When I was a young man traveling the British Columbia Inside Passage I was fascinated by the Canadian mail boats that would deliver mail to the floating logging camps along the hundreds of miles of waterways.
These were cabins and other buildings set up on log rafts. They would be towed to where the logging ops were and moored to shore for a season, the loggers living aboard.
I can’t remember the last time I saw a Canadian mail boat. Does anyone know if the system is still in operation?
Today I came across an article on AP talking about a different sort of mail boat, in Germany.
Don’t know about Canada, but my family vacationed at Lake Winnipesaukee when I was growing up (which was continued by me and my siblings in adulthood), and the mail was delivered by boat to our location. We weren’t on an island. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C7oJBT07myQ
One of my high school teachers in the 1950s would occasionally tell us about her early days of teaching in the 1920s when she worked for the Douglas Co., Oregon school system. She was the teacher on the Umpqua River Schoolboats and was responsible for running a floating, self-propelled 1-room K-12 school that moved to a different river landing each weekday. There was more than 1 schoolboat but I’m not sure exactly how many. But schoolboats served the approximately 80 navigable river miles of the Umpqua above Reedsport (the Umpqua being Oregon’s #2 coastal river after the Rogue in mean annual volume…the Columbia of course vastly larger but shared with Washington State.). The Umpqua River watershed area the school boats served was in those days still mostly roadless except for wagon roads and accessible with difficulty, especially in the rainy season (9 or 10 months long in the Oregon Coast Range!).
The Captain hired a bunch of teenagers, all fit girls of course, to jump on & off the moving ship. This is what happens when the CEO hires a deaf-mute to be director of QHSE I guess?
