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9. Ship of the Month - cont'd. Leaf Mills, but the environmental authorities quickly pounced on her as a result of her copious emissions of black coal smoke. She encountered the same sort of attention from the authorities at Buffalo, much to the dismay of her owners. The PICKANDS was taken to the Defoe shipyard at Bay City, Michigan, for repairs in late June, but after a thorough review of her condition, it was decided that the steamer simply was not worth the major expenditure anticipated for long-term repairs. Accordingly, it was decided not to proceed with any major refitting, and the PICKANDS was sold to Marine Salvage L t d . , Port Colborne, for scrapping. She arrived at Cleveland for the last time with a cargo of iron ore on July 17, 1974, and after unloading, she was sent around to Ashtabula, where she was laid up and stripped of some of her equipment. C OLONEL JAMES PICKANDS passed down the Well a n d Ship Canal during the night of September 17-18, 1974, in tow of the McAllister tugs SALVAGE M O N A R C H and HELEN M. McALLISTER. She cleared Quebec on November 15, 1974, behind the deep-sea tug DOLPHIN X, and despite the lateness of the season, she crossed the Atlantic safely and arrived at Santander, Spain, where dismantling was begun on December 13, 1974, by Recuperaciones Submarinas, S. A. The next of the sisters to leave the Interlake fleet was ROBERT HOBSON, which was sold during the summer of 1975, and like the Pickands, she went to Marine Salvage Ltd. On August 9, 1975, she was towed stern-first down through Lock 8 of the Welland Ship Canal by the G-tugs GEOR G I A and OKLAHOMA, and they tucked her away in the scrapyard at Ramey's Bend. She did not remain there very long, however, for by m i d - S e p t e m b e r , she had been pulled out of the scrapyard and was fitting out at the Law Stone Dock at Humberstone, in the old canal section opposite the Robin Hood elevator. The HO B S O N had, in fact, been resold by Marine Salvage to the Quebec and Ontario Transpo r t a t i o n Company Ltd., Montreal, which placed her under Canadian regis t r y and enrolled her at Port Colborne as (b) OUTARDE (III) (C. 384593). Her revised Canadian tonnage was recorded as 9086 Gross and 6728 Net. Her new owner wasted no time in converting OUTARDE to oil fuel, and this work was done in the early spring of 1976, while the ship was still in winter quarters at Toronto. (She had brought a storage cargo of soya beans to the Victory Soya Mills elevator at the foot of Parliament Street, and then had been placed along the face of the wharf near the foot of Sherbourne S t r e e t .) Q & O took its own sweet time in getting OUTARDE painted up in the company's usual colours, and she never was painted exactly like her fleetmates. She spent her few months of o p eration in the autumn of 1975 still wear i n g an Interlake red hull and forecastle, and her name, along wit h a version of the old Q & O "intertwined letters" stack logo, painted in white on black patches on her bows. Her stack was black, with the old Interlake orange band now simply painted white. Her cabins remained white. OUTARDE kept those strange colours throughout the following winter, and only very slowly during 1976 did she receive a black hull, a white forecastle and a wider white band on the stack. The white stack band was surrounded by two na r r o w blue bands, and the company's "pine tree" symbol appeared in blue on the white band. Even in 1977, however, she still had her name painted in white on a black patch on the white forecastle. Even after the patch finally disapp e a r e d and her name was properly painted in black letters on the forecastle, she still looked odd because of the strange Q & O logo on her bow (she was the only boat in the fleet to wear it there), and also because her pilothouse sunvisor latterly was painted black, a most unusual feature. O UTARDE operated r e latively u n e v e n t f u l l y for Q & 0, pr i m a r i l y in the grain trade, but at the close of the 1983, Quebec and Ontario T r a n s p o r t a t i o n made the announcement that it was d i s c ontinuing vessel operations. Early in 1984, the entire fleet was sold to Groupe Desgagnes Inc., of Quebec City. Some of the former Q & O vessels did operate for the new owner, but OUTARDE was not