Training for a Bad Day

We seem to take for granted the learning process when it comes to many things, not the least of which includes our physical motor skills and our cognitive ability to quantify a situation as good or bad.  Let’s take walking for example, you learn how to balance and toddle along very young, much to your mother’s delight.  Soon after that, the joyful look on Mom’s face becomes terror when you’ve learned how to run, and of course, you run with abandon everywhere.   You haven’t learned when it’s okay to run, you just run.  But in trying to teach you, Mom and Dad had to let you take a couple of  falls. Soon enough you get the idea that running is good some of the time, but not a good idea all of the time.  The first time you touch something hot serves a painful lesson, but it’s then we learn that fire is hot and ice is cold.  All the skills we acquire as we grow lead us to becoming an adult with the capacity to view our world as a collection of safe/unsafe, fun/scary, dangerous/fun or stupid moves.

“The triple bridges up the Hackensack closed on him after giving him permission to proceed. This was about 2 am and everything up there is pitch black. As soon as he realized the bridge was coming down, he threw it into full reverse, but it wasn’t soon enough. He did lose his job but the USCG did not take any action against him. They had the radio conversation on tape and exonerated him.”

When in comes to tugs and tows one could spend all day describing the mind-set needed by a boat handler but in the end it has to be learned.  The training wheels come off pretty early and the actual boat handling begins  as soon as the ticket  is in hand.  The hard part isn’t what one might think, it’s not the timing of the throttle or depth perception, it’s situational awareness.

All of the things that come into play while maneuvering a tug and tow for transits, docking, sailings, or re-configuring are subject to being re-evaluated as they progress or deteriorate using every input, hunch, suspicion, or sensation. Recognizing that things have gone bad is not easy.  You’d think it would be in your gut, but novice boat handlers don’t have the judgement or experience that exposes the “bad stuff” early in the maneuver. Knowing when to pull the plug is the hard part.  Recognizing it too late and then pushing a bad situation in the hopes of saving the day will end badly.  So it serves a boatman to understand his limitations well before any operation is undertaken.  Proper planning prevents piss poor performance.

The towing industry is a contact sport, shit happens and we’ve all had our share of “bell ringers” and bad days.  The key is to learn from them.  But, recognizing the threshold of disaster is a difficult matter when it comes to to training someone for it.  In order to make that determination, you have to see things go bad and “live it”.  That threshold  is usually reached well before things go wrong.  The chain of failure starts earlier than one might think (these days referred to as the “root cause”).  When a novice is training he practices voyage planning, sailings,  transits, and dockings.  He or she is watched and guided to safely execute the maneuvers, but they need to be allowed to screw it up (to a point).  The best lesson is one that has some “pucker factor” at work.  The greater the “pucker”, the more unforgettable the lesson.

The mark of a mature boatman is apparent when and how he deals with a bad situation.  Any novice who’s had a bit of time behind the wheel can sail and dock a barge when conditions are ideal.  The test comes when everything you thought you knew comes up short, then the fact that you won’t do anything new in an emergency becomes evident.  How you handle an adverse turn of events comes from learning how to expect the unexpected and being prepared to deal with it.

One of the most important skills is to know is when to start over.  It’s “plan B”.

The saying; “Physics is a bitch” couldn’t be more accurate.  The behavior of the tow’s mass and inertia can be calculated and parsed to the nth degree.  But who really does that?  Well actually we do, when we check the current, wind, traffic, and our gut. Quoting a post in the Captain forum from a Captain to a new mate, “Son, never approach a dock faster than you’d want to hit it”.  The approach and landing is generally a controlled crash.  We’re talking inches per second.

Ebb current rounding Tremley Point and losing it in the turn brought this one to a sudden stop. It made one Hell of an “impression”.

Giving thought to how we should proceed involves planning for as many contingencies as we can think of.  Time on deck provides the means to acquire that judgement.  But watching someone having a bad day is not as indelible as having the bad day yourself.  That crystalline intensity isn’t there.

