Side Launch: The Collingwood Shipyard Spectacle

What semi-annual event provides “ten seconds of emotional ecstasy” and attracts thousands of enthusiastic spectators from the United States and Canada to a small town on the southern shore of Georgian Bay? If you said side launchings at the Collingwood Shipyards, you would probably be, like author Robert Woodcock, a member of the Great Lakes Society for the Preservation of Side Ship Launching. As his contribution to Ontario’s Bicentennial, Woodcock traces the history of the spectacle and outlines the engineering techniques required to move a 9000-ton steel-hull vessel from atop a building berth to a narrow basin of water.

In a large-format paperback, illustrated by many black-and-white photographs, Woodcock describes how more than 200 steel-hull ships have been successfully side launched since 1901 (there was only one accident, the “Todoussac,” in 1969; two lives were lost when some of the wooden trigger levers broke) and tries to account for the appeal of side launching. Not only is it more economical than end launching, it is more spectacular as well. Collingwood is the only place in Canada where side launching is done.

The presence of a number of typographical errors is annoying but does not seriously mar the book, which for enthusiasts and area local history buffs will serve as a useful complement to Ursula Heller’s The Shipbuilders of Collingwood: A Photo-documentation (Collingwood: Blue Mountain Foundation for the Arts, 1981).

Dr. John N. Jackson, Brock University, delivered the third lecture, “The Eric and Welland Canals — A Comparative Evaluation in Relation to the Niagara Frontier.” He discusses the mutual task of overcoming the Niagara Escarpment and the fact that one canal (but for the boundary at Niagara) would have sufficed, and he compares the two systems of navigation.