Between a Rock and a Hard Place
This article was originally published in the February 2012 edition of the Port Bureau News.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------“Shoot me a note when the ship is tied up” - heard in operations and dispatch centers in over 50 terminals in the Houston area day after day, the simple missive tells hungry cargo owners that they are one step closer to beginning discharge operations. But between the channel and the pier, a group of men work diligently to ensure that each vessel is safely moored to the pier. Line handlers, or boatmen, fasten ships to solid ground, often working literally between the vessel and a concrete pier, trusting in their communications and professionalism to ensure that the ship is safely tied up and they’re not crushed between the two massive bodies.
Houston Pilot Lou Vest notes, “It sounds very simple except they're working with lines as big around as a leg, wires the size of your wrist and hooks as big as your head while walking around on a wet rocking boat without lifelines often in the dark cold and rain. All of which can combine to do serious injury to a person who has a moment of inattention. They're a great bunch of guys who are cheerful at all hours, uncomplaining in the worst weather, and absolutely an important part of the port organism.”
Mooring Companies on the Upper Houston Ship Channel
Along the Upper Houston Ship Channel, two outfits—Houston Mooring Company, and Texas Mooring—complete a combined 40,000+ operations every year—tying and releasing the lines for every arrival, sailing, and shift from Bayport to the Turning Basin. With such volumes, Houston is a competitive marketplace, attracting experienced operators and cultivating a professional work environment. With rates ranging between about $500/$1500 per operation (depending on the size of the vessel and location along the channel), Houston is a cost effective port, with line handling operations only half the cost of comparable jobs on the West Coast. Houston Mooring Company Boatman Steve Bennett notes, “Ship’s captains have told us that the boatmen here in Houston are the most efficient that they’ve seen in any port. We handle such a large volume in Houston, there’s a learning curve there. Also the way we handle the lines is different than in most other ports. We use a lot of mooring hooks here instead of hard points up on the top of the dock—when a ship gets ready to leave we just run the line through the hook and invert the hook so the lines just fall out they can reel ‘em in and go on their way.”
The two mooring companies in Houston are dedicated to ensuring a safe stable working environment for their line handlers, and efficient operations for their customers. Alex Parkman, of Texas Mooring Inc, describes their Houston operation, “Our boats are sparkling clean—white engines so that we’ll know instantly if anything is on them that shouldn’t be, and two mechanics who check each boat three times a week to make sure the engines, fuel lights, are in good operating condition.” Texas Mooring, Inc. founded in 1985, operates 15 line handling boats and over 70 boatmen. Describing a mooring operation, the focus is on maintaining safety through effective communication. “Our boatmen are trained to maintain eye and radio contact with the ship, tugs, and pilots so that there’re no surprises. When you’re under the bridge to bring a springline in, you have to make sure you’re cognizant of everything around you—no tunnel vision. Tug wash can get very dangerous, especially around some of the more active terminals near the monument where tugs, barges and other deep draft vessels are seemingly always darting in and around you while you’re trying to lash her up.”
Discussing the role of communication and customer service, Alex describes their profession as one of constant learning. “We have a meeting of all the boatmen once a month where we get together to share best-practices. And we are always looking for the best technology available to make the job safer and more efficient. The HarborLights program is one that we use that’s been instrumental in simplifying our dispatch operations, and we also provide special services for agents and other operators that have a vested interest in when the ship ties up.”
Houston Mooring President David Halbert noted that technology has been a game-changer in regards to safety and operational efficiency in the line handling environment. In operation since the 1920’s, Houston Mooring operates twelve line handling boats and has 75 operators with up to 55 years of experience along the Houston Ship Channel.
For this article, Houston Mooring gathered five linehandlers with over 175 years of combined experience to talk about how the profession has changed over the past fifty years as the Port of Houston has grown into a world-class facility.
Pitch and Catch
As each ship arriving to the City Docks in Houston slowly winds her way up the channel, pilots guide her to a berth, tugs begin to nudge her into position, and onshore, line handlers get ready to catch the heaving lines being thrown or launched off a ship. “You know how on the channel side of a ship you can usually see a tug pushing her in? Yeah. We’re on the other side.” describes Steve, whose 34 years working for Houston Mooring Company doesn’t even come close to making him the senior man in the room.
