Digital Bob Archive

Tall sailing vessels were a novelty on Gastineau Channel by the 1920s, but residents woke on June 6, 1923, to find a five-masted barkentine (square-rigged on the foremast, schooner rigged on the other four) at the wharf of the Juneau Lumber Mills. She was the Phyllis Comyn, Captain O.A. Daeweritz, and had been towed up from Winslow, Wasington, by the tug Sea Monarch to load 1,700,000 board feet of lumber for Australia. The lumber had been cut and loading started at once.

The Phyllis Comyn was one of four nearly identical barkentines built in northern California in 1919 and 1920 as an aftermath of the World War I shipping boom.
Another of them, the Anne Comyn, had loaded lumber for Australia at the Ketchikan sawmill the previous summer. The vessels were 320 feet in overall length with 46 feet of beam and 24 feet depth of hold. They had steam winches for loading cargo and gasoline winches for hoisting sails but otherwise were without power.

Loading was completed by early August but the barkentine did not leave until the morning of August 20 because of difficulty getting a crew. Two different crews were sent up from Seattle but refused to sign on for the offered $60 a month. They demanded $75, which the captain was unauthorized to grant. There were a number of experienced former blue water sailors in the Alaska trolling fleets, past their prime but even so probably more able than the inexperienced men generally available. Captain Daeweritz did his best to recruit a number of them but none relished a sea voyage of three or four months.

Finally a crew was assembled and the Phyllis Comyn was taken in tow by the former Juneau ferry, the Flosie, then owned by the Wrangell sawmill. The Flosie took her down to Cape Ommaney where sail was hoisted for Melbourne. The voyage took 128 days and that fact was detrimental to Alaska's export lumber business. The many days under a tropic sun caused much of the green lumber to mildew, creating stains that made it unattractive to buyers.

A second barkentine, the Russell Haviside, reached Juneau under tow on September 22, 1923, loaded 1,700,000 feet of spruce lumber, and on November 17 was towed to Cape Spencer by the tug Daniel Kern. The Haviside, under Captain C. Melberg, got favorable winds and made the voyage to Melbourne in 72 days.

In addition to the two shipments to Australia, the Juneau Lumber Company in 1923 made two shipments of 400,000 feet each of clear spruce, most of it destined for the United Kingdom. One shipment, by barge, went to Vancouver, B.C., for transshipment. The other was loaded on the former schooner Nottingham which was taken in tow by the Daniel Kern after she had towed the Russel Haviside to Cape Spencer and taken her to a California port where the lumber was loaded on a freighter bound for England.

The Juneau Lumber Mills shut down the sawmill In mid-November, 1923, after the biggest year in its history. It had converted eight million board feet of logs into lumber, some three million board feet more than ever before.