5-Sep-16 – The Draken Harald Hårfagre has paid its pilotage fees but the Viking ship’s new expedition manager says such fees will keep them and other foreign vessels on similar goodwill missions from returning to the United States.

The largest Viking ship built in modern times left Norway on April 26 on a route that took it to Iceland, Greenland, Canada, and United States but not to its ultimate destination, Duluth, Minnesota, where one of every six residents is Norwegian. In July, as the ship was about to enter the Great Lakes, its crew learned they would have a local pilot on board to help with navigation and they would pay him $400 per hour.

Whether it would cost $430,000 as the captain of the Draken first calculated – or $145,000 as figured by one of the organizations providing pilotage services – the fees, though not a complete surprise, were at the very least a disappointment and a distraction.

Pilots and crew agree a price quote for pilotage was sent to the Draken expedition before it arrived in the U.S. An email sent last November from a Draken crew member to the Coast Guard acknowledged that pilotage was mandatory while the ship was on the Great Lakes.

While the Draken was in Canada, however, its crew was told they did not need a pilot because their 115-foot-long by 26-foot-wide ship was too small. Whether this applied to Canadian waters only or all of the Great Lakes was not made clear to the expedition, according to Luke Snyder, who stepped up from expedition coordinator to expedition manager after the previous manager had to leave due to a serious illness. (Left) The Draken on Lake Michigan, about eight miles out from Navy Pier, on July 27.

“I can say that they were confused,” recalled Snyder, referring to expedition personnel who met with Great Lakes Pilots Association. “They were expecting not to have to pay for pilotage.”

When they realized they would have to pay, Draken captain Bjőrn Ahlander first estimated the cost at well over $400,000 because the plan was to sail across the Great Lakes. The journey would be slower than if the ship used its engines and it would cover a larger area because sailing ships, at the mercy of the wind, do not travel in a straight line.

While the engines are needed for safety reasons, the Viking ship never intended to use them as its main means of propulsion.

“The pilots don’t see the ship as a sailing vessel,” says Snyder. “They know that it has the potential to sail. They look at it moving as fast as it can possibly go in the straightest line between one port and next. If you look at that, you can reduce the cost of pilotage, but that isn’t what the expedition is about.”

(Right) Captain Ahlander communicates by radio with a nearby ship. At left is the pilot, Rory Grant.

U.S. law ambiguous, unfair, says expedition manager

Though he emphasizes they are not “anti-pilot,” Snyder says the pilotage requirement, which has cost the expedition about $117,000, is unfair in their case.

“Throughout the entire trip, throughout the Great Lakes, the thing that we still can’t quite figure out is why we’re required to carry a pilot.”

He has looked at the legislation, which dates back to the 1960s, and while it says any foreign vessel entering the Great Lakes must have a pilot, Snyder says the law applies only to commercial vessels – which the Draken is not.

“When I look in the Coast Guard regulations and their [Code of Federal Regulations] and their [Navigation and Vessel Inspection Circulars] that they send out to their inspectors, I see something completely different, where it says that a foreign flag vessel that is operating a certificate of inspection, more as an attractions vessel, is not considered to be engaged in commerce or in state-to-state trade as long as there’s no materials or cargo being shipped from port to port and that there are no paying passengers coming on board at one of our stops.”

There is “ambiguity,” says Snyder, and the law is open to interpretation.

“I think that it’s really unfair for a vessel of this size and a vessel that was here, doing something with a goodwill voyage, to be forced to pay compulsory pilotage in the open waters of the Great Lakes and expected to pay the same rate as a container vessel carrying cars or steel or goods worth millions of dollars.”

(Above) Captain Ahlander meets with his crew on the deck of the Draken. Photo by Peder Jacobsson.

Draken had planned to end expedition in July

According to Snyder, when they saw that pilotage was going to be required and the cost would be steep, the plan was to end the expedition in July in Fairport Harbor, Ohio, skipping stops in Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Chicago.

“The only reason we continued the expedition was because people started raising funds for us. And we thought, ok, the people want to see the ship and we can’t let them down and we’re going to try to make it as far as we can with the funds that are raised. And however far we make it is how far we make it.”

A fundraising campaign by Sons of Norway, a financial services and international cultural organization headquartered in Minneapolis, quickly raised $139,000 to cover pilotage fees but the expedition decided it still was not enough to get to Duluth, at least not as the sailing vessel. After visiting Chicago for six days, July 27 to August 1, the Draken made it as far west as Green Bay, Wisconsin.

After going back across the Great Lakes, the Draken left Lake Ontario on August 29 and is now on the Erie Canal, traveling through New York State.

(Above) An alternative to sail and gas-powered engines, muscles propel the Draken in this image by Peder Jacobsson.

Fees paid late due to illness

Snyder says he took over as expedition manager when the previous manager, Lisa Johansson, was diagnosed with a brain tumor, which the crew learned about while in Chicago.

“There were a lot of things that weren’t being done. A lot of things immediately fell into my lap and one of them was paying our ship’s agent in Canada.”

It took some time to find an agent in the U.S. to whom pilotage invoices, mistakenly sent to their Canadian agent, could be sent for payment. Though late, the expedition got one of the pilot organizations paid in full.

“But the District 2 pilot, even though their bills were not late, in fact I had already sent them money, they decided that they wanted to have all of their pilotage paid up front, including the trip from Erie [Pennsylvania] to Port Colborne.”

It took a few days, but eventually all of the pilots were paid and those fees, says Snyder, have been a distraction.

“No matter how many people we’ve touched and shared our stories with, I feel…we have just been fighting this entire time and we haven’t even been able to tell our stories.”

He says something has to be done so that the Draken and other such vessels, with more of an educational purpose than commercial, can reach destinations on the Great Lakes affordably.

Snyder describes Draken owner Sigurd Aase (left), Chairman of Crudecorp, an international oil and natural gas company, as “the largest contributor to the vessel.” Millions of dollars, he says, has been spent to build and operate the ship, with no plans to ever see that money again.

“Wooden ships are never an investment. They are a hole in the ground. They’re a money pit. It doesn’t matter if the boat is 15 feet or 115 feet, you’re going to put money into it all the time.”

Any money earned giving tours or selling merchandise “wouldn’t even begin” to recover the cost, says Snyder.

“You could do this for 20 years and never make a profit.”