Last month, we attempted to answer questions posed by Robert Ireland concerning the wooden tugs KEENAN and MINNIE A. CLARK. We had very little information on the final disposition of either boat and for this reason we are very happy to have heard from George Ayoub of Ottawa who has done some digging and came up with the following additional details.

MINNIE A. CLARK was renamed (b) RED FOX by the Dominion Fish Company Ltd. in 1921. We do not know when they sold her but her last owner was Frank Gerow of Port Arthur in whose name she was registered until 1944. Thereafter she does not appear in the registers and we assume that she was abandoned in the Lakehead area.

As we surmised in our history of KEENAN, it was in 1936 that she was sold to J. P. Porter and Sons Ltd. She was last registered in 1937 and there is no record of her after that date nor does she appear in any wreck listings. It seems likely that she was simply abandoned for age.

George has also given us a bit more information on the overseas doings of OUTARDE (II) in response to our earlier question, but this most recent detail does little to solve the problem. If anything, it makes it even worse. You see, OUTARDE was originally sold to Spanish breakers and we assumed that she had been taken to Santander, Castellon or Bilbao for scrapping. This may still have been the case but the plot thickens as we learn that her last recorded owner was the Atlantic Shipping Company Ltd., Gibraltar, and that Lloyds later reported her as "scrapped". Now who or what was the Atlantic Shipping Company and what interest would this firm have had in an old laker? Did OUTARDE actually get to Gibraltar or was the sale perhaps defaulted so that she lay around in some European port and was finally broken up?

Michel Vezina of Beauport, Quebec, has asked us about several St. Lawrence River vessels. Admittedly, we are no experts on the lower St. Lawrence and we can but pass along his questions in the hope someone may be able to reply.

-- What was the vessel named GUIDE which sank in the Gulf of St. Lawrence near Godbout on October 15, 1926? We know nothing about her at all.

-- What happened to Logistec's FORT GEORGE which was recently sold out of Canadian registry?

-- St. Charles Transportation bought four American L.S.T.s in 1946. Two of them were renamed ROBERT McMICHAEL and FRANK J. HUMPHREY. What were their L.S.T. numbers? None of our registers or references show their original "names".

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