21 September 2013
Kalakala – Make or Break Time for the World’s First Streamlined Art-Deco Ship
You may wonder why a fuss should be made over a dilapidated old ship. Perhaps the sight of the Kalakala in her prime might persuade you what a thing of beauty she truly was.
Beautiful perhaps, but even in her prime, she was not without problems. The steel structure of the vessel was judged detrimental to the functioning of the ship’s compass so the bridge and wheelhouse had to be rebuilt (after a fire) out of copper. These were set back from her superstructure but this bow to aesthetics meant that the bow of the Kalakala was not visible from the bridge. Her round portholes, extended to the wheelhouse and replacing the usual full glaze, made visibility even worse. She garnered a reputation for being a difficult ship to handle, particularly when it came to docking.
That wasn’t all. The engines were poorly aligned and this meant that the Kalakala was something of a bone-shaker. The entire vessel would vibrate when in full operation and even when he propeller was replaced in the fifties it only reduced the shaking and shuddering by 40% . Little wonder, then that this Silver Swan (as her owners wished her to be known) soon became nicknamed The Silver Beetle.
There was more. The Silver Slug soon became the Silver Beetle and even the Galloping Ghost of the Pacific Coast. Her name had been taken from the pidgin trade language, Chinuk Wawa and meant bird. However, many of Seattle’s large Scandinavian community could not help notice the similarity between Kalakala and the Swedish word Kackerlacka. Unfortunately, the latter means cockroach.
No-one could foretell just how ignominious her fate would be. Towed to Alaska she became a crabbing ship. Then, just three years later the Kalakala was beached in Zodiak and turned in to a shrimp processing factory. The once glorious vessel’s shame was, perhaps, complete.
However, this was not to be the end of her story. The rusting hulk was bought by a group of people interested in her restoration. Although they managed to refloat her and bring her back to Seattle (causing a stir as she was tugged up the local ship canal, above), the money ran out before any refurbishments took place. Moved on by another new owner to Neah Bay the Kalakala soon attracted the ire of the bay’s owners, the Makah people, who lost no time in evicting her.
Relocated to Tacoma, new owner Steve Rodrigues announced in 2008 that she could be the flagship of a new fleet of ferries or even the centerpiece of a floating museum. Yet unfortunately for the hapless Kalakala neither of these came to pass. Indeed, no work on her took place at all and by 2011 she was deemed a hazard to navigation. Rodrigues maintained that he had sold the ship but offered no evidence to support that claim. However, he had tried over for over a decade to get the ship’s restoration underway at considerable personal and financial loss to himself.
Now the owner of the waterway where the ship is currently moored has taken possession of the Kalakala – in exchange for the rent which is owned him. The new owner, Karl Anderson, does not want to see the ship scrapped; in fact, the steel is so deteriorated it would cost him more to dismantle the ship than it is worth.
So, forlornly, the Kalakala sits in a kind of ship limbo. The authorities have no intention of offering the $50 million that it would cost to repair and preserve this noble old ship, the first of its kind in the world. Its current owner, although a wealthy businessman, does not have the enormous funds needed to commit to this kind of project despite his reluctance to witness the demise of the Kalakala.
First Image Credit Flickr User Gexydaf
