Oilsands Review - September 2006

Thacker works the river with the Duemont, a 30-foot steel-hulled boat built from a design common on Lake Winnipeg and used earlier in its working life as a fishing boat on Great Slave Lake. The Duemont makes just five miles an hour against the current. Lashed to the Marjory with two barges and a light cargo of vehicles, fuel, and close-grained red and black granite blasted from the Canadian Shield, the Duemont’s speed doubled.

Except for the occasional speedboat racing by, the Marjory and Duemont were alone on the Athabasca this summer, cruising past isolated cabins and high-tension lines. Beyond the bones of Bitumont—an early attempt to commercially produce oilsands—the last evidence of industry along the route is the water intake for Canadian Natural

Resources Limited’s Horizon mining project, which is currently under construction.

Somewhere behind the curtain of vegetation live legions of moose. Wildlife surveys suggest that the wilderness supports more than a dozen of the ungulates per square mile. The moose kept under cover, but at almost every bend, the rumble of the Marjory’s engines drove a bald eagle from its perch above the river and panicked broods of waterfowl into a noisy search for cover.

The voyage with the Marjory was Thacker’s fourth of the season, and his charts showed signs of numerous corrections to

accommodate
the constant shift
of channels and sandbars.

The Marjory’s depth sounder, radar, and global positioning system were of little assistance on the upstream voyage, but the track recorded on the southern leg made for a speedy return to the most significant bottleneck on the route: the delta of the Peace and Athabasca rivers.