To a novice, steam being introduced from the hot, wood-fired boiler to Dodo’s engine is an audiovisual treat. While Paul Hylton, the boat’s owner, turns valves and pulls levers in a choreographed sequence, the boiler room fills with creaks, moans, burbles and hisses as the US Navy Type K 1918 two-cylinder powerplant springs to life. Quickly the cacophony softens to a rhythmic purr that resembles a giant sewing machine, with rods, pistons, linkages, bearings and crankshaft doing their thing in plain sight.
This ritual was at the heart of steamboats and ships of the Mosquito Fleet that dominated waterborne transportation on Puget Sound for a good century up to the 1930s, before being condemned to obsolescence by freeways, trucks and cars. Today, members of the Northwest Steam Society (NWSS) still abide by this tradition with great pride. Recently, they held their 50th anniversary meeting in Blaine, Washington.
“People forget that aircraft carriers are also a type of steamboat, except that their boilers are fired by nuclear power,” Hylton pointed out as he checked the boat’s steam pressure. “We’re running reciprocating steam engines, which is antiquated, but more fun. We are an attraction, wherever we go.”
Blowing those whistles, which brings smiles to faces old and young, is the byproduct of a thermodynamic process: Expanding steam produced in an external boiler (external combustion) is fed to the powerplant through an insulated line; the expansion acts on the pistons that turn the crankshaft and a large propeller with a hefty pitch, because steam engines produce a ton of torque. Steam is condensed into water and recirculated into the boiler through a system of pipes, pumps, valves and a hot well.
While steam was building, Hylton grabbed an oil can to lubricate eccentrics, bearings and reversing linkages with 220-grade emulsifying oil. Then he shifted from forward to reverse without going through neutral with a reversing lever at the front of the engine, aka the Johnson Bar. The 1918 engine produces 20 horsepower, give or take, and a top speed of approximately 7.5 knots at 325 rpm. At cruising speed, she burns about one pound of seasoned firewood per minute, and she can carry up to a cord, which is cut, seasoned and neatly stacked into her boiler room prior to a trip.
Dodo is a historic Puget Sound tugboat with a back-to-the-basics simplicity that includes painted and oiled wood on her exterior. Because engine, boiler and firewood demand a lot of space, accommodations are limited to the fore cabin with a V-berth, a basic galley and a composting head. Throttle commands are relayed by “voice telegraph” and on the way back to port, she might have to do an extra loop to use up excess steam.
Handling a historic steamboat is not a frantic job, but managing the boiler’s temperature and pressure requires attention. Hylton runs Dodo with his wife, Emily, trading helm and navigation with engine room duties that include firing the boiler and working the throttle. On this trip to Blaine, their younger daughter Jocelyn came along to enjoy one more cruise before heading to college. Although she’s used to Dodo as the family vessel, she considers her special, an experience her peers don’t get.
The boat was built between 1915 and 1934 by Harold Lanning Sr. who fastened fir planks on oak frames, which means she celebrates her 90th launch anniversary in 2024. During the Depression, she was used for fishing, crabbing, shrimping and towing logs, running on harvested driftwood.
As a leisure vessel she was kept in good trim but was repowered with a Perkins Diesel in 1990 while the Type K steam engine was sold to the UK.
“Dodo is part of my steam heritage,” Hylton said. He’d known her since his teenage years. “I thought she was the neatest boat. We bought her in 2008, intent to convert her back to steam power. She’s a uniquely Northwest boat with ties to the area that are important.”
In a stroke of luck and serendipity, her original Type K Navy engine No. 1567 came up for sale on eBay in 2010. “We bought it and arranged for shipment from Southampton,” Hylton said, “duty free, because the engine was made in the U.S.”
Steam vessels don’t fit the concept of instant gratification. “They keep you engaged,” observed Michael Cross, a retired mechanical engineer who was a cruising sailor before joining the steam society, where he is currently safety chair. “I have to control the fire, manage steam and plan for what will happen in 15 minutes.”
Hylton agreed. “It’s about long-term satisfaction,” he said. His big job was designing a new boiler with 130 square feet of heating surface on crisscrossing seamless pipes. He started in 2010 with help from his late father, David, a mechanical engineer and thermodynamic expert who grew up in Friday Harbor, Washington, and got into steamboats through college friends at Washington State University.
But before the installation of the new boiler, which fellow steam enthusiast Andrew Van Luenen built in 2013, Dodo’s hull needed attention. Andy Stewart at Emerald Marine in Anacortes updated and strengthened the pilothouse, stiffened the boat with two new bulkheads and 25 steam-bent sister frames, and replaced one topside plank on starboard. The proud moment of Dodo’s first voyage with her new boiler and the original engine came in 2016, when she was taken to a steam meet on McConnell Island, eight years after her purchase.
