High Seas, High Risk

Gordon Turner is the author of Empress of Britain: Canadian Pacific’s
Greatest Ship and the editor of SeaFare, a quarterly newsletter on sea
travel.

Few chapters of Canadian history have been less chronicled than our
nation’s nautical achievements, particularly in peacetime. However,
between the mid–1950s and mid–1970s, residents of coastal British
Columbia got to hear about the exploits of two large ocean-going tugs,
Sudbury and Sudbury II. The tugs spent much of their lives towing barges
of logs from lumber camps to Vancouver or Victoria. Their most
spectacular journeys occurred when they sailed out into the stormy North
Pacific to rescue stricken ships that had suffered mechanical breakdowns
and were in danger of sinking or being blown onto a rocky, inhospitable
shore.

Most of these rescue attempts were high-stakes gambles. The tugs
operated under a “No Cure, No Pay” policy issued by Lloyd’s. If
either Sudbury towed the hapless ship into a safe harbor, the owners
(Island Tug and Barge) would receive a handsome fee; if the rescue
attempt failed, the tug owners received no compensation whatsoever.

Drawing on interviews with former officers and crews of the ubiquitous
Sudbury tugs, this competently written and well-illustrated book sheds
light on a facet of Canadian history that has largely been ignored in
the 40 years since the publication of Farley Mowat’s Grey Seas Under,
which dealt with a salvage tug in Atlantic Canada.