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Glacial Ice for West Star’s drinks

Unfortunately, the deck crew was not the only problem with the ship. As
stated, we always endeavoured to get in among some ice, either in Glacier Bay
or Tracey Arm, both of which lent themselves to lowering a lifeboat to pick up
some glacial ice and serve the thousand-year old product in the bar drinks that
evening; passengers loved it, even at extra cost! The drawback was the size of the
ship, for the propellers were only a few feet below sea-level, and too frequently
we damaged the propeller blades. This induced some noticeable ship vibration,
thus necessitating going into dry-dock in Victoria and having the propellers
shaved into shape or replaced. By some lucky coincidence, this was easy enough;
Victoria had one of the world’s biggest dry-docks in the naval base, a relic of
having occasionally to service the Queens during the War.

This was not all. The ship was a motor ship, and prior to joining it, my total
experience had been with steam turbines. The difference was in mobility, for
in Alaska one did not use tugs to go alongside, and on occasion it took several
movements to properly berth, in some cases meaning that we ran out of ‘starts’ –
the compressed air that was stored and blasted into the cylinders to get the motor
to start simply being used up. In those instances, we were obliged to sit out in the
harbour off the berth while the ship’s compressors refilled the compressed-air
storage tanks, sometimes for a half-hour or so; that did not sit too well with our
passengers, all naturally anxious to go ashore.

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