Old boat is a whale of a project

Curt Brown -

Every spring, volunteers from around the Midwest gather to scrape, paint and refurbish a unique beached museum: the last whaleback steamer.

It's dark, cramped and numbingly cold in the aft of this old vessel -- a beached whaleback steamer known as the S.S. Meteor. Paint fumes are dizzying, space heaters and fans deafening. And the massive gears of the steering mechanism are thick and slick with 105 years of grease, flecked with a century of dust, cobwebs and paint chips.

Wedged back here, wearing goggles and gas masks, a retired history professor from Duluth, a car mechanic from Lino Lakes and a 12-year-old kid from Wisconsin are scraping and painting this filthy steerage room. They're part of a 52-person crew of volunteers from across the Midwest. They've come back for the seventh straight year to spend a knee-wrenching, back-twisting weekend restoring this quirky, cigar-shaped freighter.

"Folks around here are just boat nerds," says Jerry Sandvick, 70, emerging from the dankness for some air. "It's dirty, noisy -- and wonderful."

The Meteor is the world's last whaleback steamer -- not counting the shipwrecked ruins that litter the bottom of Lake Superior. Starting in the late 1880s, a 44-boat armada of the strange-looking freighters and barges with pig-nosed snouts hauled Great Lakes iron ore, grain, sand, gravel, fuel and even ferried cars from Detroit.

They were the slightly flawed, instantly outdated and devil-to-unload brainchild of Scottish-born Capt. Alexander McDougall, a Duluth engineer, entrepreneur and curmudgeon. (He railed against construction of Duluth's iconic Lift Bridge, among other things.)

"There's a common assumption that there was something wrong with whalebacks and that their design was faulty, but this boat was active and productive from 1896 into the 1960s," says Sara Blanck.

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