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December 2012 MAINE COASTAL NEWS Page 5. PROCK MARINE MAKES REPAIRS TO KATAHDIN


GREENVILLE – I have always been surprised at the number of coastal people that consistently make their way up to the Moosehead Region. My fi rst time to the area was in the early 1990s to see the 1914 Bath Iron Works built KATAHDIN. She was used to move logs across the Moosehead Lake, but now takes passengers on cruises over the same waters. Being in fresh water she has not suffered the corrosive effects that many vessels have on salt water. Back in the 1990s KATAHDIN underwent a major restoration, which gave her new life. Unfortunately, she developed a leak at her bow that needed to be addressed. Last winter they began making inquiries as to how they could get her out of the water and make the repairs. The last time they took her out of the water they ran I-beams through her sides, which they did not want to do again. Other thoughts were a railway or a Brownell trailer, but then Prock Marine of Rockland suggested a drydock. Gary Neville, project manager at Prock Marine Company, said, “Originally one of our mechanics was on the boat and somehow was talking about the engine. He was asked if he knew what kind of engines they were and he said he did, they were 617s. He then went on to tell them that we had a pair here with a marine gear and we donated them to KATAHDIN. We didn’t have any use for them, they came out of one of our old tugs, MONARCH. That was the start of the rela- tionship and then Maynard Russell, who was down here for the donation of the engines, talked to us about how to haul the boat out of the water. He didn’t have any very good options. One thing led to another, and we came up with this drydock idea. “We were having a meeting with the shipyard, Prock Marine Company, and the naval architect, Tom Ferrell,” added Gary. “I brought it up after that meeting to talk about ways we could get this boat out of the water. I had line drawings of the boat from Bath Iron Works dated 1912, the boat was built in ‘13 and launched in ’14. Everybody looked at them. One thing led to another, and we decided that probably a drydock would be the best way. So I put some rough num- bers together and the Moosehead Marine Museum went out for grants and we help behind-the-scenes. They obtained the grants and in the end the people that administered them were okay with going sole-source. We were to haul the boat, fi x her and put her back in the water. We fi x our barges, and our tugs so it was a good mesh for us.”


“Our original concept had four guide-


post and a fl at deck,” explained Gary. “We used our nine 10 x 40 x 7 foot pontoons, which had enough reserve buoyancy to lift the boat, which is 200+ tons. Tom was okay with it, other than it was nontraditional. We were within a week of saying we would prefer to do it in the Spring because it ended


up very fast tracked. In the fast-track mode we made the decision to go with a traditional drydock so that added six more pontoons (wing walls), three on a side. With a tradi- tional drydock, all the computer modeling and everything else was a lot easier to do. Tom did the analysis at different stages, fl oating, partially sunk, with the boat in it, with the boat partially raised, and with the boat all away up. We knew we were safe. We had a structural review done just to make sure that we weren’t going to crush the pontoons, or folded it in half. So we had several people check out the design. At that point there was a man at the shipyard who spent most of his working life operating drydocks, Jim Cochrane. Jim helped us with the blocking plan and he came up the two days we sunk the drydock and refl oated it empty to get familiar with it. Then we sunk and lifted the boat out the second day.” Over the years when the level of the lake is down the bow has rubbed on a sand bar. This wore a hole in the bow that had been repaired a number of times with underwater epoxy. Once the boat was out of the water, Prock workers looked at the area and quickly saw that they needed to modify the keel. When she was replated before they brought the new plate down to the keel and then wrapped a 1/8 strip of sheet metal from one side to the other. What surprised the workers is that the original keel was cast. The mod- ifi cations removed the 1/8 inch sheet metal from along the entire length of her keel and they put a 1 x 5 fl at bar keel on the entire length and welded a ¾ x 6 or ¾ x 8 plate on both sides. This is now in full contact with the full-length of the original keel. Prock Marine also inspected the rudder


and thru-hull fi ttings and then painted the hull. What surprised almost everyone was that just how good the bottom paint was that had been put on back in the 1990s. They also removed the propeller and sent it out to be repaired. She had a few dings, which likely came from hitting logs or ice. For those that watched Wednesday 28


November, the drydock with KATAHDIN, was moved out through the skim ice to where they had more than 17 feet of water just after 0800. Originally they had gone further out and into a cove on the eastern side of the lake to haul her out, but the lake was now up an additional two to three feet and this allowed them to make a shorter journey. Unfortunately, the webcam did not focus on the refl oating of KATAHDIN, but by mid-afternoon KATAHDIN was tied up to her dock with the dry-dock off her stern. Now Prock Marine began to dismantle the dry-dock and ready it to be transported to Rockland.


Gary added, “Other than the pace at the beginning, this was a great project.”


In early October the cruise boat KATAHDIN, homeported at Greenville on Moosehead Lake, was put in a drydock and lifted out of the water so that repairs to her hull and normal main- tenance could be performed. On 28 November she was relaunched and ready for more years of service on the lake. (See stern view on Page 18.)


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