The Tug Malolo

Being in a ship is being in jail, with the chance of being drowned.

                                                            -Samuel Johnson-

If form follows function, then the necessity of a thing dictates design.  And if design is not true to the purpose it is intended, then that thing will not hold up to time.  Ships are our example, and they are an example of ingenious design that has evolved through the ages into a hallowed art.   And as the purposes for which a ship might sail are as variable as the abundant catch of the sea, and so there is also great diversity in their classes.

Ships inspire the romantic, and terrify the pragmatic, for there is no logical reason for man to place himself in one and go to where man is not intended to go, but to the romantic there is every reason to do so.  Ships insight curiosity, and often, like sirens, they cast their spells on the unsuspecting.  I have known the soul of a number of them, and still do those I have sailed call up in my dreams, harkening up from the sub-conscious my passion for them, beckoning to me, like a lost love, to finish that which we had begun.  A ship, like good architecture, is where art and utility are joined. 

And so ships fall into classes based on the function they are intended to serve.  There are fishing vessels (F/V), research vessels (R/V), pilots, tankers, and cargo ships.  There are also warships, which are perhaps of the most diverse, as their various hull designs elucidate.  Some warships are intended to have shallow drafts to navigate coastal waters; others are floating cities capable of subsisting 5,000 men and women for prolonged periods.  Other warships are no more than floating warehouses to re-provision and re-fuel others while underway.  And in each of these you will find variations in these ships’ designs to fit their specialized purpose.

But, perhaps the pinnacle in the evolution of nautical form would be the tall ship. Their graceful design perfected by tradition, their self sustainability and white billowing sails seeming like square clouds harried atop an azure sea still awes the onlooker, and entices even the most cynical of landsmen.  The question has been broached as to when tall ships received the designation of tall.  As ships began switching from sails to steam the last remaining working full rigged sailing vessels began to diminish, this occurring over time during the latter half of the 19^th century until around the 1930’s, and it was during this period that they were referred to as being ‘tall’.  Joseph Conrad, the great novelist sea captain, refers to this ghost fleet as such in his writings.  The remnant tall ships exist now by virtue of their beauty, and the tradition they embody.  They are now educational ships, ambassador ships for various cities and states, replicas of some distinct predecessor, or confined to the docks as museums.  Their true purpose as working vessels has been replaced by the merchant vessels capable of carrying out the ever-increasing commerce of a new global economy. 

And now the class of tugs, after all, that is what we are about here.  These ships are as old as steam engines and immediately filled the necessity of being able to pull large sailing vessels from off the docks and moorings to carry them through narrow navigational channels to the rivers and out to sea.  Before steam, and before tugs, ships were pulled from their berths by men rowing longboats, and from there they would go out to the roads where they anchored to await the right weather conditions, and sometimes it could take days, weeks, and even months to get into the sea lanes.  And today there is a class of tug that still assists the larger less maneuverable vessels in landing.  This is called harbor, or assist work, and the tugs are called tractor tugs.  These tugs assist the larger ships and are equipped with z-drives.  These are two motors that power two independent propellers that are capable of turning 360 degrees.  They are controlled by a man in a chair holding two joysticks that can turn the vessel in a complete circle.  Highly maneuverable and powerful, these often come along to assist us as we land our barges to the docks. 

There are also those of the traditional high bow with lines that run sharply aft toward the waterline so that the back deck is nearly awash.  These have a housing structure atop the weather deck where the crew lives and the vessel is navigated.  The landlubber can identify these.  You say tug and the layman sees the representative beat up and rusty workboat lined with tires and captained in the wheelhouse by some gruff bearded old man with a perpetual frown wearing a short-billed captain’s hat and chewing on the stubby end of a cigar, no doubt smelling of last nights cheap scotch and this mornings burned coffee.  There are no great noble sea captains here, just a rag tag crew of weathered and churlish tugboaters, headed by a profane old man with a voice course from decades of yelping orders, and all differing only from convicts by the fact that through some sort of insanity we volunteered for a floating prison instead of sentenced to a more stable footed one.  But in this club, once admitted, rest assured, the crew become like the ship, beaten and rusted through, but seaworthy and reliable to watch one’s another when things get rough.   And this is the Malolo of which we are sailing on now. 

