- by Steve Briggs

Probably everyone in Owen Sound is familiar with the little steel Ancaster tug outside the former Marine & Rail Museum on the harbour. But many might not know how these were used or why they look the way they do.

They were used to get logs from remote forest areas in Ontario, Quebec and eastern Canada down rivers and to the pulp and paper mills, from the 1940s up into the 1990s in some places. The big anchor allowed these boats with small engines to move massive log booms downriver, and the flat bottoms allowed the boat's winch to drag itself over land!

The boat would leave the boom and run ahead of it between one-half mile and one mile, depending on the size of the boat and the length of the cable. It would then drop a large anchor over the bow, which was fastened to the forward mounted winch cable.

The boat would then turn 'round and run back to the boom of logs. They'd fasten a short length of cable between the tow post on the after deck and one of the short logging chains that connected the boom timbers. They would then engage the winch and wind in the forward cable, thereby moving, or warping, the boom of logs in the direction they wished to go at a speed of between one-half and one mile an hour, depending on the velocity of the wind.

While this may seem a very slow rate of speed, it was very efficient and an economical method of bringing large booms of logs to the mill and did the work of much larger and more costly steam boats. Consider this: A small winch boat like the Ancaster could move ONE MILLION feet of logs, and these boats had engines of only 20 or 30 horsepower!

When the boat had wound in all the cable, it would lift the anchor onto the deck and the procedure would be repeated until the logs were at the mill. Russel Brothers changed the name of the type of logging boat that they built from "headworm" or "alligator" to "winch boat" for one under 28 feet long, and "warping tug" for the ones over 35 feet in length.
http://russelbrothers.ca/winchtug.html