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New Brunswick pioneer Molly Kool honoured by Coast Guard

'Bad ice year' looms as Coast Guard adds 1st new icebreaker to fleet in 25 years

The Canadian Coast Guard has named the first of three new icebreakers after New Brunswick trailblazer Myrtle "Molly" Kool.

The Alma native, born in 1916, was the second woman in the world — and first in North America — to become a licensed ship captain.

The CGCS Captain Molly Kool, measuring 93.7 metres long by 18 metres wide, is the first new icebreaker floated in 25 years. It's part of a trio of ships purchased from Norway in August.

Ensuring "Captain" was part of the name was a brilliant decision, according to James Upham of Resurgo Place, a Moncton-based museum and discovery centre.

"It's perfect," Upham told Shift.

"The point with Molly is that she's Capt. Kool."

But earning that distinction didn't come easy.

"People actively hindered this. They really tried to scuttle her," he said.

Born to a family of mariners, Kool learned her trade while working on her father's boat the Jean K, a vessel she would eventually captain. As she took on more responsibility for the boat, Kool applied to be a licensed captain, only to be denied at first.

The shipping legislation referred to a captain as "he," Upham said, but Kool fought it, passed the test and was awarded her coastal master's certificate in 1939.

After making it through unusually rigorous testing — an attempt to ensure she would fail, he said — Kool went straight to a telegraph office and sent her father a telegram that simply read, "From now on you can call me captain," Upham said.

From then on, she earned a reputation as a fearless mariner transporting cargo on the Bay of Fundy.

A symbol for women

Kool's childhood home in Alma was rebuilt with a museum aspect to honour North America's first seafaring captain following her death at age 93 in 2009.

"She was a woman who plowed the way for other women to enter into various occupations which were thought as being only masculine," said Mary Majka, Albert County Heritage Trust president at the time.

Kool's ashes were taken out in a lobster fishing boat and scattered just a few nautical miles off the coast of Alma.

A Quebec shipbuilder won a now $827-million contract for the acquisition and refit of the vessels. The other two are expected to be ready in 2019 and 2020.

The CGCS Captain Molly Kool's home port is in St. John's, Nfld.