Boatnerd.com wrote:
Keewatin tow from Douglas to Port McNicoll calls for layover at DeTour
4/23 - The plan had been for the 350-foot 3,886-ton former Canadian Pacific Great Lakes steamship Keewatin to be waiting for Travel Dynamics’ 257-foot 2,354-ton Yorktown to greet her on the event of her first arrival at Saugatuck on June 17. But plans now call for the Keewatin to be towed away earlier to lay over at De Tour, Michigan, in preparation for a planned arrival back at Port McNicoll, Ontario, on June 23. That date is significant because it will be exactly one hundred years to the day since the Keewatin first sailed from Port McNicoll, after the new port was opened on Georgian Bay in 1912.
The Keewatin should be at DeTour, however, on June 20 when the Yorktown passes on her way to the Soo Locks at Sault Ste Marie and Lake Superior. As DeTour is on the main St Marys River shipping channel it is quite likely that the two ships will come within eyeshot of each other, as the Keewatin will probably be scheduled for departure for Port McNicoll the following day.
The Edwardian-era passenger ship was built on the Clyde in 1907 and carried up to 288 passengers. Roland Peterson, owner of the Tower Marina at Douglas, Michigan, purchased the Keewatin after her retirement in 1965 in order to save her from the scrappers and moved her in 1967 to Douglas, near Saugatuck, where he and his wife Diane have maintained her as a nautical museum at for the past forty-two years.
Her latest owner, Toronto-based Skyline International Development Inc, took possession in October 2011. As part of the deal, Skyline is dredging Saugatuck-Douglas harbor so that it can tow the ship away. And in honor of the couple that has preserved the Keewatin for more than four decades ownership of the vessel has been vested with a not-for-profit organization called the R J and Diane Peterson Great Lakes and S S Keewatin Foundation.
The Keewatin will become the historic centerpiece of Port McNicoll, which is being developed by Skyline International as a $1 billion 800-acre resort. About seventy minutes north of Toronto, with six and a half miles of shoreline, the new resort community will feature homes, condominiums, cottages, hotels, shops and marinas.
In their heyday, the Keewatin and sister ship Assiniboia operated weekly cruises from Port McNicoll to Sault Ste Marie and Thunder Bay, with the Keewatin sailing on Wednesdays and the Assiniboia on Saturdays after the arrival of the Canadian Pacific boat train from Toronto.
While Douglas may be losing the forty-two-year presence of its Edwardian cruise ship museum, the arrival of Travel Dynamic’s Yorktown will now give the area an active cruise ship. Seven calls are planned by the Yorktown at Saugatuck this summer.
For those wanting to cruise the Great Lakes in 2012, Travel Dynamics International offers a full program of thirteen cruises between June and September. Further details can be obtained from
cruise@cruisepeople.co.uk.
Cruising the Great Lakes