Every deckhand with some time under his belt utters the same monologue when the pilothouse is having a problem.  He knows exactly where the poor bastard went wrong and has the answer to all things “tugboat” until he himself is at the helm envisioning all too late what he should have done.  There isn’t a working boatman alive that can claim he has never had a reportable damage. You can’t be in this industry and not have had an incident.  It’s the nature of the job.  Incidents that don’t get you or anyone else killed or maimed serve as educational opportunities.  You (hopefully) never forget the “lesson learned”.

With luck and determination, a good number of candidates for the wheelhouse survive their “baptisms by fire” and turn out to be competent and capable boat-handlers.  Most recognize that their careers are ongoing educational seminars at “Tugboat U”.   The number of years one is on the job is not insurance against error.  Even with 30+ years at the wheel, errors occur.   They don’t happen as often, but they happen none the less.  Overestimating rudder power and underestimating the wind could turn a simple approach to an “all astern frantic” exercise.  With luck it becomes a footnote and lesson learned, catch it too late, disaster.

Allowing for error during training is one of the most difficult lines to walk in this business.  Every trainer has a different comfort level and each trainee is unique. Some are granted a bit more leash  while others are held a little more tightly until their skills improve and allow for more freedom from intervention. Overall, the aim is to expand the limits of one’s skill level when it comes to error management.  The only practical way to do that is to let the situation develop and address it.  If you haven’t been allowed to deal with a bad situation, you’ll never be able to defuse one.  It sounds like a “Catch 22” but the many factors that have an effect on decision making can’t be listed in a curriculum.

The U.S. Navy has intensive and expensive training for damage-control and fire fighting.  They practice air combat maneuvers and test the mettle of their people in relatively controlled environments.  The intensity of having water up to your ass while you plug a hole in the hull or flames licking at your heels knocking down an engine room fire, or someone at your six with “missile lock”.  It’s about as real as it can get, but it’s still a training exercise.  The ship isn’t really sinking or afire and that missile isn’t really heading for your tailpipe.

On tugs, we have to create these training opportunities as we work.  We don’t have the luxury of the reset button.  The set-up and execution of specific maneuvers are conducted in the real world with little room for dramatic errors.   Some elements are frequently encountered during the hitch.  We see wind, current and traffic every day.  We deal with strange berth assignments that test our close quarter maneuvering skills daily.  We utilize assist boats not too differently than docking masters on large ships.  When an assist boat is used, the equation now includes another whole set of considerations.  Not the least of which would be keeping it in position safely and using it to its greatest advantage.  All of these skills are learned on the job, not in school.

It’s been mentioned that simulators would be useful in giving wheelhouse candidates a safer environment to experience their “Kobiyashi Maru Incident”.  I can agree to a point, the quality of simulators has improved dramatically in the last ten years but the reset button is still there.  It’s an expensive course of limited value in my opinion.  I can’t say that I would have a lot of  faith in a trainee telling me that he had the high score on the simulator as we are on approach to Hell’s Gate drawing 25′ at max flood, eastbound, meeting a westbound deep draft sailboat in mid-channel.  There’s a whole lot more at stake then a grade at that point.

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Deferring to Expertise

Tugboat mariners are an independent sort and we’re accustomed to enjoying a measure of autonomy that few industries allow. We don’t take kindly to the “clueless” telling us anything, much less how to do our job.  We’re used to the press not having a clue, we’re used to answering the same old questions over and again about what it’s like on a tug. We’re thankful that when we’re underway the world shrinks to the tug, tow, and our immediate horizon.

When we watch those poor bastards driving (more like crawling) on the B.Q.E. and F.D.R. Drive as we sail by, we thank our lucky stars we’re not faced with that every day. But unlike them, we have an “alphabet soup” of Federal and State agencies looking over our shoulder.  Insurers, customers, and employers alike pile on to make our jobs just a little more interesting.

The trip that takes our daily commuter from his front door to his place of employment is seldom given more thought than to decide what size coffee to pick up with his bagel or scone every morning.  It doesn’t require too much preparation, just a full tank of gas, a friendly traffic report, and perhaps set his “Tom Tom” for an alternate route .

