Navigation
There were over 40 different steamboat routes on Puget Sound. While steamboats were shifted from route to route, there was also a strong tendency for vessels to be run on the same route for a long period of time, and in fact many vessels were purpose-built for a particular route. Some of the reasons for this were economic, as high-passenger routes, such as the Seattle-Port Orchard or the Seattle-Tacoma routes might justify one or even several high-speed passenger-only vessels, like Tacoma, Flyer, or Athlon. Others like the East Pass route of the Virginia V warranted a mixed-use passenger/freight/mail boat.
One important consideration which will not necessarily be obvious in modern times of radar, GPS and depth-sounders, is the degree to which navigational skill and experience on a particular route played in making sure each run was completed safely and profitably. The steamboats could not run only in fair weather or in the daytime. Heavy fog was particularly hazardous, and could come any time of year. Once a steamboat was in a fog bank, a captain would have to reckon very carefully from his experience on the run just where his boat was. While there was no radar, captains proved remarkably adept at determining their position with echoes from the steamboat's whistle. Sound travels at about 1,080 feet per second in a fog bank, and rounding off to 1,000 feet for safety, that meant that if an echo was heard one second after the whistle blast, the steamboat was 500 feet from shore. The maritime historian Jim Faber well-summarized the degree of detail that an experienced crew could deduce by echo location:
| “ | Experienced navigators not only could estimate how far they were from shore, but also could determine their position by the sound of the echo. This despite the fact that a low shoreline, a high bank, or a gravel beach all return a different sound. Another determinant was the length of the echo. A short echo denoted a narrow island or headland, for most of the whistle continued by on both sides. With only a few seconds' leeway. the navigators also had to decide whether the echo was bouncing from floating logs, buoys -- or even a solid fog bank. | ” |
It took an experienced captain years of navigation on a particular route to be able to safety pilot his boat through a fog bank or a dark rainy night using this method. This of course made it difficult simply to put a new boat on a particular route without a crew with strong local experience.
Read more about this topic: Puget Sound Mosquito Fleet