Isle Royale Line

[1] Ferry service to the island began around ten years before it became a national park, with the Water Lily, owned by Charles Kauppi.

He was a risk-taker, very brave (several seamen have said that Kauppi is the bravest captain ever to have sailed on Lake Superior, going out to rescue ailing vessels in unspeakable conditions—sometimes at the request of the Coast Guard station in Eagle Harbor).

[1] In about 1935, Kauppi realized that he needed something better, now that the publicity surrounding president Herbert Hoover's authorization of Isle Royale as a national park had increased business.

However, when the Coast Guard began to impose tighter ferry boat construction standards, the Copper Queen could have been put out of service.

The vessel did not possess watertight compartments that lay below that waterline, and the Coast Guard did not certify the ship to carry people on a regular schedule.

This goal was reached in 1938 when he commissioned the Wiinikka Boat Works of Houghton to build the Isle Royale Queen, a forty-foot ship that contained the necessary watertight compartments the Coast Guard wanted.

[2] But when Charles died in 1955, his family sold the Copper Queen to the Grand Portage-Isle Royale Transportation Service, where it was renamed the Voyageur.

[3] Grosnik quickly expanded on the current operation, and set up a contract with the T. D. Vinette Boat Company of Escanaba, Michigan to build the Isle Royale Queen II, a 57-foot-long (17 m), 18-foot-wide (5.5 m) steel ship, much faster than her descendants.

Captain F. Manzzutti, a marine surveyor who surveyed the Queen, described the new vessel as such: a specially designed, staunch, graceful, open-water long-voyage, heavy weather ferry ... with a gracefully raked stem, streamline, contour, elliptical after-splay; tumble-home transom; rounded forefoot; slightly flared, raised bow; straight sides; v-bow merging into semi-modest v-bottom to midship, thence to a near-flat bottom to the reinforced transom area.

Despite his efforts, Kilpela could not find a new vessel worthy of the crossing, so he hired naval architect Timothy Graul to design a lengthening of his current ship.

Kilpela and his three sons sailed the ship up three rivers, into Lake Michigan, and finally, to Copper Harbor, where it was renamed the Isle Royale Queen IV.