Tugboat Times Revisited (circa 1968)

written on 12-03-08   TUGBOAT TIMES REVISITED   (circa March 1968) :    I had sailed my home-in-a-boat up Richardson Bay and on into Waldo Point's (then still uncluttered-to-death) sailors' snug harbor & anchored a few hundred feet off shore where my boat would not bottom out on the low tide of that day. Some days, I would anchor nearer the shore and let the boat sit on the mud for low tide. Of course, I had previously, at earlier low tides, gone to study the debris-fields' exact bearings; & there were quite a few piles of stuff that earlier folks had dumped into the bay—fridges, old tires, snarly tangled clumps of steel wires & very rusty cable. This local knowledge allowed me to get in close to the shallowest parts of the shore-side areas to where I often went for to play music with others at practices or parties, or try to find a hit or two's worth of schtuka--or, for about a year & ½ or two: the various pure substances that were occasionally available in one place or another along the waterfront in those days, that produced the psychedelic-experience-- plus for taking laundry to the laundromat & buying food (or gleaning some of the makings out from the supermarket's dumpster out back). ¶ Had got the anchor set & was rowing my rowboat toward shore when I saw this (to me) newly-arrived floating apparition where there previously had been only water: A tugboat and its large barge. The barge was made of steel and stood almost six feet high out of the salt water backwater I was rowing my rowboat across toward shore. Sixty by thirty feet, I judged; & with two twelve inch diameter pipes welded to it amidships on either side that stood twenty feet in the air. I later learned that these pipes held within them a solid steel ten inch diameter, essentially, a giant nail; called a spud by those in this trade. 'Neat,' I thought, 'no anchor needed.' At least in waters under about 15 feet deep, 90% of the navigable waters of San Francisco bay and its hundreds of miles of delta tributaries are that shallow. A Link Belt  boom-crane assembly, with its eighty feet long, twenty tons lift capacity, boom's outer end resting in it's ten-feet-off-the-deck tall sturdy steel cradle on one end of the barge, and still overhanging another fifteen or twenty feet over the water out beyond the barge's end-plates. And, at the other end stood the steel operator's cage with all of its many levers and gear-shifts and brake pedals that control the functions of the machinery driven by the large diesel engine; whose shed populated the deck under where the boom lay, along with two double spool wire-winches and their large gears' housings. One double-hub winch was for operating the spud-lifting cables, and the other operated the two sets of wire cable blocks and tackle set-ups that controlled the lift of the boom, and up or down of its 'bucket' or slings; or for positioning its forty feet high steel framed pile-driving slides, and raise the thousand pound pile driving hammer. ¶ Alongside of the barge was a fifty feet long wooden harbor tugboat tied up that I instantly noticed had three exhaust stacks (instantly aroused my curiosity : Why 3?) sticking out of its engine-room trunk cabin up against the rear of the tug's smaller-but-taller pilothouse. forward of it. These two cabins, one lower and one with stand-up room at deck level, and with large windows all around, occupied about 2/5ths of the forward half of the tugboat's deck. A large “Ħ” shaped welded 4” steel pipe kingpost-type tow-bitt and deck winch occupied most of the triangular foredeck space at the bow. The after half of the boat's deck was clear and flush, with the  solid large steel “Ħ”-shaped main tow bitt in the dead center of the boat, immediately behind the back of the engine-room trunk cabin's rear hatch. The two-piece hatch boards (1 horizontal & 1 vertical) that slid into slots, called slides, in the hatch opening's sides; its boards--painted the same bright orange as were the cabins' sides (rest of the boat's above-water vertical surfaces were painted black)--were lying atop the trunk cabin near the hole that led down onto the back of the sizable transmission unit on the rear of the middle diesel engine & then, a step down onto the floorboards alongside either side of this industrial-strength engine. Two more GMC 'jimmie' 671s (6 large cylinder) diesel engines flanked this middle one slightly forward of its position. I was later informed by the captain that each engine, in turn, ran its own propeller shaft and propeller!! I was impressed. So much so that after I had met and 'befriended' mister tugboat/crane-barge captain—this involved chipping all the old black paint and rust flakes off of ev-r-ry single square inch of that erector-set like eighty feet long, average four feet inner cage-like space inside its four beefier corner struts boom, hoisted up to at about 35 degrees, scrapping and sanding it, and then giving it a fresh coat of thick black paint; only took a week!