This story was originally published in Coast Reporter's fall edition of Coast Life.
For access to MacKenzie Sea Services I drive down a winding road surrounded by trees to a beach work site on calm Sechelt Inlet. As usual, this marine business is pulsing with activity. Work crews are scrambling to board their boats moored at the marina, a welder is noisily riveting a work boat up in dock and several men are lugging equipment to and from the wharf. Hard to believe this busy commercial enterprise is just a quick paddle from Sechelt, almost within sight of the government dock.
As I arrive, one curious fellow asks me if I’ve met the owner, Don MacKenzie, yet. No, I tell him.
“Well, go easy on him when you see him. He’s 89 now,” the man tells me.
“Will he mind you telling me his age?” I ask.
Turns out Don doesn’t mind a bit. Most of his 89 years have been spent on the water and he still supports the day-to-day activities of the business he founded. “I’m afraid to stop,” he says. “When my friends have stopped, they’re no longer here.”
He was born into this life. His father was a marine engineer and when Don was just ten years old, he went to work as a helper to his dad. He was small enough to get right inside a boiler—a big help when it needed repair. This part-time job at a tender age often kept him out of school—much against the wishes of his mom, a teacher.
“I made up my mind at seven that I wanted to go to sea,” Don says. When he turned 17 in 1952, he became a deckhand at Kingcome Navigation, a subsidiary of a Powell River company. One of the company’s runs was from the mill in Powell River to Vancouver towing Davis rafts. Don pauses here while he searches for a photo of a Davis raft. He shows me a raft being towed—it could be up to 400 feet long—piled high with bundles of logs.
Over the years Don went from deckhand to mate to tug master of the vessels. In 1974 he bought Seaforth Towing & Salvage becoming owner and master of many vessels throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Not all tugs are good with ocean crossings but in 1977 Don’s business bought the tug Glengary in Southampton, UK, and he served as tug master, crossing the Atlantic, and through the Panama Canal, for delivery to Vancouver.
During those years, “I didn’t even want to come on land,” he says, adding that for most of his life he spent an average of 250 days of the year at sea. It was for that reason, perhaps, that his wife supported him in buying his current marine business where he could stay closer to home. In 1988 he moved to Sechelt and began MacKenzie Sea Services with six vessels: landing craft to barge to tug dive-tender.
Tugboats are the graceless but vitally important boats on our western coastal waters. “They’re the handmaids of the sea,” Don tells me. They are known for their moderate draft (deepest reach of the boat from the waterline) and broader beam (widest part of the boat), making them suitable for commercial uses. Mostly we see them slowly towing log booms in the Salish Sea.
The real work of a tug involves so much more: assisting ocean-going ships to berth in Vancouver Harbour, as support vessels for naval divers on training exercises or for movie crews filming on the water, and engaging in pollution control and cleaning up oil spills including maintaining floating pollution containment booms.
Don notes that some of his tugs perform other jobs, for example, two of his boats, the Glenayre and the Glenshiel, were fitted out for firefighting and the Redonda is a work boat for salvage and deep diving support.
Tugs are critical marine vessels, the saviours of boats in distress. If a yacht is too badly damaged, it is the tugs that supply salvage work.
In 1999 an enormous sleek yacht made a wrong move at Malibu Rapids, the gateway to Princess Louisa Inlet. The yacht named the Golden Cell had gone aground at high tide, apparently because of a dispute in the wheelhouse between owner and skipper over whether to go through the rapids in the dark. Meanwhile the boat drifted onto rocks, and as the tide receded, the yacht settled onto the rudders which gave way and snapped under the tremendous weight. The boat then settled on the expensive props and bent those too.
Scuba diver Mike Pearson wrote his recollections in a 2011 blog. He was called in that night by Don and by the time Mike arrived on the scene Don was already there ready to salvage.
“He must have really poured the coals to the old tugboat to make it there that fast,” Mike said. “I’m thinking he was at least ten times as excited as I was. He just claimed the salvage rights to what had turned out to be a mega yacht operated by a Mexican billionaire.”
The task of pulling the yacht from the rocks fell to Don and would become legendary in the annals of salvage.
The tide had receded so far that it was possible to walk around the yacht showing obvious damage. The only thing to do was wait for the high tide in the coming night and try to pull the mega-yacht free of its perch into deeper, safer waters using the biggest tug they owned at the time, piloted by Don’s son, Kevin. They were successful.
The work had to be documented thoroughly by Don and taken to London, UK, to substantiate an insurance claim. Don’s prompt efforts were acknowledged by the insurers as “pollution salvage.” Had the yacht slipped into Jervis Inlet’s deep water (800 feet depth near the yacht’s grounding) it would have been a messy, complicated salvage in pristine waters.
Back in the day, Sechelt Inlet teemed with work boats back and forth to various farm sites, floating logging camps and booming grounds. These days Don sees less industry from his office window except for work crews on their way to a hydro facility up Salmon Inlet, the dragon boat paddlers, a few yachts and always boats needing repair. But it’s enough to keep him busy and still working after his lifetime on the seas.
Correction: This story has been updated to use the correct last name for Mike Pearson.
