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Just discovered your website and saw your notes on activities on the Arthur Foss.  I thought you might be interested in my story about the Arthur.  Back when Foss first donated the boat to "Save Our Ships", I was working with Paul Bellesen on his minority youth training program North by Northwest Adventurer's Inc.  We had a 93' tug, the Langston Hughes, which was powered by a Cooper Bessemer JS-6 and we were tied up at Pier 57 in Seattle just a short distance from where the Arthur and the old Relief light ship were.  This was about 1970 or 72 and I was about 20 years old in the second or third year of engineering school at the UW. 

NxNWA was a interesting program that took mostly city kids, aged 7-14, and tried to teach them discipline and responsibility by training them to run the old tug.  We frequently went on overnight cruises to the San Juans or south to Olympia (Hartstene Park was a favorite destination for the oysters we could harvest there).  The kids actually maintained and operated the engine and the boat.  Usually there would be only two or three adults on board and the kids really did most of the work on both the engine and running the boat.

Anyway, when Foss dropped off the Arthur, the little old ladies on the SOS board of directors (and Ivar Haglund) were content to just let it sit at the dock and rot away like the Wawona and the Relief.  It had apparently been in storage for several years but I was impressed by the good condition of the boat and thought they should make it operational.

I made a pitch to the SOS board of directors that if it just sat at the dock it would deteriorate to where they could not maintain it.  But if we got it running, people would appear to help maintain it and keep it in good condition (plus it would be fun).  And for some reason they bought it and basically turned the boat over to us (myself and several of our best trained 12 year old engineers).  We dug into the boat that same day and despite not having any manuals or advice, by afternoon had air pressure up and actually started up the main.  At that time we had to hand crank a Lister gen set to charge the battery to start the GM 3-71 that would provide enough power for the compressor and get the lights on.  Took all day and there were some interesting moments in the process but I will skip over those for now.  We ran the boat several times that summer including one trip to Port Townsend for the just restarted tug boat races. 

An interesting side note on that trip was that we put all of the adults in the NxNWA program on the Arthur as we were very nervous about not screwing it up.  That left just some of the kids to run the Langston Hughes which followed along as backup.  Both boats were in Lake Union at that point so we had to navigate out the locks.  The oldest person on the 93 foot Langston was the skipper, Randy Inouye, age 14.  The engineers were Paul Bellesen Jr. and George Jordan, both age 13.  Paul Bellesen Jr. is now a captain for the state ferry's on the Bainbridge run and Randy is an accountant for King County.  The other note on that story was that when we got to Port Townsend, the city officials on the city dock didn't want us to tie up there with all the blacks on board.  NxNWA had about 50% minorities in the kids and Paul Bellesen was black though several of us were white.

So we decided to go back to Seattle.  It was a good trip anyway.  We got that a lot back then.


It was apparently originally steam powered.  The wheel motion went by a shaft back to the steering engine which powered the rudder.  This seems a bit different from your description of how it is set up now and I don't know if it was different then or that my memory is faulty.  I don't recall any manual steering without the air system on.  But in any case, I hurriedly traced down the air lines and found a valve turned off which supplied pressure to the steering engine.  Then I found a sheared connector pin in the steering shaft (Paul was a pretty strong guy and, by then, pretty excited) and finally got the steering going, as we were drifting peacefully across Lake Union.  Every thing worked fine after that.

No one seems to remember that it was us that convinced the museum to get the boat operating again and that we actually did so.

And I believe that what we did is the main reason the Arthur is in as good a condition as it is (and thanks to all the expert volunteers such as yourself who actually did appear - as I predicted - to work on the boat).  And we owe that a lot to both Paul Bellesen (who passed away just last month) and his remarkable group of young kids who were totally dedicated to old tugs and direct reversing, air start, engine room control engines.  If nothing else, NxNWA produced a group of local kids (now in their 50's) who had experience and great affection for those throbbing old engines.

I still think of my time on the Arthur and that old Washington. I recall the engine as 18"x24" bore and stroke, 700 HP at 200 rpm and that the spare piston, lashed to the base of the port side ladder, was cast iron and weighed 300 pounds.  And that the injector units could be changed, in theory, while the engine was running. Just figuring out how to start the thing and control it was an interesting puzzle.

By the way, the old Langston Hughes is now the Excalibur based in Port Orchard but, sadly, the Cooper was removed several years ago and replaced with a Cat V8.  Whoever did the swap called me and offered to sell me the Cooper (for $5,000 around 1980 as I recall) but I couldn't justify buying it back then.  No room in my garage.

One other question.  Do you know anything about the current status of the tug Chief owned by Christian Lint and do you have contact info for him?.  I see your map showing it is located at the ship yard on the north side of Lake Union.  I have lost contact with Chris and the boat.

I worked on it from time to time including a project towing a steel YTB to Seattle from Seward, AK that turned into an epic adventure.

Dirk