Emerald Marine also worked on Uno, a 22-foot, black-hulled wooden steam launch with a plumb bow, a fantail stern and a jaunty sheer line that in conjunction with her raked smokestack produce a dazzling appearance. For 50 years Uno has been in the care of Hylton’s aunt Stephanie, who lives on Lopez Island, a handful of miles west of Anacortes.
Stephanie was introduced to the steam world in 1971 by Hylton’s dad David, who was her brother. And like all Hyltons, she is active in the NWSS, holding the office of treasurer. She’s lived on Lopez most of her life, but also as a liveaboard. She worked as a teacher, a farmer and as an oiler on Washington State Ferries—and she does not mince words.
Uno was built on Lopez by Norwegian immigrant Michael Norman in 1894 for a family on neighboring Decatur Island as “the equivalent of a pickup truck,” Stephanie explained. “Everybody got around the islands by oar and sail, because there were no gas boats then.” Uno’s past as a sailing vessel is evidenced by a bouquet of silk flowers that sits in the mast hole. To work Uno one follows the same choreography as on Dodo, but in open air, on a smaller scale and with only a single actor, who has to manage boiler water level and steam pressure, while navigating, steering and keeping a lookout.
Operating Uno for as long as she did, Stephanie knows the boat’s history inside out and every bit of her hull that was built from indigenous woods like red cedar, fir, juniper and oak. Those bits include the keel, the natural crook stem, forefoot and frames, the planks, the stern post, the horn timber and her massive original shaft log. During her soon-to-be 130 years, Uno had several propulsion systems. Oar and sail lasted until 1906, when she was converted to an Arcadia gas engine that was replaced with a stronger model for rum running, and, after being seized by Federal agents, to chase rum runners.
Her conversion to steam was in 1960; in 2002 Stephanie installed a new boiler and a Stuart Turner 2-cylinder compound which produces a maximum speed of 6.3 knots at 350 rpm. “It’s only 5 horsepower, but those are strong draft horses,” she joked and explained that the elegant fantail stern creates hull clearance for a big and slow-turning propeller.
Most of the steamboats in the NWSS are trailerable, which simplifies maintenance and saves on skyrocketing dock fees. But storage capacity is limited, so they often are diesel-fired. As NWSS members covertly admit, using diesel is half a step towards the “dark side,” but it has practical reasons, because diesel packs more energy in a smaller space. “My steam-atomizing diesel burner works like a spritz bottle,” Stephanie explained. “The nozzle is from a paint sprayer and uses steam instead of air pressure.” Steam and diesel mix and exit through a tiny hole to form “a mist that burns clean because there’s plenty of oxygen around each droplet.”
Wood or diesel, running a steamboat is an authentic experience for her. “I was very lucky I lived aboard a working tugboat, with only a 32-volt battery for lights and the radio,” she said. “I still don’t have a TV or a smart phone.” She said she finds it difficult to be around people who are always staring at screens.
Along these lines, Harold Lanning, Dodo’s designer and builder, told a magazine in the 1960s: “A man who wants to know what he can accomplish with his bare hands and mind has a limited choice today. He can paint a picture, climb a mountain or build a steamboat. Nearly all other endeavors are utterly dependent on ‘the advertised product’ and the intricate industrial society we inhabit….”
“Lost worlds,” he concluded, “cannot be resurrected, but some of their qualities can and should be preserved.”
Still Making Steam
The Northwest Steam Society emerged in 1973 from the Puget Sound Live Steamers, previously known as S. L. O. W., the acronym for Steam Launch Operators of the World. The 50th anniversary meeting in Blaine celebrated the society’s proud steam heritage and the emergence from the Covid pandemic that had disrupted in-person events. The Steam Gage, a tidy quarterly newsletter, kept the roughly 200 dues-paying individuals informed, some from as far away as Australia.
This far-flung constituency owns and operates steamboats, cars, trains and industrial machinery and covers a wide range of skills that includes boatbuilding, naval architecture, carpentry, engineering, machining, welding and serenading fellow passengers on a sunset cruise by playing jazzy tunes on a cornet.
NWSS is strictly volunteer-driven, but stalwarts are aging out or passing away, so the organization is looking for new members who are willing to help preserve tradition while building something new that resonates with younger folks who are intrigued by steam technology. Existing members readily share their knowledge and take folks on free rides during steam meets, but don’t serve sandwiches. Some of the members mentor students who want to build a steam or other external combustion engine for a shop class project in school.
Dave Hogan, 78, a life-long steam enthusiast and volunteer at NWSS, reflected on nearly seven decades of his own steamboat history, which included work on the famous Virginia V steam ferry. In a note that was posted alongside historic exhibits at the meeting, he expressed hope “that this hobby will continue into the future and that the history of steam power will not be lost to the next generation.” www.northweststeamsociety.org.
This article was originally published in the November 2023 issue.
