Story
Wir’s hull was built in 1910 by the Mäntylä workshop owned by Juho Matti Itkonen in the area of present-day Varkaus, near the Lehtoniemi workshop. The ship was ordered by Axel Ungern as a pleasure yacht at the Putkisalo manor in Rantasalmi, which he owned. It was named “Saga” after Ungern’s daughter. Already three years later, in 1913, it was sold to Sääminki, where it operated as the milk boat of the Tynkkylänjoki manor under the name “Tynkkylänjoki” until 1940, hosted by Johannes Itkonen. After this, the ship operated as a tugboat under the name “Viri” first in Savonlinna, then in Enonkoski and Punkasalmi. Viri had reportedly been submerged in Punkasalmi since 1948, when in 1951 Savon Voima Oy bought it in Kuopio and turned it into a towing engine called “Voima”. The power was sold in 1958 to Näsijärvi Visuvesi Oy, where it worked until 1985, when it ceased commercial traffic.
It now remained standing dry on the shore of the Visuvesi sawmill until it was bought by a private individual in 1993 and the steamer began to work on it again. After purchasing the Power, the owners began to convert it into a steam boat. Its hull was refurbished and the deck structures were made completely new and more reminiscent of an old-fashioned steam loop, in accordance with the old photograph and drawings of the steam boat Mary (Satu). The new “Puhti” vertical boiler was commissioned at a workshop in Suolahti, and the aforementioned 4-person single-cylinder machine, purchased in 1967, was installed. Finding a suitable propeller was difficult, eventually one was found in Heinävesi, which had a bronze propeller from the steam boom “Tenhon” that had been scrapped decades earlier. From the old steam-time names of the ship, the name of the ship was chosen in a slightly different form “Wiri”. The small single-cylinder steam engine together with the “Tenhon” heavy propeller made the ship slow and difficult to maneuver, so the owner refurbished the defective 7 ihv compound machine from the Kotvio sawmill into a new working machine for Wiri. The “new” aircraft was made in England and was originally on the German warship “Emden” as a steam-powered connecting boat. Alarik Gummerus had found it in England and brought it to Finland in the 1910s. With the new machinery, the Wir became an easy-to-handle steam jet, and its speed also improved as the ship cooled in its home waters on the Streams.
