Columnist David G. Sellars boarded the 580-foot STX Pioneer log ship at the Port of Port Angeles and recalled his experience in the Peninsula Daily News:
Log ship at Port Angeles. Photo by David G. Sellars/for Peninsula Daily News
We spied logging trucks running a loop from Peninsula Plywood to the docks, where the debarked logs were lifted off by the port’s log loaders and nested in log bunks adjacent to the ship while the trucks returned to PenPly for another load.
Longshoremen [ILWU Local 27 – Ed.] set the rigging around the nested logs, which were then hoisted aboard ship and stowed into her holds.
This process went on hundreds of times until all of the contracted logs were loaded.