The News Tribune reached out to several sources before finding answers. The book “Exploring Maritime Washington” by Erich Ebel briefly listed the ship as a water tender built in 1919 that was later renamed Captain Barker and sunk in the 1970s. One of “The Crete Fleet”, “WWI Concrete Water Tank Boats - Built in Vancouver, Washington” and published Aug. 13, 2023 explores the history of the first ocean-going concrete “tank boats” built to transport fresh water in the United States following World War I. Concrete ships were built as an experiment after a scarcity of vessels during wartime combined with a shortage of steel, the article said, people were also interested in exploring the durability and affordability of concrete as a shipbuilding material. The Great Northern Concrete Shipbuilding Co. of Vancouver built five “tank boats” designed to carry 52,000 gallons of fresh water each. They were launched between Feb. 20, 1920 and May 31, 1920. Only two of those ships survived more than one year and the rest sank as a result of storms. The boats were not properly constructed for sea trips, it has been said that the shape of the ships made them ride too low in the water and made them easy to tip. Captain Barker was one of the ships to survive longer than a year, it launched on March 3, 1919 but was placed in dry dock after its first sea trials found its steering ability unsatisfactory. Enos Crawford was assigned captain on Jan. 18, 1920 and the Captain Barker arrived in Astoria from Vancouver on Jan. 21, 1920, towed by tugboat USAT Slocum. In October 1921 Captain Barker was offered for sale at Fort Canby, Astoria, and in June 1923 it was bought by Rouse Towboat Co., which was part of Foss Launch and Tug Co., with the plan to have the ship towed from Astoria to Seattle for use in local waters, the article said. It was renamed Foss 103 and used as a sludge-disposal barge. In the mid-1960s it was sunk as breakwater at the end of Nisqually Spit. At some point the boat split in two, likely the result of yawing in the tide.