Up until about 15 years ago, like our commuter, voyage planning in the N.Y. towing sector was still an informal exercise.  The plan was always fluid with the distinction of being mostly in our heads as opposed to written down. Planning seldom got too complex, we didn’t see a need to write down what we could recite from memory.  The term “voyage plan” wasn’t in the vernacular.

To us, it wasn’t broken.  So of course it had to be fixed.

In the mid-90’s I was attending the first Bridge Resource Management course offered for tug masters by the Seaman’s Church Institute in New York City.  There were eight seasoned tug captains in our group and one or two qualified as “Tugasaurs”, meaning they had been in “tow-biz” since Christ was an “Ordinary”.  We were on the company dime and didn’t really know what to expect from a class that was undoubtedly more suited to a ship than a tug.

Except for playing with the newest simulator, the curriculum promised to be about as exciting as a root canal when our instructor, a young ship driver/academy man, introduced himself and began reviewing the need for the practices he was going to impart.  The more he talked, the uglier it got.  It proceeded to get bloody (figuratively) as we began to chew this guy down to his ankles.  I mean, who the Hell did he think he was telling N.Y. boatmen how to do their job?  He’s never set foot on a tug much less handled one.

It wasn’t long before our “victim” saw the cavalry arrive in the person of Captain Rich Weiner (pronounced “wine-r)”.  This poor bastard’s savior was just in time to prevent his bloodied carcass from being dragged to the seawall and summarily dispatched as eel-bait.

Captain Weiner is a well respected and widely known docking master in New York Harbor and has worked with many of us over the years.  Once Rich walked into the room, the pack eased off long enough to hear the same message delivered.  And although he delivered the very same message, he had status as one of us.  His reputation and expertise gave him the credibility to make clear that the issue was the message, not our unfortunate messenger.

After the grumbling settled down, Captain Weiner was able to smooth our ruffled feathers and explain how voyage planning was being required and formulated.  Whether we liked it or not he explained, we should be the ones deciding how it should be done.  Having others decide how we do our jobs was even more distasteful than the new idea itself.  So, in the end we all drank the Kool-Aid.

It was difficult to admit that it was a good idea at first, especially since our voyage planning seemed perfectly adequate to us.  The more Captain Weiner talked, the more it became clear that our customary practices were not enough to satisfy the “powers-that-be” and were necessarily being replaced by the increased paperwork and tedium.

It simply became impossible to argue against the need for detailed passage and voyage planning.  The fact that it must be written down was probably the most irritating part of the idea since our paperwork load was increasing exponentially every day.

With that said, it was obvious that knowing where, when and how are key to a safe and hopefully uneventful passage from point “A” to point “B”.  There’s little difference between a tug or a ship’s voyage planning when it comes to the considerations of wind, weather, available depth, current, and way-points. Arrival times at key points along the route, DR positions, current set and drift are always critical considerations now more than ever in the age of OPA90., the Clean Water Act, and any number of State Regulations.

These days the practice is deeply ingrained in our procedures and codified by customers, company policy, insurance providers, and ISM safety management systems.  Everyone uses a different template, but they share the same basic information.  These plans allow us to visualize the entire transit and determine ETA’s with greater accuracy.  The plan is an overview of our vessel’s presence of mind along the way.  At any point in the trip we can have a clear and detailed reference of how things are going.  Guesswork is reduced to a minimum.

On top of that,  it is a professional approach, proof that the vessel, crew and cargo is in “good hands”.

We aren’t being asked to be clairvoyant or perfect, the document is a “working” plan subject to updating as we go.  There’s little doubt it’s for the better, “Tugasaurs” notwithstanding.

If you aren’t conducting and detailing a policy of voyage/passage planning, you will be. ISM Safety Management Systems are built around international law and customary practice, within which voyage planning has become an integral practice.  Sooner, rather than later, you’ll be asked to do this.  Better to do it now so you control how it’s formatted instead of having some geek do it for you.

