Dave Sullivan
Northern News Services

Hay River (Oct 22/01) - Built from the toughest steel, they stand defiant against constant wind while resting stripped bare, facing a giant lake that was sometimes their foe, but which was also their reason for being.

As though burnt out from too many steroids, like a bodybuilder who stopped working out years ago, the bulked-up vessels look like they died of exhaustion.

They're in a tugboat graveyard on Hay River's waterfront.

The heavy-duty tugs, weighing thousands of tons each, are crushing some of the wood blocks that have held them up for decades.

Captain Doug Camsell of NTCL says of the collection "It's not a graveyard, but more like a retirement home."

If they could talk, each would have tales to tell.

Eighty-four year-old Percy Monkman remembers his days piloting similar vessels from the Arctic on down to the Great Bear and Great Slave Lakes.

He's done a lot of other things in his career, which got started in an unusual way.

"I grew up fishing on Lake Winnipeg for 15 years. Then in '46 I moved to Selkirk, Man. That's where I started tugboating. For it's population, it must have been the most drunk town in Canada. Sometimes the skipper just wouldn't show up, so I'd have to take the boat out," he recalls.

"Other times someone like the engineer would be missing, so I'd have to fill in there too."

Monkman first earned a reputation as a can-do mariner in 1949, when the government asked his employer to dredge large boulders. They were in the swift-flowing Great Bear River, where it leaves the lake.

Others had been trying for years to clear the channel so uranium could be shipped out.

On a piece of scrap paper, Monkman draws out how he and a crew of four rigged a series of cables and anchors with gear the others had left behind, and got the job done in three weeks.

Until recently he was still in demand. A year and a half ago he says he was asked to captain the Norweta tour boat. Just six years prior to that Monkman retired from captaining ferries like the Merv Hardie.

"I told them I was giving up, I'm getting old. Damn ferries. You've got to be climbing stairs all the time just to go to the bathroom."

A widower, Monkman uses a cane but still lives independently in Hay River's Old Town. Just down his street are whitewashed remains of a 18.3-metre wooden boat he built and skippered years ago for a fisherman. After using it for 15 years, the fisherman sold the boat to someone who hauled and turned it upside down in a hay field.

"Kids wrecked it. It bothers me to see it all buggered up like that," Monkman says.

Although just a skeleton of what it once was, passers-by can still see beauty in the vessel's lines.

Monkman had moved to Hay River after the Bear River dredging job to skipper tugs and be wharf superintendent for Yellowknife Transportation, which was later swallowed up by Northern Transportation Company.

The takeover made him bitter because the new owners demoted Monkman, making him scrub toilets.

So he bought a whitefish boat and returned to fishing. Monkman soon got someone else to run it while he and his wife built up a booming catering company.

"We were feeding a lot of people and we made good money." That was, until the kitchen burned to the ground in the late 1960s, when a cigarette started a blaze that took two lives.

The whitefish boat, meanwhile, was bought by the government in a scheme to start a commercial fishery in Inuvik.

"So that was the end of that. They were going to have a big industry there but they should have sharpened their pencils first."