En route Rabboni had stopped at Coos Bay and procured a three-month supply of coal, and picked up 18,000 board feet of lumber.
[3] Rabboni was considered a good tug for the time, but ran into opposition at the Columbia from the bar pilots and prejudice among sailing ship owners against steam craft of any kind.
[3] After many years out of the area, Rabboni was returned to the Pacific Northwest, this time to the Strait of Juan de Fuca, in an effort to pick up tow work from inbound ships headed for ports in Puget Sound.
The Klondike gold rush created a great demand for shipping, which resulted, as one historian as written, in “large number of old vessels pulled off the mudflats and out of backwater sloughs from Oakland Creek to British Columbia.
Rabboni was last used in service for the Bellingham Bay Improvement Company, whose lumber mills were controlled by Cornwall.