Iconic Launceston vessel Lady Stelfox's final fate revealed

After two decades ferrying tourists on the Tamar River, the replica paddle-steamer was sold interstate in 2002 to run the tourist route between Docklands and Williamstown.

Much mystery and speculation has surrounded its whereabouts since.

Some said it was still in use at Port Philip, Mackay or on the Murray River, while another rumour had it that the vessel was overhauled to transport cattle.

The reality was far less glamorous.

Hamish Turner, who runs Classic Steamboat Cruises in Melbourne, said the Stelfox had been scrapped in about 2015 after many years standing outside Melbourne Maritime Services in Docklands.

"It sat there out of the water for years and years before they finally demolished it," Mr Turner said.

"It barely ever did anything here at Melbourne - I think it sank once at Docklands which is why it came out of the water and that was it.

"In the end it would have had to have gone because I think the Port of Melbourne were taking back some of the land [Melbourne Maritime Services] was using at the time."

The Lady Stelfox was the brainchild of Penny Royal founder Roger Smith.

In September 1982, five years after the original concept was designed, the boat's frame arrived in the Penny Royal carpark beneath Paterson Bridge.

A team of about 10 men spent the next 15 weeks in "desperate activity" to have the boat taking passengers by Christmas.

On December 12 that year, the state's two largest cranes lifted the finished vessel onto a low-loader on Paterson Bridge.

After 16 hours of painstaking work, the boat was launched off the Tamar Marine slipways about midnight and taken to its moorings.

Mr Smith asked Colin Davis, who had previously skippered Tamar Sea Rescue vessel MV Goondooloo, to become the ship's first captain.

"I was the first one out in the boat in the water," Mr Davis said.

"[People loved it because] it was an antiquity. They could stand in there and watch the big beam engine - which was the full height of the ship - turning the paddles around.

"They could lean out the doors right where the paddles were and watch them flapping around in the water."

Not everything about the project went to plan.

The Stelfox was built top-heavy and needed four buoyancy tanks to be stable in the water, but even that couldn't stop it becoming a staple of the Tamar for the next 20 years.

Geoff Hays got his skipper's ticket specifically to run the vessel.

"We would have had hundreds of thousands of people on her over the years," he told The Examiner in 2002.

"She could carry 70 passengers and we went out seven or eight times a day. One day we went out nine times."

But by the turn of the decade, things had changed.

Tourist numbers were declining, and as many as three trips a day were being cancelled due to silt and tide problems.

In 2002, it was announced the Stelfox would head to new waters.

Then-Penny Royal owner Ross Ambrose sold the Lady Stelfox to the late Peter Mitz, an "eccentric" Melbourne businessman who had built an entire 1850s-themed tourist town in Central Victoria.

It was tugged to Bell Bay, loaded up on a barge, and arrived in Melbourne a few days later.

From there the timeline gets hazy.

One account says that the owner was seriously injured while working on the boat and then wanted nothing more to do with it.

Another reported that the boat was repossessed and sold at auction, fetching $10,000.

Whatever happened, the ship ultimately found its way to Enterprize Road in Docklands, and was last captured on Google Maps imaging in 2013.

By the time a prospective buyer visited in mid-2015, the boat was in a sorry state.

The Stelfox had sunk in the port after its bilge pump was left disconnected.

The boat was pulled out of the water but had rotting timber, holes in the roof and its engines and electrics were damaged.

At the age of 35 years the Lady Stelfox was scrapped, and Ports Victoria has no records of it past 2015.

Even under different circumstances or different owners, Mr Turner believes the vessel would have struggled to find a market in Melbourne.

"I can tell you from experience trying to operate a boat like that in those early days at Docklands - it wouldn't have worked," he said.

"It might have worked now - but he wouldn't have been able to get the business for it back then."

Launceston lost its last major link to the Lady Stelfox soon after.

The Stelfox jetty - a picturesque boat shed, walkway and pontoon outside Stillwater - was washed away in the 2016 floods.

Torrential flows through the Gorge carried the shed many kilometres up the river to Rosevears, and it was later fished out by Gravelly Beach Marine.

The pontoon was recovered and sold for use on a private dam.

A small graffiti-laden shed beneath Paterson Bridge, now part of the Stillwater property, stands as the sole remnant of the Stelfox's home base.

"The shed was used as the storage shed for supplies to the Lady Stelfox," Stillwater co-founder Rod Ascui said.

"When I bought that asset from the Penny Royal people the Lady Stelfox was long gone. It was just part of what came with the pontoon."

The Lady Stelfox will never scrape the Tamar River's muddy bottom again.

Vintage merchandise on Ebay - mainly postcards, badges and spoons - is all that remains of the ship.

Twenty-two years on, Mr Hays' observations as he watched the paddle-steamer disappear out of Launceston towards Bell Bay and Melbourne seem more fitting than ever.

"It's a sad thing to see the old girl go, but nothing lasts forever."