 |
magazine / jf08
 |
January/February 2008 issue |
|
|
|
Night at the museum ship
Experience marine history aboard a retired Coast Guard vessel turned
B&B. If you’re lucky, an officer’s ghost might rise to give you a tour.
By Alan Morantz with photography by David Barbour
The moment I enter the main
hatch of the CCGS Alexander
Henry, a retired Coast Guard
icebreaker that once served on
the Great Lakes, I feel as if I’m walking
straight into a movie. By day, the
museum ship is the largest artifact in the
collection of the Marine Museum of the
Great Lakes, on the Kingston waterfront.
By night, it serves as one of the most
unusual bed and breakfasts around.
 |
| CLICK TO ENLARGE
|
It is as a B&B guest that I’m thinking,
Wait, I’ve seen this film. Then I realize
that I am Larry Daley, the hapless
dreamer played by Ben Stiller in Night
at the Museum. Poor Larry works the
graveyard shift at a natural history
museum. During his watch, gladiators,
Huns and a T. rex come to life and the
wax figure of President Teddy Roosevelt
on horseback helps Larry make sense
of the chaos. With no other guests in
sight and night setting in, I imagine
long deceased crew members from the
Alexander Henry rising from their slumber
to give me a personal tour.
I feel a kinship with the old icebreaker.
Both of us were born in 1958, and we are
at an age when the past looks a whole lot
rosier than the future. The ship spent its
roughly 25-year career in the Lake
Superior region. In winter, it
kept the harbour of Port
Arthur (now Thunder Bay)
clear of ice for grain shipments.
In spring and summer,
it serviced navigation buoys
and helped in repairing lighthouses
and docks. The
Alexander Henry was decommissioned
and moved to the
Marine Museum here in
Kingston in 1985 and began
its life as a B&B a year later.
In retirement, the Alexander
Henry is not without its
charm as a place to spend a
night. Late on a Friday afternoon,
I find the red and white ship
squatting in shallow water next to the
Marine Museum. Established in 1975,
the museum is made up of a number of
renovated historic shipyard structures
and presents the marine history of the
Great Lakes, including shipwrecks and
the transition from sail to steam. The
jewel of the collection is the Alexander
Henry. Some 64 metres stem to stern,
the Alex is commanded by a huge derrick
used for lifting five-tonne buoys into
and out of the water. Inside, I detect the
faint but unavoidable smell of diesel
hanging in the air, the first sign that
the Alexander Henry is not just a rosescented
trip through marine history.
The second sign: narrow passageways,
raised doorsills, angled floors and virtually
perpendicular staircases. This is the
real deal. Sleepwalkers beware.
top
|
|
| ADVERTISEMENT |
|
|
|
|
