Boatnerd Discussion Forum

Back in the day, the Canadian Wheat Board awarded their contracts to each of the fleets based on their hauling capacity. In other words, a larger fleet would equal a larger share of the contract. Paterson took advantage of this by keeping their retired vessels to boost their tonnage. By the time Paterson sold their fleet to CSL, the Vandoc and Quedoc were not in any shape to be sold for anything but scrap.

Even though Paterson used the Windoc accident as a reason why they sold the fleet, the truth of the matter is Paterson approached CSL about a possible sale long before the accident. In fact, CSL had already inspected most, if not all of the Paterson boats prior to the Windoc accident. I’ll concede that the accident may have hastened the sale, but by no means was it the reason as Paterson publicly stated.

As excess capacity as Paterson entered the 1990's and sent them to the wall due to lack of cargo (And having already sold some modern lakers for scrap), they had been stripped to support Paterson's in-service vessels over their 10 year layup. That included engine components used on the Mantadoc for one example.

As such, Paterson didn't think it was financially justified to reactive one of them in the wake of the Windoc accident to replace that lost capacity (And apparantly the Comeaudoc needed extensive hull work which precluded her being reactived with her modern powerplant). And of course not long afterwards, they decided to get out of the business entirely in the wake of the Windoc incident.

As for why they didn't find new homes somewhere else, the usual suspect of recent years (Lower Lakes) was a much smaller fleet specializing in small self-unloading vessels serving smaller customers that lacked shore based self-unloading equipment that were often located in the tight confines of rivers.

So even if they were available, it's quite possible Lower Lakes had neither the finances or potential customers back in 2002 to accomplish it and keep them busy after acquiring and fixing them up. And that's if they were even able to be sold. They all went to scrap in the couple of months after the active vessels were sold to CSL. So it might've been written into the sales contract that the inactive vessels be disposed of by scrap and Paterson honored it by ensuring they were sold to scrap and not a potential CSL competitor.

Why were the Quedoc and Vandoc scrapped?