Dockside with the Cove Isle: How Catalina Fuels Keeps the Great Lakes Working
- Jun 23
- 7 min read
There is a particular kind of quiet that settles over a working dock on an overcast morning. The freighters wait. The water sits flat and grey against the lock wall. And tucked in beside a red-hulled Coast Guard vessel, a Catalina Fuels tanker runs a single hose down to the dock and gets to work. It is not a dramatic scene. But moments exactly like this one, fuel moving from a truck to a hull, reliably and on schedule, are what keep the entire Great Lakes shipping system moving.
The vessel in the photo is the CCGS Cove Isle, a Canadian Coast Guard ship that has been working these waters since 1980. The truck beside her is ours. This is what marine refueling looks like for Catalina Fuels, and it is one of the parts of the job we are proudest of.
Meet the Cove Isle
The Cove Isle is easy to overlook next to the thousand-foot lakers she sometimes shares a dock with, but she does essential work. She is a navigation aids tender, a buoy tender, one of the small, tough specialty vessels the Canadian Coast Guard relies on to keep the lakes safe to navigate. Her crew sets, retrieves and maintains the buoys and channel markers that every other vessel on the water depends on, and that black deck crane you can see in the photograph is the tool that lets them lift those heavy steel buoys in and out of the water.
She was built in 1980 by Canadian Dredge & Dock Ltd. in Kingston, Ontario, and she has been in continuous service ever since. The specifications tell the story of a purpose-built workboat rather than a glamour ship:
Length: 20 metres (about 65 feet)
Beam: 6 metres
Draught: 1.7 metres
Tonnage: 92 gross tonnes
Propulsion: two Cummins diesel engines
Speed: 12 knots
Range: 2,000 nautical miles
Endurance: 14 days
Crew: five
Her home port is CCG Base Parry Sound, on Georgian Bay, and she is assigned to the Coast Guard's Central Region. She takes her name from Cove Island, the small island near Tobermory that marks the entrance to Georgian Bay, a fitting name for a boat whose job is to mark the way for everyone else.
Because she is not strengthened for ice, the Cove Isle works a roughly nine-month season, from April to December, and then stands down while the lakes freeze. During those working months her duties go well beyond tending buoys. The Coast Guard lists her roles as resupplying and maintaining lighthouse stations along Georgian Bay, providing search and rescue support, assisting with pollution cleanup when needed, and supporting science research on the water. It is a remarkable amount of capability packed into a 20-metre hull crewed by five people.
Why a buoy tender needs a fuel truck
It is a fair question. The Coast Guard runs a national fleet, so why is a fuel truck from Grimsby pulling up alongside one of its vessels?
The answer is that marine refueling on the Great Lakes is a logistics problem, not a pump-at-the-gas-station problem. Vessels like the Cove Isle don't always tie up where there is a fixed fueling facility. They work out of working harbours, canal walls, lay-by berths and service docks scattered across hundreds of kilometres of shoreline. The most practical way to keep them fuelled is to bring the fuel to the hull, on-site, on the vessel's schedule, wherever she happens to be working that week.
That is exactly the service Catalina Fuels was built around. We are a mobile, on-site fuel delivery company. Our trucks already spend their days bringing diesel to construction sites, equipment yards, generators and fleets that can't easily come to us. Bringing marine diesel down to a dock is the same discipline applied to the water's edge: the right fuel, the right volume, delivered cleanly and safely, with the paperwork done and the spill kit on hand before the hose ever comes off the reel.
The fuel itself matters too. Modern marine engines and emissions rules have moved the industry firmly toward clean, low-sulphur distillate fuels. Marine gas oil (MGO) and ultra-low-sulphur diesel are distillate fuels, the same family of clean-burning products we deliver on land, and since the International Maritime Organization's 2020 global sulphur cap, vessels are required to burn fuel with no more than 0.50% sulphur content. For a distillate-burning workboat like the Cove Isle, that means the marine diesel going into her tanks is closely related to the on-road and off-road diesel our trucks carry every day. It is fuel we know, handled the way we always handle it.
The bigger picture: a dock, a lock, and 135 million tonnes of cargo
Look past the Cove Isle in the photograph and you see the rest of the system: a Great Lakes freighter at berth, and the grey wall of a canal lock. That backdrop is not incidental. It is the reason this corner of southern Ontario is one of the busiest stretches of inland water in North America.
The Welland Canal climbs the Niagara Escarpment between Port Weller on Lake Ontario and Port Colborne on Lake Erie, lifting ships over the height of land that Niagara Falls makes impossible to sail. It does this with eight locks: seven that step vessels up and down the escarpment and a guard lock at Port Colborne. The canal is a working part of the St. Lawrence Seaway, and every year roughly 3,000 ships pass through it carrying about 40 million tonnes of cargo. Lock 3, in St. Catharines, is famous enough to have its own public viewing platform where visitors watch the lakers rise and fall.