A working tug like the Malolo can be divided into two parts, and these parts are divided by the weather deck.  Atop the weather deck is the superstructure, or housing.  In this small space fits the galley, cabins, heads, and atop of all of that is the pilothouse.  Below deck is a space entirely dedicated to fuel and engines.  As a fact, most of the tug is underwater, and her entire purpose and design is to pull great weight for long distances.   

The Malolo was built in 1975 by Allied Shipyards of Larose, Louisiana.  When she was launched she was christened as the M/V Ted.  M/V is the designation of her class as a motor vessel.  Once purchased by our company she became the Malolo, which in Hawaiian means Flying Fish.  And when one sailor to another speaking in nautical vernacular would begin to describe her, he would enter into a series of acronyms, terminologies, and numbers completely foreign to a lubbers ears.  Such a sailor would begin with the length, or LOA – Length Over All, which is at 105 feet, and her beam at the widest point is about 31 feet.  The draft is 15’ 8” below the waterline.  On board we have a fuel capacity of 79,376 gallons of diesel, a water holding capacity of 5,577.  We are propelled by two large eight cylinder Caterpillar motors with a horse power of about 3,500 that turn through a reduction gear two 105” screws, or propellers.  There are also two generators a board that power us with electricity, and one motor that powers the tow winch, as well as a water maker to make fresh water.  Now, this is a relatively small boat.  Our company has other tugs in which the fuel capacity is around 150,000 gallons and the horsepower of those engines are about 4,500. 

Now consider that on average we consume 1 gallon of fuel per day, per horse.    This would mean that if we were pulling a full load with engines at full pulling capacity we would be burning 3,500 gallons a day on this particular boat.  Your mouth may now be agape, but next time you are sitting at a railroad crossing, sighing heavily at the inconvenience of the never-ending caravan of boxcars and tankers, count them.  You may count as many as two hundred.  This would be a regular sized tow for the Malolo.  However, for a fully loaded larger tug on one of our longer runs, say one from Seattle to Hawaii, or Seattle to Anchorage, this number would only be half of a full load.  These larger tugs carrying containers across oceans are hauling between four to five hundred containers, or other like items such as timber, industrial equipment, etc, each container weighing up to 70,000 pounds each.  A fully loaded barge for our smaller vessel, the Malolo, would weigh around 11,050 tons, or roughly 22 million pounds of freight.  The fuel consumption would then round off to about 3 gallons of fuel per one ton of cargo per day, and less than that for our larger vessels and their cargo.  Now, imagine two hundred tractor-trailers lined up along the interstate consuming fuel at less than 10 miles to the gallon, to haul a single shipping container.  Now, how many planes would it take to lift this weight into the skies?  At this comparison suddenly the cost of trans-oceanic shipping comes into perspective.  And what possessions do you own that haven’t been shipped?  What food do you eat that hasn’t crossed the great oceans? 

But why tow merchandise across oceans using a tug and barge instead of larger merchant vessels?  Again, money and convenience drive economics.  Consider yourself an industrial building contractor in some place like Honolulu.  You are in need of buying timber and building materials in bulk.  The lumber industry in Honolulu cannot support your needs, so you order from a place like the Pacific Northwest where good Douglas fir abounds.  However, when you look into a shipping method you will have to place your order on a shipping manifest, and when that manifest is full a ship will be dispatched to deliver your goods.  One or two months would be the likely wait.  This creates an opportunity for another company to come along and fill the void of convenience.  This company determines that they could send out a shipment every two weeks, fully loaded or not, and to offset the cost this company will use a barge, which requires less maintenance and less regulation.  Furthermore this shipping company will lease out the actual job of moving the material to a tug company that can afford to be competitive, because tugs are also less maintenance, and they are only crewed by 6 persons instead of the 25 to 50 required to man a full sized container ship, and they consume a comparable amount of fuel.  The draw back is that they are slower, only making, at best, 10 knots, and often only 8, instead of 15-20.  The benefits outweigh the drawbacks, and a niche is filled. 

