Digital Bob Archive

My favorite story about a boat named Favorite - and there have been several of them over the years - concerns one that in the summer of 1915 engaged to do some freighting from Juneau, or Douglas, to the community of Baranof on Warm Springs Bay, Baranof Island. The storekeeper there was running low on liquor and the wholesaler in Juneau hired the small gasboat Favorite to take him a dozen cases or so of the commodity.

The Favorite chugged out of Douglas on July 30 with four men aboard: Bing Halleck, D.E. Fuller, Fred Hastings and Chris Teperich. They may have all been skippers; apparently none was a gas engineer because when the engine stopped as they were about to round Point Retreat, they could not get it started. The weather was calm and eventually they drifted in close to the mouth of Eagle River and dropped anchor. A passing boat carried a message to town and on August 5 Karl Lawrence arrived on board.

By then the Favorite had been at anchor for nearly six days and it was pretty boring. In lieu of any better way to pass the time, the crew broached the cargo. Just a little bit. Lawrence got the engine started and decided to sign on for the voyage, and the party. The cargo kept shrinking. Nobody could seem to remember, later on, just what courses were steered during the next several days, or whether they steered at all. They wound up out in the Pacific Ocean but did not really realize it, and when asked about it later there was a division of opinion as to whether they had gone out through Icy Strait and Cross Sound, or had reached the ocean around Cape Ommaney at the south end of Chatham Strait.

The weather remained good, so far as anybody could remember, and the engine kept running until the gas tank was dry. Then they drifted, probably for several days, until the Favorite washed ashore on what proved to be the south side of Hinchinbrook Island, near Point Steele and some 25 miles from Cordova. It was, as later determined, the evening of August 16, eleven days since they left Eagle River.

The five men had no idea where they were, but in the distance they could see the masts of a wireless station. It was the Navy station at Point Whitshed. The men were not sure whether they had had a skiff when they started, but they had none when they reach Point Steele. They started walking the beach toward the radio towers and before long found an old dugout canoe. Lawrence and Fuller, who may have been the most sober of the lot, paddled the canoe to Point Whitshed and the station boat took them on to Cordova.

The lighthouse tender Kukui happened to be in port at Cordova and she went to Point Steele and picked up Halleck, Hastings and Teperich but left the Favorite on the beach. A wireless inquiry to Juneau brought the word that search parties had been out, but only in the Chatham Strait area.

All hands eventually got back to Gastineau Channel but no newspaper followed up the story to learn who paid for the booze.