Zoom out to the whole Great Lakes and St. Lawrence Seaway system and the numbers get genuinely large. In 2022, the system moved 135.7 million metric tonnes of cargo, valued at around US$26.1 billion. That waterborne commerce supported more than 241,000 jobs across the United States and Canada, nearly 94,000 of them on the Canadian side, and generated tens of billions of dollars in economic activity. Iron ore, grain, salt, stone, cement and fuel all move on these waters because moving them by ship is still, by a wide margin, the most efficient way to do it.
None of that cargo moves if the channels aren't marked, the locks aren't working, and the vessels aren't fuelled. The Cove Isle handles the first part. The Seaway authorities handle the second. And companies like Catalina Fuels handle the third.
What marine refueling actually involves
There is a craft to dockside fueling that doesn't show up in a single photograph. A marine delivery is not just a bigger version of filling a car. Before a drop of fuel moves, our crew is thinking about a checklist that runs something like this.
A delivery starts with access and positioning, getting the truck safely into place at the water's edge, which, as the photo shows, can mean parking on grass and gravel a careful distance from the dock and running the hose the rest of the way. From there it is about containment and spill prevention: drip trays, absorbent materials and a spill kit staged and ready, because the one thing you never want near open water is uncontrolled fuel. Then comes the right product and the right volume, metered and documented, so the vessel gets exactly what its tanks and its paperwork call for. And underneath all of it is safety and compliance: grounding, no-smoking discipline, communication with the vessel's crew, and the fire extinguisher within reach.
It is methodical, unglamorous work, and that is the point. The best marine refueling is the kind nobody notices, because nothing went wrong.
Proud to serve the vessels that serve our waters
Catalina Fuels is a family-owned company based at 18 Tops Drive in Grimsby, Ontario, with more than fifteen years behind us. Most days, our work is on land: bulk diesel and gasoline delivery, on-site and mobile refueling, generator fueling, tank rentals, diesel exhaust fluid (DEF), lubricants and complete fuel-management systems for fleets and job sites across the Niagara region, Hamilton, Halton, Haldimand and the Greater Toronto Area. We run deliveries 24 hours a day, seven days a week, because the equipment we fuel doesn't keep office hours.
But there is something special about the marine side of the business. Fueling a vessel like the Cove Isle means playing a small part in keeping the Canadian Coast Guard on the water, the people who mark the channels, maintain the lighthouses, support search and rescue, and respond when something goes wrong out on the lakes. We are proud to support the crews who serve these waters, and proud that a red Catalina tanker has earned its place on the dock beside them.
So the next time you are standing at the rail at Lock 3 watching a freighter climb the canal, remember the quieter vessels working alongside the giants, and the trucks that keep all of them moving.
Frequently asked questions
What is the CCGS Cove Isle?
The CCGS Cove Isle is a Canadian Coast Guard navigation aids tender (buoy tender) built in 1980 and based at CCG Base Parry Sound on Georgian Bay. She maintains buoys and channel markers, resupplies lighthouse stations, and supports search and rescue, pollution response and science work on the Great Lakes.
What kind of fuel do Great Lakes vessels use?
Many modern Great Lakes workboats burn clean distillate fuels such as marine gas oil (MGO) and ultra-low-sulphur diesel. Since the IMO's 2020 global sulphur cap, marine fuels are limited to 0.50% sulphur content, pushing the industry toward these cleaner products.
Does Catalina Fuels deliver fuel to boats and ships?
Yes. Alongside our on-site and mobile fuel delivery on land, Catalina Fuels provides dockside marine refueling for vessels across the Great Lakes and Ontario's waterways, bringing the fuel directly to the hull wherever the vessel is berthed.
Where does Catalina Fuels deliver?
We serve the Niagara region, Hamilton, Halton, Haldimand and the Greater Toronto Area, including Grimsby, St. Catharines, Welland, Niagara Falls, Fort Erie, Port Colborne and beyond, with 24/7 delivery. Call 1-866-606-3835 to talk to a fuel-management expert.
Sources: Canadian Coast Guard and CCGS Cove Isle vessel records (Wikipedia, DFO Coast Guard fleet database); Welland Canal and St. Lawrence Seaway figures (Great Lakes St. Lawrence Seaway System, Britannica); Great Lakes St. Lawrence Seaway 2022 economic impact study (Martin Associates / Seaway); marine fuel and IMO 2020 sulphur cap information (industry bunkering guides); Catalina Fuels Inc. company and service information (catalinafuels.ca).
