TBay waterfront changing tides.

• Author: Ross, Ian
• Position: SPECIAL REPORT: THUNDER BAY - Thunder bay

On a blustery November and December day in the past, Gerry Dawson would be reachable only by radio.

Not so this year for the president of Thunder Bay Tug Services.

This fall, there's no locomotives shunting, ships' hatch covers slamming or water being churned up by massive propellers. The towering pallisades of grain elevators on Thunder Bay's waterfront are fast becoming a paint-peeling relic of what once was.

"Welcome to what's here, there ain't much left." says the 35-year career tug captain.

"This should be our busy time. We should be going 20-hours a day. Normally this time of year, I'm lucky if I get home some days."

Consolidation in the grain elevator business and increased competition has siphoned off cargoes to other North American ports, leaving Thunder Bay with 10 working elevators and two possible closures next year.

Few know how many jobs will be lost.

At the end of October, Thunder Bay has moved 6.6 million tonnes of grain, coal, potash, bulk and general cargoes on 331 vessel trips.

It's far removed from the 17.6 million tonnes recorded in 1983, the highest total in the last 50 years.

In the heydays of the 1950s and 60s, Thunder Bay harbour was an autumn frenzy of activity with 'lakers' and 'Salties' nudging into berths at one of 27 grain elevators. Shippers were anxious to load Prairie grain and get it out through the Seaway before winter freeze-up.

"This time of year, we should have five or six ships sitting out at anchor waiting to load. And I think there's only one in there loading there today," says Dawson.

It's tough to see for Dawson. He wants his son, who earned his 60-ton captain's certificate last year, to eventually take over the family business.

"I'm looking for a third generation, but I don't know what's going to be here for him."

Dawson grew up in the working part of Thunder Bay's waterfront, receiving his captain's papers at 19.

"I've been around here since I was born," says Dawson remembering his first trip at age six aboard one of his father's tugs taking supplies up to the lighthouse keepers on the Slate Islands.

His parents ran a floating store 'bum boat' in the 1950s that supplied ships in the harbour with laundry service, tobacco and other goods when crews couldn't get ashore.

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The family bought their first tug in 1957 and when the St. Lawrence Seaway opened in 1959, they got into the linesman business catching ropes to tie up foreign ships and later expanded into commercial diving.

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