SS Kentuckian - Interwar Years

Interwar Years

Kentuckian resumed cargo service with American-Hawaiian after her return from World War I service. Though the company had abandoned its original Hawaiian sugar routes by this time, Kentuckian continued inter-coastal service through the Panama Canal with a few incidents that interrupted what was a mostly uneventful twenty years. In September 1928, a day after sailing from San Francisco, Kentuckian was rammed by the General Petroleum tanker Los Alamos near Point Sur, California, in a thick fog. Kentuckian had a leak in her number two cargo hold and damage to her port bilge keel and returned to San Francisco for repairs. In early April 1933, a fire broke out in Kentuckian's number two cargo hold, which resulted in the delay of the ship at Panama from 8 to 14 April. Kentuckian made her way to Los Angeles over the next ten days, where surveyors examined the ship and her general cargo.

For the most part, Kentuckian primarily carried general cargoes whose contents were not noteworthy. One exception occurred in July 1929, when The New York Times reported that Kentuckian was carrying, Pirate, an R-class racing yacht to races at Larchmont and Marblehead. The newspaper reported that Pirate was the first West Coast designed and built yacht to race in the East.

Unlike SS Minnesotan, a fellow American-Hawaiian ship that was plagued with labor difficulties, Kentuckian seems to have escaped much of the maritime labor turmoil of the mid-1930s. One incident was reported by the Los Angeles Times in August 1936. The news item reported that a portion of Kentuckian's crew went on strike in protest against unsafe working conditions. The ship's master had ordered the deckhands to rig one of the cargo booms after the ship docked in Los Angeles, but they refused because the deck was slippery and therefore, in their opinion, unsafe.