"[6] Active until 1944, the Mabel Brown class Malahat was the longest-lived of all the 12 five-masted auxiliary schooners built in Victoria and North Vancouver in 1917–1918.

[7] Malahat began her career as a working lumber schooner, sailing between Canada and Australia, transporting a cargo of 1,300,000 board feet in 1917.

[6] She was used as a self-propelled log barge, carrying Sitka spruce from the Queen Charlotte Islands to the booming ground at the Powell River in Teakerne Arm in Desolation Sound.

[12][13] The Malahat sailed out to "Rum Row", located somewhere between the Pacific Coast and Hawaii (possibly the Farallon Islands), where she served as a floating warehouse[4][14] while smaller, faster vessels picked up the contraband liquor and ran it ashore.

"[17] One cargo, consisting of "32,000 cases of whiskey and 15 barrels of beer," required "almost nine months to discharge" due to the foggy weather in 1925 along the California coast.

[14] Apparently this was possible in part because Captain Stone's sister-in-law, who lived near Jericho Beach, Vancouver, received information from "sympathetic coastal vessels" and transmitted coded radio messages to the ship regarding the Coast Guard's whereabouts.

[14] Evasive tactics included dropping burlap bags of sand over the side as a decoy, and marking the site as a cache of liquor, in order to distract the Coast Guard's attention while the ship sailed off to another location.

[23] The career of the Malahat has been cited as recently as October 2011, on the floor of the House of Commons of Canada, by MP Randall Garrison, as an example of potential negative consequences that could result from passing a new law to prohibit transport of wine between provinces for personal use.