Some have commented that it sounds dangerous, a little tug pulling a big barge across open seas.  Here are the mechanics.  Attached to the barge on the port and starboard bow is a bridle of chain, of which a single link weighs 80 pounds, and each length of the bridle is about 90 feet, and where the bridle joins there is attached another 90 feet of chain we call a pigtail.  Why 90 feet?  90 feet, for reasons surely dating back to English measurements, equals what we call a shot of chain.  So there is a shot of chain on each section of the bridle and a shot of chain for the pigtail.  Sometimes, when weather is expected, we put an extra shot of chain on the pigtail to weigh down the tow rig, which acts much like a spring or shock to absorb the weight of the load and keep it from pulling too hard at once. Attached to the chain is the tow wire, which is about four inches thick of steel wire cable, and when out at sea we will have nearly half a mile of the wire out.  The more wire, the more weight, which helps eliminates jerking from the barge, and naturally this gear is so heavy it rests well under the water.  All this weight is focused mostly on the back of the tug and is wrapped around a large winch.  This weight keeps the tug sturdy while out at sea.  At times when it is particularly rough you can feel the tow wire yanking heavily on the boat.  In these cases we often have to slow down, and sometimes so slow that we are making only 1-3 knots.  Sometimes the wind blows the weight so forcefully that were are being blown backwards by it.  Regardless, we keep the tug in front of the barge, wait the wind out, then proceed on.  So you see, the barge balances the boat, acting much like ballast, or weight.  Traveling as a light boat, or a tug without a barge, is the same as ships of olden times traveling without cargo as ballast, and this makes for the more uncomfortable and perilous ride. So yes, it is dangerous.  But, going to sea is dangerous.  But it isn’t so dangerous as to be plagued by accidents and disasters.  That would illicit regulation, and then this aspect of shipping would become more or less obsolete. 

Now we have thoroughly, and in shoreman’s terms, discussed the mechanics of a working boat like the Malolo, now we travel from the bowels of the ship above the waterline into the housing.  You can take note whenever you are held up by some draw bridge over the inter-coastal waterway for some tug to pass through, that most of the hulls are black, or if not black then some dark color.  The reason for this is simple, black masks the rust, of which there is no short supply.  However the housing color scheme is usually particular to a certain company.  Green base, white top, all red topped, blue with a gold band and white topped, etc.  Our tugs are black hulled with a red base around the housing that runs just waist high, where there is then a gray bootstrap atop of the red, then the rest is white streaked with copious rust.  For the vessels we own there is a D painted on the smoke stacks.  This D represents our company, Dunlap.  Most of our fleet is leased, and they do not have this D.  There is a galley on board with a full industrial stove, three freezers and two refrigerators, and of course two coffee pots.  On this vessel there are 5 staterooms.  One for each crewmember, saving the deckhand and the cook share a room.  The bunks are narrow, but long enough, and generally the cabins are musty and the crew inside them used to the constant drone and pulse of the engines.  There are two heads, one for the Captain and Mate, and the other for the rest.  The Captain and the mate stay one the deck above the maindeck, and the pilothouse is one deck above that. 

The pilot house is equipped with a VHF Radio, and often a single si-ban radio capable of communicating with stations around the world.  There are two radars interfaced with two computer screens that project the charts, ship’s position, course, speed, as well as icons symbolizing other ships navigating nearby, and this icon gives their course and speed.  Also interfaced with the computer and radar is the ship’s GPS.  Most tugs, and ships for that matter, no longer have aboard them the traditional helm, but instead they more or less have a knob that can be manually turned to change the vessels course manually.  When underway the ship is operating on autopilot that too is interfaced with the GPS and computerized chart plotter.  Oooh it’s a far cry from the traditional days.  More often than not the mate on watch is sitting in the swivel chair behind the consol reading a magazine and looking from time to time for other vessels or obstructions in the water.  Still we have brass chronometers, barometers, and whistles, but that is about it for tradition on these vessels. 

Unique to the Malolo there is a helm, a remnant of the olden days, and it swings independently and defiantly with the rudder, unwilling to surrender itself up as being impractical or unwanted.  Often in the way, it is a thing outdated and foreign to the new era, but I like it, and should they ever trust me to drive the old boat I would use it religiously.  For when one has their hand on the wheel or tiller one feels the vessel’s pulse through the palm of the hand, and feels her react to the master’s touch.  It is, in a sense, where the sailor connects with the ship’s soul and the two work as one, moving through the waters of the world into places yet known to them.  Or perhaps to places that are known, and these ports, like the vessels that one has captained or crewed, have become old friends, waypoints defining moments and circumstances in this life’s journey.  

Tug Malolo

-Aleutian Islands, en route; Dutch Harbor to Sand Point-