Good Old Boat as "Nature Says When" 2005
Ever since I was a child machines have fascinated me, especially if they have big diesels in them. The sounds that emanate from these machines: the whirls, the pssst, the throbbing - well they just seem alive. The mass and momentum, even when creeping along mesmerizes me.
Davenport, Iowa was my home for some 1000 days (but whose was counting) and the one thing that kept me entertained all summer was riding my bike down to Lock and Dam #15 to watch the big tows go through, usually on their way down the Mississippi River to New Orleans, with their cargos of wheat, soybeans and corn destine for some far off country.
The five story push boats and their barges would slowly glide into the lock, almost silently till it was time to stop, then clouds of black smoke appeared from the stacks to the sounds of tympanis and bass drums. The equivalent of many hundreds of truckloads quickly came to a stop as a seething caldron of water erupted at the rear of the boat.
It is all done with such élan; I just hoped that if I ever got a boat (a dim prospect) I could do as well with thirty feet as opposed to three hundred plus feet. It all seems organic to me, like large breathing, belching and well farting creatures have descended upon us. I would sit there for hours in the warm sun, on the banks of the river and just watch and dream.
But this is a story about the transition from sail to power, a transition that occupied a good decade of my life. I cannot remember when I first saw my first small tug, I mean one which I could actually own. I cannot even remember if it was in person or a photo in an ad but it certainly left an impression on my frontal cortex similar to the first Herreshoff design I gazed at in a big coffee table book. These are real boats designed to look and act the part, and come from an American tradition of working boats and not the imagination of some anonymous euro-design team.
Now remember this is happening to me in pre-internet days. I wasn’t able to get gratification by typing “tug” into the search engine and have a few thousands images instantly available. I commenced to search and while secretly looking at powerboats magazines I saw an ad for a dealer selling tugs about half a days drive from my home base. So one Saturday morning my wife Charlotte (she had figured out my obsession by this point) and I took a ride to see these exotic creatures.
It could not have been more than forty degrees out and was drizzling and foggy by the time we got up north to the dealer. They were very patient with us considering that it would probable be another fifteen years before we would have enough where-with-all to purchase one of these little ships.
I took a few pictures of the tugs and placed them on the refrigerator. Not on the front, which is reserved for family, friends and more attainable goods, but on the side. Every day as I walked into the kitchen I would see these two boats perched up on their cradles and think about the possibility of actually owning one.
Time moved on and we became the owners of a superbly built 31 foot Swedish sloop, got a mooring in the harbor I had first started sailing in thirty years before and hence fulfilled the dream of a life time. The next five years were spent rebuilding every system and learning to sail her properly. Another five years went by and all of a sudden we had become middle aged.
This was a shock to both of us. I think I first realized it when the top of my head got sunburned. I couldn’t understand this; it certainly looked to me like I had a lot of hair when I looked in the mirror. Other clues, such as taking thirty minutes to straighten up every morning after sleeping in the V-berth and having to approach getting to the head in the middle of the night like a military campaign, brought the inevitability of aging home.
So I decided to start looking in earnest for a powerboat of the trawler type. I had never paid much attention to powerboat design, figuring it would be simple compared to sailboats and I think there is some truth to this but not enough to warrant ignorance of the subject.
Starting my search for information I first looked to the various powerboat magazines but mainly found boats which could sit-in for the shuttles on the Spaceship Enterprise or ads with either young body builder types or older gents with shocks of white hair with the prerequisite bikinied blond on their arm, but not much about boat design.
Little by little I started to decipher the lingo and understand the differences between planing, semi-displacement and displacement hull forms: the pros and cons of inboards versus outboards, single screw versus double screw, diesel versus gasoline and thruster versus no thruster. I also started to come to grips with the concept of gallons per hour versus gallons per season. I have paid much more attention to the price of crude oil since signing the mortgage for the tug.
Oh yes, I forget to mention we did go over to the dark side and are now the owners of a 1990 32 foot single-screw, semi-displacement tug soon to be renamed the Carrie Rose, after my wife’s grandmothers. We still have the sailboat but it is on the block and our friends, though at first somewhat suspicious and wondering if I was also going to become a republican, have been very gracious. I even think they are a looking forward to their first ride, as I am having been on a powerboat for less than five hours in my entire life.
So today, on this spring day with the cumulus clouds gently gliding overhead from the southwest, I am in my car parked at Montrose Harbor, looking out through the harbor entrance at downtown Chicago, trying to imagine what my mooring will look like with a stack and a pilothouse instead of a mast and a dodger.
I spent the last ten years getting ready for this moment, but I think I will sign up as crew on the Wednesday night beer can races just to keep my feet in the water as we heel over to the gust on Lake Michigan.
