The last week in September the Deliverance, a 58-foot steel pot-fishing boat out of Homer, Alaska, was due to be hauled at the Port of Toledo Shipyard in Toledo, Ore. Then it will be outfitted with, among other things, a new aluminum wheelhouse. The original house is “worn, old and leaking like a pig,” says the Shipyard’s Mike Lee.
The Deliverance was built back in the days when you bolted the wheelhouse to a steel coaming on the deck with an anticorrosive putty-like substance between the metals to prevent electrolysis. But over time electrolysis took over.
The new wheelhouse will again be aluminum and welded to the steel coaming, but with a Detacouple transition joint between the aluminum and steel to prevent electrolysis. That’s a pre-bonded bi-metal strip with steel on one side and aluminum on the other that’s been put on a press and then an explosive charge fuses the metals into each other.
The new wheelhouse will be about double the size of the original house, matching up with the Deliverance’s hull, which was enlarged when sponsoned at Giddings Boat Works in Charleston, Ore., in 2015, going from 58’ x 18’ to 58’ x 25’ 10”.
The Deliverance will also receive “an all new interior,” says Lee, and be repowered with a larger engine. With the wheelhouse removed, a hole will be cut in the galley deck to pull out the 323-hp Cummins, exchanging it for a 740-hp Yanmar, along with a new gear, generator, bearings, stern tube and prop.
“Have to put a new shaft in and the stern tube isn’t big enough,” says Lee. The rudder might also have to be replaced because “there will be a lot of thrust pushing on that thing.”
He speculates that more than doubling the Deliverance horsepower might be because the boat’s owner is “thinking about dragging and having the horsepower to do it,” instead focusing primarily on pot fishing for black cod.
At the end of the summer - other than the Deliverance - most of the Port of Toledo’s work was maintenance related on smaller boats. However, there’s the potential for what Lee calls “a huge project” involving a 55’ x 19’ Dungeness crabber out of Astoria, Ore.
The boat would be cut in two at the engine-room bulkhead, then sponsoned out to 26 or 28 feet. The crabber would also gain a new bow - making her a 58 footer – and new wheelhouse, and be repowered. Some engineering time has started, but the deal hadn’t been finalized at the end of September.
