Towing ships is a dynastic business, hard to establish and harder still to give up. It's built on deep allegiance and cutthroat margins, and its inner workings are full of intrigue and —successionary drama: fistfights, lawsuits, power struggles, and disinheritances.
The early tugs were expensive to staff and almost comically difficult to steer. A twelvehundred-horsepower boat might burn twenty tons of coal in a day and require ten men to shovel it. Every time the tug needed to reverse direction, the engine had to be stopped and re-started, by which point the boat might well have run aground. Modern tugs are very different beasts.
They can have ten thousand horsepower and carry a hundred thousand gallons of fuel. Their propulsion systems have evolved from coal to diesel, from paddle wheel to propeller. Now they may go five thousand miles without changing course. Then, when things finally get interesting - when land heaves into view and headlands rise, when currents intersect and wind barrel down from surrounding slopes, when a narrow channel must be negotiated under bridges between breakwaters, and into a crowded port - the tug captain assumes control.
The shipping industry has gone on a construction spree lately, building ships more than a thousand feet long with as much cargo space as eleven thousand trucks. It means that fewer but more powerful tugs are required to tow the same amount of cargo, and shipping schedules have accelerated dramatically. Tugs that could once afford to lie at port for a week or two now have turn-arounds of less than twenty-four hours. It is a new era for tugboats!
(from THE NEW YORKER, April 19, 2010)
