On Tugboats by Virginia Thorndike

Author:Virginia Thorndike
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781461744726
Publisher: Down East Books

Designing Tug-and-Barge Units

Naval architect Bob Hill, who with a partner developed the Intercon coupler, has been fascinated by tugs since he was a boy in Troy, New York, where tugs were constantly bringing barges into the four petroleum terminals. He hung around the boats and talked with the men working them. “To a man, they said, ‘You don’t want to work on these, you want to design them.” Bob took their advice and taught himself to draw. He says he picked up his first job, with Matton Shipyard, because he was the cheapest help Matton could get. His first independent project was fabricating a sewage retention tank for the tug Margaret Turecamo. “I measured it all up, and it was going to fit like a glove.” Marty McGeary, the yard foreman, said so too. But there was a problem. “You see how big that door is?” McGeary asked young Hill. “It’s a great tank, it fits perfectly, but I can’t get it in the boat.” The door was twenty-four inches wide and the tank was fifty-seven inches—so it had to be cut into three sections.

“I was devastated!” Bob was certain he’d get fired over this blunder. Bart Turecamo owned the shipyard at the time, and it was part of Bob’s job to drive him to and from the airport. When he heard about Bob’s mistake, he spent one trip reaming out the young man, every other word four letters long. “I thought I was doomed. I had to take him back to the airport that afternoon, and he was nice as pie. In today’s environment, I could have sued him for some of what he said—but I still had my job.”

Today, Bob is one of the last self-taught naval architects in the business of commercial design. He credits the elderly, knowledgeable gentlemen he had the opportunity to work and talk with as he was learning the business—Merit Demerest, Dan Berg, Joe Hack, John Gilbert—and says he picked up the engineering in dribs and drabs. “I’m fortunate in the clients I have had over the years. They had enough faith in me to give me a chance. Nowadays such a chance would be hard to find.” He certainly knows his stuff, but he started out without the advanced degrees that most people in his position began with, which meant he could not testify in court as an expert witness—an inability that, to this day, he doesn’t mind a bit.

It was in 1972, while he was working for Matton Shipyard, that Bob did his first serious work on a tug. This was the Mobil 1 (now the Zachary Reinauer), designed by Merit Demerest. The Mobil 1 was interesting because she was taller than most boats of the day, with her wheelhouse a half a deck higher than normal, and she had twin screws. “That was becoming the rage at the time.”

In 1980 Bob first got involved with the field he now specializes in, the articulated coupling of tugs and barges. He was

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