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M/V KALAKALA
Puget Sound Ferry

Click on this image to download a 30k detail

The year is 1933, and Captain Alexander Peabody, head of the Puget Sound Navigation Co., has just purchased the burned out hulk of the San Francisco ferry Peralta (launched in 1926). He has dreams of making it into the flagship of his fleet. And he wants this to be a very striking flagship, too, hence his Mom’s reputed allusion to the DeSoto. The design, however it was dreamed up, became the basis for one of the most unusual ships ever constructed. Certainly, it has never been duplicated and the Kalakala remains the only Art-Deco ship ever to be designed, or launched.

The name Kalakala means “Flying Bird” in the Chinook Indian tongue and this “rare bird” flew between the Bremerton shipyards and Seattle for more than a decade before finally moving on to transport vehicular traffic between Seattle and Victoria, B.C. for another twenty years before being retired in the mid-1960s.

In the pre-war years, the Kalakala was famous for her Saturday night dance cruises, when for a dollar you could dance the night away with your sweetheart to the swinging sounds of the ship's own "Flying Bird Orchestra". Once the war came, such frivolity ceased and it was work, work, work, for the duration. Soon, the Kalakala was one of five ferries running in a continuous shuttle service hauling shift after shift of yard workers back and forth to the bustling Bremerton yards. With her size, Kalakala, handled the lion's share of the 28 scheduled trips a day that the ferries made. Complete with showers and lockers, the ship also allowed the yard workers a place to clean up and change clothes on their way home.

When the Kalakala was launched in the in the summer of 1935, the futuristic “spaceship ferry” garnered press attention from coast to coast. Everyone saw it as the ship of the future. Enthused the august Saturday Evening Post, this is “the most important nautical event since Noah’s Ark...” Well, she may have been the most modern ship afloat, but the ferry is best remembered today by those who rode her, for her teeth-rattling ride for there was some problem with the alignment of her shafts and she was plagued with vibration problems for her entire career.

Retired in 1967, the Kalakala was converted into a salmon cannery with the addition of $400,000 of cannery equipment and towed north to Alaska where she served the fishing industry for many years. Recently the ship was again towed south, this time back to Seattle where the Kalakala Foundation has hopes of restoring the ship as a museum and conference center at Bremerton or to turn it into some type of tourist attraction.

This ship was another very difficult one to build as the rounded streamlined construction of the Kalakala is such that there is nowhere to hide the normal seams that invariably occur when you build such a large vessel in a bottle. As I result I had to determine some method of building it so that the seams were minimal. A very difficult task indeed when the ship is 1 1/2" by 1 1/2" ( 40mm by 40mm) and has to fit through a neck opening of less than 3/4" (18mm)...

Displacement: tons ( kg) Length: 276 ft. (11.6 m) Beam: 56 ft ( 4.3 m)
Top Speed: 18 knots (68 kmph) Crew: 13 Passengers: 1943 Vehicle Capacity: 60 cars
Scale: 1 in 490 Length of Model: 6 7/8 " (173 mm) Bottle Size: 20oz (750 ml)

Model ship photos & text © D.S. Smith 2003

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