Passage plans and voyage plans are synonymous, the voyage starts long before we sail with the collection of the vessel/tow

particulars including:

Deep draft, of the tug and tow

Cargo, grade and amount

Vertical and under-keel clearances, including “vessel squat“

Expected speed over the route and waypoints (courses and distances),

Tidal heights and current (set and drift) for critical points along the track-line, including departure and arrival

Estimated time en route

Estimated arrival times, at waypoints and final destination

Berth information, chart catalog, pubs last update

Pilots and escort/assist boats, required or not

Once this information has been collected and detailed on the plan, we can refer to and update the all important ETA as we go along. Adjustments, observations and delays are all considered.  The greatest benefit is that our situational awareness is enhanced by the plan. We have considered and calculated a D.R. for the entire trip giving us a good basis for setting up assists, line handlers, pilots and crew changes.

A well prepared passage plan is akin to the FAA’s required flight plan.  How long will it be before tugs with tows have to file our own “flight plan” with a government agency sometime in the future?  I’ve read discussions pointing to that possibility, I would hope if that should come to pass it will be under the control of licensed and experienced mariners with the local knowledge for each area of concern.

Of course it’ll be up to us to take an active part in the process before the clueless run us into each other or aground.   As distasteful as change may be, it’s better if those of us on the job have a say in how it should be done.  I’d recommend that the “powers that be” continue to embrace the idea of deferring to expertise, it just makes sense.

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New York, The Harbor

Photo by Capt. Jim Brucato

It’s said that the citizens of New York City reside in a place that is rich in a thousand ways.  The fortunes won and lost on Wall Street, the fame and fable of the East Village, the museums, parks and activity that never ends.  Of my favorite places in this city I include all of Little Italy and Chinatown.  Like Frankie said, “a city that never sleeps”.  But there is something about New York that seems forgotten, overlooked or ignored by many of her residents in the colder weather. Her status as a world class port.  It wasn’t too long ago that the city’s maritime connection was well known to its population, since they likely arrived by ship.  Nearly every immigrant family to arrive here since 1887 has had their first sight of the Statue of Liberty burned into their memory.

For nearly 400 years, ships of all kinds have moored along the banks of the Hudson and East Rivers and dropped anchor in the Upper Bay by the hundreds. Sailing ships, then steamers and yes tugs and barges from every corner of the world called here to pick up or deliver people and items from and to the farthest reaches of the planet.  But the terminals and wharves that once employed our grandfathers are now either in shambles or reinvented as recycled real estate.

The port has become all but invisible except for the behemoths that pass under the Verrazano Bridge or those that lay at anchor in view of the ferries running between Staten Island and lower Manhattan.  The port is “out of sight and out of mind”, it’s “somewhere in Jersey” now.  The visible port activity is considered quaint as opposed to critical commerce.

Docks along the Hudson River that were once bustling centers of trade are now home to the commuter ferries or fishing haunts that sit perched on the bones of the New York Central, Erie Lackawanna, and Lehigh Railroad dockyards of Weehawken, Hoboken and Jersey City. Terminals that once housed coffee or soap processing plants in Edgewater are now shopping malls and walking parks with few if any of the residents realizing what transpired beneath their feet only a couple of generations ago.  The Chelsea docks that were once the busiest in the city now house a recreation center and golf driving range. It’s easily acknowledged that the city is so transient that it’s residents tend to overlook its legacy as one of the greatest ports in the world.

But not everyone is oblivious to this city’s legacy. We can be thankful for the stalwart souls that pursue the quixotic endeavor of trying to save and/or showcase historic vessels and locations throughout the city.  The organizations at large (to name a few) include the good people restoring and maintaining the Tug Pegasus. This classic tug was, and still is a workhorse with a worthy pedigree. Captain Pamela Hepburn brought the Pegasus to life and put her to work for many years before putting together the means to restore this classic tug to its original self.  A true labor of love.  The “Peg” is now a regular at “tug musters” and gatherings concerning the Hudson River Societies seeking to preserve the Port’s history and educate the community with real working vessels and the people that run them.

