The script was the same, but the bottles’ contents were different when two tugboats named Ohio were dedicated to their futures.
One, fresh from the Great Lakes Towing shipyard in Cleveland, was christened with traditional champagne for its formal start of commercial service. The other, built in 1903 in Chicago as a fireboat for Milwaukee, was for a second time splashed with beer to start its new life as a museum exhibit at the National Museum of the Great Lakes.
“I christen this tug Ohio. May God bless her and all who work on her,” Jane Smith, 95, of Vermilion, Ohio and Julie LaMarre, 34, of Monroe County’s Frenchtown Township, both said before smashing their respective -- and well-wrapped -- bottles of Pabst Blue Ribbon and bubbly on the tugs’ forward railings during a ceremony that served as a sort of torch-passing between the two.
“This is a demonstration of evolution,” Christopher Gillcrist, the museum’s executive director, had said previously to describe the two vessels brought together for a first-of-its-kind maritime event.
The new Ohio, officially classed by Great Lakes Towing as a Loren 76 ice tug, is “smaller, more agile, and more efficient” than its predecessor, Mr. Gillcrist said.
Built in an Ohio shipyard by Ohio workers, “the new tug will operate in Ohio waters and serve Ohio ports,” said Joe Starck, the tugboat operator’s president. The new Ohio specifically is to be assigned to the Toledo harbor.
Its construction and that of four new fleetmates was enabled in part by an Ohio Environmental Protection Agency grant that covered 40 percent of the cost for four of the vessels’ propulsion systems, Mr. Starck said. Older, less-efficient tugs that could not meet new Coast Guard inspection requirements will be replaced by the new boats, he said.
The old Ohio’s dedication as a museum tug followed a seven-month cosmetic restoration that included extensive repairs to its steel decks, hull reinforcement, renewal of its pilothouse, and repainting above the waterline into Great Lakes’ signature green and red.
“It was a wreck before,” said Greg Rudnick, a maritime historian from Lakewood, Ohio who noted, as Mr. Gillcrist had done previously, that the old Ohio had been stored for years downwind of a salt mine near Great Lakes Towing’s Cleveland facilities.
Museum volunteers have “done so much work already, and there’s so much more to do, but it looks great,” Mr. Rudnick said.
Mr. Gillcrist effusively thanked both the museum’s volunteers and several companies that donated work or materials toward the tug’s restoration. The latter included Great Lakes Towing; Solomon Diving, Inc., of Monroe; the George Gradel Co. of Toledo; Mid American Group, a steel fabricator in Newport, Mich.; Barton International of Glens Falls, N.Y., which provided sandblasting material; and Sherwin-Williams, the Cleveland-based paint manufacturer.
Among the restored tug’s visitors before and after the ceremony was Marcus Kelch of Cleveland, whose father, Paul Kelch, was one of its captains from the late 1960s to the mid-1980s.
Mr. Kelch said his father was proud of his work and would have appreciated the restoration effort.
“It’s amazing. I’ve never seen it painted like this,” Mr. Kelch said.
Also visiting was Adam Cook, 46, of Wauseon, a museum member who had brought sons Asher, 11, and Addison, 14, to see the tug in November before its restoration began and came back for the “after” version.
“It’s awesome. They did a really good job,” Mr. Cook said.
Mrs. Smith, a longtime Great Lakes Historical Society employee and then volunteer, said it was “very, very special” to have been chosen for the museum tug’s dedication. Even after the society moved its museum to its current, expanded Toledo location, Mrs. Smith has continued to volunteer for the society, traveling a half-dozen times per year to Toledo to contribute.
Mrs. LaMarre, whose husband, Paul LaMarre III, is a member of the museum’s board and director of the Port of Monroe, said she had been honored to be chosen by Great Lakes Towing to christen its new tug, but nervous that she might not swing the champagne bottle hard enough.
A christening bottle that doesn’t break is considered bad luck.
“I was getting it from two different family members -- my husband and my father-in-law -- that I needed to make sure I break the bottle,” she said with a laugh.
Mr. LaMarre’s father, Paul LaMarre, Jr., is a veteran Great Lakes mariner who now is captain of the Detroit-based Diamond Jack tour boat.
As a nod to its owner’s 120-year corporate history, the new Ohio displays a tribute to Great Lakes Towing’s early years, when refloating vessels that had accidentally run aground or ashore represented a substantial part of its business.
The white horse emblem displayed on the new tug’s pilot house is “the white horse of salvation, rescuing a stranded vessel in need” and at one time appeared on all Great Lakes Towing tugs, Mr. LaMarre said before the ceremony.
While Friday’s ceremony was reserved for holders of tickets sold only in advance, the rededicated Ohio will be open to the general public for a celebratory weekend Saturday and Sunday.
The new Ohio was to have been on-site -- though not open for tours -- during the weekend, but that plan had to be scrubbed because of high water on the Maumee River that compromised the available space to dock it.
The high water prompted the old and new Ohios to be moored nose-to-nose for their dedications, and a wind shift later in the day caused water to start flooding the dock area after the ceremony was over.
Museum admission is $17 for the general public and includes access to both the Ohio and the Col. James M. Schoonmaker museum freighter. Museum members are admitted free.
First Published June 21, 2019, 3:56 p.m.
