees, logs and other debris frequently clogged its waterways, posing hazards to ships and boats. Winter ice created another problem. Those conditions obstructed fireboats from fighting fires along the city’s rivers and aboard ships in the harbor.

The remedy: a hybrid vessel that could break ice, remove debris and fight fires.

A year later, a boat with these prerequisites was commissioned, to be called the HARBOR SEAGULL. The city tasked the T. D. Harbor Shipbuilding Company of Escanaba, Michigan, with building a 220 horsepower engine, a 22 foot boom with a two-ton capacity and a water pump capable of hurling five hundred gallons of water two hundred feet a minute. The new vessel would assist the city Fire Department’s boat, TRIDENT, in fighting fires and cracking the harbor’s ice pack.

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Milwaukee’sShepherd Express adds an odd transitory twist to the history of the HARBOR SEAGULL. Even before the new baby was delivered, there were brief worries that the boat had been lost. “T. D. Vinette himself piloted the Seagull on its delivery trip, but missed a planned changeover in Port Washington that would have had Milwaukee Harbormaster R. H. Knight captain the boat on its final leg to the city. Vinette was distracted by a small mechanical issue and found himself just outside Milwaukee Harbor by the time he realized he had overshot his target port. Seeing no sense in turning back, Vinette delivered the Seagull to its new Jones Island home as city officials worried that the Seagull and its crew were lost in the soupy Lake Michigan fog.”

The city’s new workboat was given the official vessel registry number 287633. With a length of 44.42 feet and width of 16.33 feet, its reinforced steel hull had a depth of 5 feet and a gross tonnage of 23 tons.

“But it was an ecological calamity that ended up giving the Seagull its primary duty,” the Shepherd Express declared.

That was the alewife.

A pelagic native to the Atlantic Ocean, the alewife entered the Great Lakes through canals, according to the Great Lakes Fishery Commission. It was first seen in Lake Ontario in 1873, bypassing Niagara Falls through the Welland Canal. The species became widespread in the Great Lakes basin by 1960. “Alewives became so abundant that they exceeded their carrying capacity in lakes Michigan, Huron, and Ontario, resulting in massive die-offs that littered shorelines and beaches,” the commission observes. “The invasion of alewife, coupled with overharvest and the havoc wreaked by the noxious sea lamprey, led to the extirpation of lake trout — the native top predator — from most areas of the Great Lakes.”

The massive die-off of alewives littered beaches. Rivers became chock-a-block with dead and decaying fish. The smell along the lakefront beaches was a telltale sign of summer. The HARBOR SEAGULL netted the fish, with a landfill the final disposition for the stiff fish. Later in the summer and fall the boat removed tons of floating duckweed.

As the alewife population waned, the boat’s primary duty was breaking the ice pack.

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“It continued to serve as the primary icebreaking vessel for the port until recent years, when the conversion of the Menomonee Valley Power Plant to natural gas ended the year-round tugboat runs of coal from the inner harbor to the valley,” the Shepherd Express reported.

When not in use the HARBOR SEAGULL tied up on the west side of Jones Island, near where the two Great Lakes Towing tugs docked, next to Kaszube’s Park. This year the three boats were moored just south of the lake freighter STEWART J. CORT, where I photographed them on January 25.

A man who identified himself as a former crew member told me that the HARBOR SEAGULL assisted in training the police dive team. He said that the boat would transport an old car, with its pollutants removed, into the outer harbor. There the car would be sunk so that the Milwaukee police divers could practice recovery operations.

A month later, at 5:30 a.m. Monday, February 22, city workers arriving for another day of crewing the HARBOR SEAGULL found an empty dock. The port’s oldest worker was nowhere to be seen. She had sunk at her dock sometime during the previous night, according to Port Director Adam Tindall-Schlicht. The boat had disappeared into the approximately 30 feet of water. The boat had last been used to break ice on the Kinnickinnic River Saturday night.

Salvage began promptly the next day, Tuesday. Jerry Guyer, local salvor and owner of Milwaukee’s Pirate’s Cove dive shop, arrived with his converted fish-tug-dive boat, the LENDER. I arrived around 10:45 am. By that time two divers were in the water, securing lift chains on the HARBOR SEAGULL and hoses to pump out the fuel tanks. The fuel was pumped into a tanker truck on the dock. The chains were connected to cables attached to a mobile crawler crane mounted on a barge on the west side of the STEWARD J. CORT, just north of the sunken boat.

The lift began about 11. Slowly the top of the pilot house emerged, then the rest of the boat came out of the water. The lift was stopped when the boat was in the normal floating position. Additional hoses were put aboard to pump water out of the hull. The boat’s stern seems to have drifted away from the dock during the sinking. Looking at it as it became free of the water, held in place by chains, the boat had a noticeable list to its port side.

In an email to Carl Eisenberg, president of the Wisconsin Marine Historical Society, city spokesman Jeff Fleming, describing the lift and pumping equipment, said: “We used a Lieber crawler crane mounted on a flat barge. 3 trash pumps to de-water the vessel, 3 vacuum trucks for oily water on the vessel and in the water. A lot of oil absorbent boom and pads plus a skidsteer and our port vehicles. A ton of manpower.”

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Around 1 p.m. the lift stopped. Another bystander with a radio monitoring the Port’s radio frequency announced that the crane operator reported that the weight of the boat and water still inside had reached the maximum weight limit of the crane. The boat was then lowered back into a floating position so additional water could be pumped out. I left around 1:15. The lift resumed later in the day and the boat was placed on a barge and moved north of the big lake freighter to the Port’s heavy lift dock, where it was placed on the dock.

While watching the lift, another bystander identified himself as a former crew member of the HARBOR SEAGULL. He speculated, based on his experience, that water had leaked into the hull through an improperly adjusted packing gland, which seals the hole in the hull where the propellor shaft enters the hull. However, when the boat was pulled out of the water, with water still in its hull, no water leaked out of the boat’s hull. What caused the sinking is under investigation.

Tindall-Schlicht said preliminary estimates to remove the boat from the water were around $30,000 to $40,000. Repairs could cost between $200,000 and $300,000.The Port intends to repair the boat, since the cost of a new boat could be over a  million dollars. The HARBOR SEAGULL is the older of two workboats owned by the Port. The other boat, the JOEY D, was purchased ten to twelve years ago and cost $1 million. 

Tindall-Schlicht said that the HARBOR SEAGULL was last worked on about five years ago, when the boat began taking on water, though it did not sink at the time. The Port spent $40,000 on repairs then.

During a Monday press conference, Tindall-Schlicht said the sinking caused no known environmental problems. He added that the Port did not have the means to detect any pollution or other issues if they occur. The U.S. Coast Guard said in a statement the next day that an estimated 120 gallons of diesel fuel spilled into the waterway.

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Top photo: Milwaukee Port’s Harbor Seagull clearing show with its high pressure fire hose, January, 14, 1966. City and private snow removal trucks dumped snow in the Milwaukee River in the downtown area. Credit: Milwaukee Public Library and Wisconsin Marine Historical Society Great Lakes Marine Collection

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James Heinz is the Wisconsin Marine Historical Society’s acquisitions director. He became interested in maritime history as a kid watching Jacques Cousteau’s adventures on TV. He was a Great Lakes wreck diver until three episodes of the bends forced him to retire from diving. He was a University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee police officer for thirty years. He regularly flies either a Cessna 152 or 172.