NTCL can deliver loads of up to 1,000
tonnes from anywhere in the world to
the Beaufort Sea, then south to Fort
McMurray, the company’s historic
home port.
“We’re ready to go now, but we
anticipate that the people who would use
our service need a two-year lead time to
get their projects in
line,” Foster says.
Planning for
the Marjory’s voyage started 18
months after
contractors continued service to isolated
communities on Lake Athabasca. That’s
where Doug Camsell, NTCL’s manager of
marine projects, went in search of the
special knowledge of the rivers needed
for the project.
“I knew we could do it, but we
would not have succeeded without the
right people who wouldn’t give up on
the project,” Camsell says.
Picked from the company roster, the
Marjory’s crew was a neat slice of
Canada. Franklin Lea, the captain, started his career on Lake Winnipeg, in
Manitoba. Rick Bliss, chief engineer, lives
in Kamloops, British Columbia. Second
engineer Mike Heron builds fast cars in
the off-season at his home in East
Sooke, British Columbia. The deck-hands—Faris Najafi, Harold Cornect, and
Wilson Thorne—return to lives in
Vancouver, British Columbia; Yarmouth,
Nova Scotia; and St. John’s,
Newfoundland. Cathie Peters, the
Marjory’s cook, is in her second year of
nursing studies in Vancouver.
Camsell and Alfred
Landry, the
Foster was
appointed presi-
dent of NTCL. He
says the company is
rethinking its role, and the surge in oil-
sands development “is an opportunity on
our doorstep.”
“We’re a marine transport company
with a history on the water link to Fort
McMurray. We have shallow-draft tugs
that were designed for the low-water
conditions on the Athabasca, but we’re
not restricted by the navigation season.
There is a winter road from Fort Smith
to Fort McMurray; there is rail and
road from Hay River.”
The voyage of the Marjory marked a
return to the earliest days of northern
Canada’s oldest tug and barge company.
NTCL started operating in 1934 from
Waterways, which is now part of the
city of Fort McMurray, and carried
cargo north via the Athabasca and
Slave rivers until 1979.
When NTCL left the Alberta leg of
the river route, a clutch of small freight
first mate,
were born and
raised in Hay River, Northwest Territories
(NTCL’s operations base), and have spent
their working lives with the company.
River pilots Reg McKay, Guy Thacker, and
Freddy Marcel, all from Fort Chipewyan,
brought their knowledge of the Slave
and Athabasca rivers to the project.
Hydroelectric, forest, and petroleum
industries drink deeply from the
Mackenzie basin, but current hydrologi-cal data shows that the water flow in
the Athabasca and Slave “is pretty well
the same as it was in 1979, the last season we operated from Fort McMurray,
so I was confident that the project could
be successful—if this wasn’t a low-water
year,” Camsell says.
The Athabasca runs coffee-coloured
through shifting sandbars and islands held
together with the roots of willow, poplar,
and spruce trees. It is tireless in its work,
filling one channel and opening another,
planting snags along its course between
steep banks stained with seeping oil—
noted by early traders who manoeuvred
their York boats through roaring clouds of
mosquitoes and blackflies.
