The Wanda Sue cruises along the South Thompson River in Kamloops on August 3.
Image Credit: SUBMITTED/ Darcy Anderson
August 07, 2024 - 6:00 AM
The paddlewheeler Wanda Sue was spotted cruising along the river in Kamloops over the weekend causing a bit of stir among its fans.
Darcy Anderson caught the iconic paddlewheeler on video as it churned past his South Thompson River property on a sunny Saturday, Aug. 3.
Built by George Slack in the early 1980s, and currently owned by the Slack family, the 40-year-old boat has a special history in the tournament capital.
The Wanda Sue is 18-feet wide and almost 100-feet long, and in 1984 it was licensed to carry 100 passengers.
For two decades it plied the waters of the South Thompson down to Savona on occasion and up to Salmon Arm on others. Most of the cruises took roughly 2.5 hours. It couldn’t run up the North Thompson because it was too shallow and the mechanism to lift the CN Rail Bridge span had been removed.
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The popularity of the tours eventually dwindled and the boat was parked at George’s home in 2003.
"Every year it is fired up and moved at least from her inside moorage to the outside moorage, and sometimes on a little family cruise," George Slack's grandson Rick Slack told iNFOnews.ca.
"The family would love to see the Wanda Sue plying the river again on a commercial basis, and are always interested in talking to people who share that vision or have aspirations of making that happen."
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