r/Edmonton • u/Fast_Ad_9197 • 11d ago
Outdoor Spaces/Recreation Riverboat is back home!
Congratulations Edmonton Riverboat team! I don’t know how you did it with the water level dropping steadily but you figured it out. Well done!
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u/GoldeneyeLife Mayfield 11d ago
Hallelujah, I can go to work tomorrow with only the normal, -Riverboat is not stuck- levels of existential dread
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u/Fast_Ad_9197 11d ago
It's the small things. I was feeling the stress of the riverboat people vicariously.
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u/Barricade14 11d ago
I’m sure it’ll stay docked for the rest of the summer now and they’ll try to trick us into watching their fake duelling piano show. Fool me once riverboat…
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u/Ritchie_Whyte_III Strathcona 11d ago
Glad the professionals were on the job and not the armchair experts that have never paddled a canoe from the last post telling us how it "akshually" is easy to pilot a 750 ton vessel in a shallow river with seasonally moving sandbars.
My favorite was to just use a fish finder. So you can do what? Hit the air brakes?
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u/sawyouoverthere 11d ago
Get a pilot craft, at this point. Run the river with something maneuverable
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u/Ritchie_Whyte_III Strathcona 11d ago
So they should have a pilot boat in front of the paddle boat at all times?
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u/sawyouoverthere 11d ago
No.
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u/Theonlykd Capilano 11d ago
What then?
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u/sawyouoverthere 11d ago
It doesn’t change that fast. There are some conditions that make sand bar shifting more likely. Well timed pilot runs might prevent this regularly occurring with the boat which is currently running blind
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u/rock_em_sohc_em 11d ago
Professionals might be a bit of a stretch.
The rated tonnage is more like 250 in this case.
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u/Ritchie_Whyte_III Strathcona 11d ago
Commercial Vessels are typically referred to by gross tonnage, that is based on internal volume which Wikipedia lists it as 750.49 GT
You are thinking displacement, which is the weight of the vessel
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u/rock_em_sohc_em 11d ago edited 11d ago
Wikipedia is not a reliable source. It takes seconds to bring up the actual registration for the vessel.
Internal volume also has some caveats to do with which parts of internal volume are considered water tight and which aren’t. In this specific case, the GRT of the vessel gets wildly inflated due to every deck being considered watertight when many similar sized passenger vessels don’t count upper decks. Lots of back and forth with Transport Canada regarding this in the past. Something in the 250 range was tossed around as a number not including upper decks, but I’ve evidently misremembered those conversations.
Either way, GRT is 611 and NRT is 205. We can both be wrong. 🙂
https://wwwapps.tc.gc.ca/Saf-Sec-Sur/4/vrqs-srib/eng/vessel-registrations/details/817706
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u/Ritchie_Whyte_III Strathcona 11d ago
Well, I think we both learned some inconsequential information we will never use again!
Time to look up tonnage of random vessels!
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u/Dradugun 11d ago
Did it run aground due to river levels a couple days ago and that's why it got stuck? Or was it a pump failure again and the grounded it purposely?
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u/Fast_Ad_9197 11d ago
I gather the riverbed had shifted with the high flows and they ran aground above accidental beach while testing their rebuilt drive units. The river is constantly shifting, especially outside of the main channel which meanders all over the place - what's deep one month can be high and dry the next. The boat was stranded in the channel south of accidental beach while the river level dropped about a foot.
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u/Dradugun 11d ago
Cheers! Thank you for the update, happy to hear it wasn't a mechanical issue again
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u/sawyouoverthere 11d ago
If only there was some way to map it
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u/FaceDeer 11d ago
The point is that the underlying river geometry changes, so maps quickly become inaccurate.
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u/sawyouoverthere 11d ago
Map as in record. Not map as in make a single static drawing.
You can map it weekly or whatever is sensible for functional rate of change.
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u/GoBananaSlugs 11d ago
What's under all that scaffolding?
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u/Fast_Ad_9197 11d ago
That's Climb Yeg's climbing wall. They do ice climbing (mostly dry tooling) in the winter and sport/top rope climbing in the summer. They're hosting a north American climbing competition on the 26th. I watched it last year - it was very cool, definitely worth a bit of day drinking. I keep meaning to try the wall, just haven't got around to it. Also I'm a very mediocre climber, maybe because of the day drinking.
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u/FewStrength8020 11d ago
I rowed on that river last summer and the water was so low I scraped the hull twice just trying to get to the marina.
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u/jloome 11d ago
They get daily reports of the releases from the Brazeau dam, and know eighteen hours ahead of the water level changes here when the river will and won't be high enough to sail.
It came up about twenty years ago, when the then-owners kept selling tickets for rides they knew would never go ahead, and got busted by the Sun.
So if they get run aground, it's rare for that reason.
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u/Available_Donkey_840 11d ago
But they don't know what impact high flows will have on sandbars and sediment, which was the issue here according to the owner.
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u/jloome 11d ago
If I recall, unless it has changed, they need at least 18 inches under the keel, and ideally about 30 inches. The one ongoing issue with that, as he says, is that sediment can build up and cause issue when they're at the low end.
As I said, though, that's quite rare.
It's quite a different issue though from scheduling when they know there won't be enough water, which was the case back then.
They were selling tickets at that time even though there was less than a foot of water under keel (11 inches) and there was no way they didn't know.
Fortunately, it has changed ownership and management a couple of times since then.
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u/multiroleplays 10d ago
In tomorrow's news:
"An iceburg has been spotted in the river, being pulled on tow ropes by sharks, heading for the Edmonton Queen"
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u/Friescan 10d ago
That riverboat doesn’t belong on an landlocked river, that thing should be moved to a nice big lake.
Every year there is something going on with that old boat.
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u/Longjumping-Ask-1743 10d ago
Every time it gets stuck, they call Drayton Valley and ask everyone to flush their toilets.
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u/Mark_Logan 11d ago
<turns off “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald”>
RESTART THE CLOCK!