The retired M/T Mary Whalen serves as the nexus of the Portside Project for Ms. Carolina Salguero and her group of volunteers to help bring awareness to the Port of New York’s Brooklyn Piers and surrounding facilities.  She has undertaken the task  to rehabilitate the Mary Whalen as close as possible to her original working configuration with a few changes to accommodate her new mission.  Her efforts to improve access and usability of the waterfront she has dubbed “the sixth borough” are a worthy endeavor that deserve support.  (Ms. Salguero has earned the respect of many in the port for her unflinching multi-media documentation of the events on 9/11/01.)

The Fireboat John J. Harvey is another gem that has been fighting off the ravages of time with dedicated volunteers to keep her afloat and in our minds. A recently published memoir by her latest engineer, Jessica Dulong, offers a definitive dialog of her participation in the Harvey’s restoration and operation.  The Harvey is a genuine working reminder of service vessels that have given above and beyond during their tenures in New York Harbor.  I recommend this book to anyone with a desire to glean a deeper understanding of the kind of people who have lived, worked, and endured serving the port.  Ms. Dulong has cited the contributions of the giants of history as well as the everyman in the Hudson River’s importance to all things New York.

The Old Mariner’s Home at Sailor’s Snug Harbor, Staten Island has transformed from its original retirement home for mariners to a world class museum that presents local lore and history in many forms that inform and applaud the Harbor that is New York.  It has featured our local towing community as a long term exhibit.  The Noble Maritime Collection, definitely worth a visit.

Soon the weather will be balmy and warm.  The harbor will fill with recreational boaters and tour boats.  Tugs and barges will continue their duties all the while dodging small craft and dressing themselves in a fresh coat of paint. The Circle Line boats will circumnavigate the island of Manhattan and the Statue of Liberty is open for visitors as always. Fireworks will soon be showering the Statue and the East River will see dozens of wedding parties celebrating their big day.  Taking a decidedly different tack on the tour business is the group running Hidden Harbor Tours. They take a closer look at places the Circle Line Boats might not have a desire to visit.  The tours focus on smaller, less well known corners of the harbor.  A look at places most guidebooks don’t include, definitely for the hardcore urban tourist .

Cruise ships will make their conspicuous yet stately passages from the North River, Bayonne and Brooklyn waterfronts to sea.  The true spirit of the harbor will become a little more obvious as the summer heat moves everyone to the shoreline to catch a breeze.

Photo by Capt E.W. Brucato

In the years I’ve worked in and around the city, I’ve had the chance to witness the building and destruction of landmarks great and small.  Like many, as a teenager I watched the World Trade Center rise on the skyline, and as an adult I watched it crumble.  I was a deckhand when we were delivering sand and gravel for the foundations of Battery Park City.

photo by Donna M. Brucato 1987

I saw and participated in Op Sail 76, the Brooklyn Bridge Celebration of 1983, and the Statue of Liberty’s 100th birthday in 1987, that one easily beat all.  My boat was hired to tow the fireworks for the first time that night.  I had the good fortune to be able to host my family on the tug while the most impressive Grucci fireworks display I ever witnessed unfolded over our heads.  I’ll never forget how you could feel it in your chest as each report from the detonations echoed though the World Trade Center complex that night.  My 10 year old daughter was so frightened by the noise and paper from the exploded shells showering the boat that she hid in the pilothouse for the finale.  I haven’t seen a fireworks display that could hold a candle to that show since that night.

The activity is year-round and everywhere.   The vessels calling here are the most sophisticated transport systems afloat and carry an enormous amount of goods.  The tugs moving oil and building materials still do it the New York way, quietly and efficiently, with skill and flair. I’ve listed only a few of the fine organizations that serve this port by keeping its legacy alive.  Just thought I’d mention it…..in case you forgot.

A Buchanan tug off Constable Hook Bayonne c.1981

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