Cartela

CARTELA

Races, rescues and restoration First across, now the last of the line faces the future – Mike Kerr writes in praise of the SS Cartela

She was designed with just one purpose, to avenge for a lost race and badly-injured pride, to put the south ahead of the upstarts from the north. No expense was to be spared in the quest to win.

The result, even now, is an extraordinary construct. Sleek and strong, kauri planks over Tasmanian oak beams, 200 tons over 123 feet. Though built at the time of the Model T Ford, her engine – her heart – was the equivalent of a thumping V8.

This was anything but ordinary transport. She was … she is … the Steam Ship Cartela.

In the year of her first voyage, 1913, the reaches of the River Derwent were heavily trafficked, awash with fishing dories and coal carriers, boats filled with timber and stone for factories and mills, others bearing grain, fruit, vegetables and meat to the city.

Back then, everything and everybody moved by water. Between New Norfolk and Dover and around the coast, townships owed their very existence to the Derwent. It was their lifeblood.

Top-dogs on this water were the passenger ferries, and the Cartela, the vessel commissioned by the Huon, Channel and Peninsula Steamship Company, was destined to be pride of the fleet, perhaps of all five southern fleets.

Riding on her slip at Purdon and Featherstone in Battery Point was more than a mere vessel, however. There was an unspoken imperative. This newcomer had to beat Tamar's Togo, a ferry that in fresh memory had thrashed her southern rival in an event known officially as the 'Express Excursion to Green Island.'

In fact, that gentle euphemism veiled something known to everybody – except perhaps marine authorities. The annual 'Excursion' to the small, low-lying island in the D'Entrecasteax Channel was a flat-out race, watched by thousands on Derwent's foreshores, and hundreds more aboard the boats themselves. Togo's win had sharpened the stakes, rekindled north-south rivalries.

From Plenty & Sons in Newbury, England, was ordered a state-of-the-art triple expansion steam engine developing a huge 500 horsepower. The heart of the beast was a Scotch marine boiler, so big that it occupied a chunk of the cargo hold and limited Cartela's profitability as a freight carrier. But this was absolutely not about freight.

She was launched from the famous Battery Point slipyard on 24 September 1912, and her superstructure was completed three months later after the engine was installed. Her very first passengers came aboard at Brooke Street Pier on New Year's Day, 1913.

Those passengers had little idea, but beneath them was the marine equivalent of a hot rod.

'Cartela's engine is a sophisticated piece of engineering,' says Ross James, manager of a four-year, $4 million restoration project. 'It develops six power strokes per cycle, with adjusting valves that enable her to maintain speed over distance without wasting energy. She was born to race.'

The restoration will reinstall that original engine and refurbish the vessel, stem to stern.

'She is remarkably well preserved for her age,' Ross notes. 'But like every wooden boat, she needs TLC.'

The most famous of Cartela's many races was on Christmas Day 1926. After tearing downriver to Green Island, she and Togo – each vessel with some 500 eager passengers aboard – were barely minutes away from the finishing line at Princes Wharf. The northerner was just ahead and on the seaward side.

Sensational events were to follow. In a last ditch effort to overtake, Cartela went around her rival. Her skipper misjudged the space, however, and he clipped Togo's stern, nudging the smaller vessel off course and into the sand of Battery Point. The resulting ruckus, including no less than a Royal Commission, went on for months. Cartela had won the race – but she later lost the legal battle!

Yet focusing on her early race career furnishes little insight into a vessel that became a marine icon.

'Cartela also did wartime duty for the RAN,' Ross James points out. 'She worked extensively as a patrol and examination vessel, as well as a tug, including the memorable feat of rescuing a disabled vessel ten times her size from Storm Bay.

'And she was even there for us in 1975 when the Tasman Bridge went down,' Ross says. 'Cartela is remarkable because she herself has had many lives, over multiple decades, and touched so many lives, too.'

Indeed, Cartela's own career reflects Tasmania's history, including the revolution in transport when roads arrived in the fruit, dairy and timber-rich south during the 1950s. Freight moved off the water and onto tarmac, and Cartela's lucrative IXL contracts disappeared. She was sold to Roche Bros – along with four fleet sisters, Bass, Breone, Excella and Marana.

Another change, this time in the form of advancing marine technology, arrived in 1958. Fitted with a diesel, her original engine went to Hobart's Technical College as a training aid. However, steam technology was no longer the coming thing, and the engine was trucked off not long after to a Dover museum run by enthusiast Jim Casey.

Today, Cartela is the centre of a new challenge, in many ways the race of her life.

Her century-old wooden hull, now secured with very large nails called 'dumps', needs to be refastened. Small sections of those 70mm thick planks will be replaced entirely, while a comprehensive restoration will require Cartela to be on a slip for many months, an expensive exercise; and once out of the water, a serious test of her structural integrity.

And then there's that steam engine, now waiting at Saunders and Ward in Kingston. How much it will cost to refurbish is an unknown, although one estimate was around $360,000. Ross James says the engine was running as recently as 30 years ago, so he's optimistic about it driving a propeller again.

The restoration of Cartela and her engine, of course, is less about money than it is about love.

"Is she worth it?' Ross James repeats a question he's asked – and asks himself – frequently. 'Absolutely. She's not just the last of the line, but in fact, the best of it. Cartela has given her life to this place. Now we can return the favour, and give her a new lease on life.'