—he gave me a job as helper and deckhand; and later as a worker in a boatyard he bought and ran for a few years, in addition to his waterborne business. We towed bunches of boats around from mooring-to-mooring or to & from boat yards for the bi-annual requisite haul-out to give them a fresh coat of bottom-paint; loaded ship's stores by the many tons' worth, up to the high decks of seagoing ships-at-anchor out in the ships' anchorage of S.F. bay; hauled huge rafts of large old select Douglas fir timbers back to home from pier-demolition projects across the bay, that he had bid on and won; drove pilings, lifted boats-to-fix out of the water, & plucked salvage from where it was to be found; repaired and sold, cheap, the stuff for what we could get for it, plus some extra for our labors, etc. Once, we pulled a 300 feet long 880 volt underwater lead-sheathed, three one-inch diameter strands of copper out from their steel pipe conduit, with the tug. It took 3 of us 3 days on our knees slicing the insulation off of 900 feet of one-pound-per-foot “#1” seven stranded tempered-copper wire that yielded our captain almost  $300 & us two helpers 120 $s apiece--after we finally got all that insulation removed at the cost of many blisters worn raw right through our gloves from incessant clutching-in-clenched-grip-wielding of the razor knives we used to cut the slit into & through the tuff thick plastic insulation to the copper; which then allowed us to pry it open enough to get the strand of copper started on its way being pulled out, foot-or-two--by-- foot-or-two, from its shroud. ¶ As a result of this introduction to waterfront style snatching of valuable objects from total-lost status and to realize that there was money in it—though never enough to support a family on; I was single in those days--I caught the fever for marine salvage. As my home bay's upper reaches' shallows and shore had long been a dumping ground for used up wooden vessels, barges, and six ancient auto ferries sticking their 3 or 4-story pilot houses up above from out of the helter-skelter hodge-podge mish-mash colorful patchwork quilt of housing setups in or on all sorts of floating & semi-floating stuff clinging to the many shore-side acres & waters immediately adjacent to the shore—& just seemingly chock full of all manner of marine wreckage--there was plenty of salvageable yellow metals. Valves, pipes, wiring, through-hull fittings, bolts, nuts, etc. I only focused on gleaning the yellow metals because steel salvage hardly pays for all the skin one loses when trying to rend old steel into the scrap-buyer's size specifications of nothing over 30” in length. Copper; yellow, white, & red brass; bronze, lead, & a few other more exotic metals such as monel & manganese-bronze; plus the occasional porthole or bronze cleat for the antique store lady downtown. & not-to-forget the many lost anchors & chain & rope & lots of other cast aside as 'junk' marine hardware stuff that was either usable or could be traded for other stuff I had the desire or need for. I spent many many low tides crawled into the carcasses old old worm-eaten wooden hulks of once solid vessels engaging in some noble or not-so-noble trade; to tempt the fates whether or not the creaking hulk would chose these moments to finally collapse into its muddy grave and take me along with it as, standing knee-deep in muddy muck, I whammed my sledgehammer or ax, or pried with my pry-bar another piece of yellow metal loose from the underwater sides of this vessel and that. Worrying loose the through-hull fittings of an ancient wooden ship of about 120 feet in length and twenty feet wide decks; sides eaten away at the waterline; inner ribs about eaten through; and already half sunk into the thick deep mud of this inner-harbor area of the small bay of Waldo that I called home base in those days of my boat-borne life—and all for another $40's worth of brass or bronze. I basically assembled my first waterborne combination sink, stove, bunk, workbench, vise, & tool-storage home-in-a-working (sailing) boat, assembled from abandoned marine-'junk': Wood, hardware, rigging, fasteners, & canvas; & not to forget my trusty bust-proof 16 feet long stout-yet-limber exceptionally-usable unbreakable oaken oar that would bend like a banana but never even 'crack', let alone break on me, which it never did. Strong, supple, pliable, limber oak oar: My good friend for many years.                       Whoo-pee du! & so what?