Since mooring lines are often too heavy and awkward to be thrown easily, heaving lines —light, but with a heavy knot or other weight near the end— often begin the mooring process. Once linemen begin to pull, the heaving lines give way to heavier gauge material that will secure the ship to shore or to a mooring station alongside a berth. Spring lines are led diagonally from the bow and stern, while breast lines run perpendicular to the ship before being tied to a bollard or other anchor and made fast to keep the vessel from moving fore and aft or drifting away while alongside the pier.
Of course, in practice, the operation requires a great deal of skill and coordination, and a degree of intrepidity to carry out safely. “If you’re on the dock—like right up here at the Turning Basin, basically, the crew’ll throw you a heaving line and two guys on the end are pulling it. We’ll drive a truck to where the bit is, hook the lines in, and use your truck as a winch. You’ve got to be really careful though—over the years, we’ve had some vehicles pulled into the water, not because of something that happens shoreside, but because of the setup onboard the ship—there, the lines are coming off of drums—just like a fishing reel, when you cast it out, sometimes it’ll backlash—well these drums’ll do the same thing."
New boats and new technology has made the boatmen’s job safer and more efficient than ever before. Boatman Rick Kerser described some of the conditions from decades past: “Just before I was down here we were running boats with gasoline engines. You’d have to use the throttle on one hand, gear shift on the other, and a T-Handle on the bulkhead while a shifter came out of the floor, you’d have to idle it down before letting it mesh. Now, the velvet drive transmission al-lows you to go from ahead to astern without meshing—you still try to idle it down a bit so you don’t wipe out the transmission, but boats are much more maneuverable than back then.”
Chiming in with his own recollections, lineman Bobby Kersey described some of the challenges he’s worked with since he started tying up boats in 1957. “The original boats we had were wooden—cypress hulls, and they’d leak like crazy. We had to put a lot of maintenance into them just to keep ‘em running. The gasoline engines, you’d have to air them out, they’d always run hot without modern coolant systems, so you’d carry a spare ignition capacitor. When you were driving the channel, they’d suck up polyethylene bullets into the heat exchanger, shutting off the water, and after a long run, you couldn’t pull it back to neutral and back it up because it’d die on you. You had to come up much more tenderly otherwise you’d smack into the side of the ship or the pier.”
“Now”, Alex Enloe, a “young” boatman with only 14 years of experience interjects, “Now, the diesel engines, bigger wheels, velvet drive transmissions, we’re equipped and safer with better boats and gear like oars and life jackets. At safety meetings once a month, the Coast Guard comes, the companies come, pilots come—we work out what’s going on around the channel, see what to look for.”
"He’s right,” agrees Don Gibson, “Before, we didn’t have any type of radio, if you broke down in the middle of the channel, you’d have to pull up a floorboard and try to get out of the middle of the channel. Most of the lights didn’t work… it was more dangerous”
While new technology can create safer conditions, the growth of new practices and materials can be a double-edged sword: “One of the things that we have to keep track of is that now, ships are going to supersynthetic lines—Kevlar and other materials that’re stronger and lighter than steel, but can be much more difficult to handle. By being so light, and about 90% buoyant, these new lines will drop a few feet under the water and just stay there. Because the material is so dense, when you stop the boat, or if you’ve two other lines on the boat and one comes tight, the line still in the water keeps trying to feed itself into your propeller. Now, on the other hand, when the line snaps, there’s no recoil to it. If one of the steel wire breaks—you can hear it starting—and that can cut you in two.”
As the boatmen recollect the close calls that so many have had over the years, they don’t shy from describing some of the catastrophes that’ve occurred on the ship channel. “When Goodpasture Grain terminal exploded and burned, we had ships on the terminal at the time, and they had to come out of there. Boatmen had to go in let that ship go, and have the tugs pull it off.“ Reeling off specific incidents, the boatmen continued: the Amaco Virginia at Hess burning for days after being ignited by an oil burning lamp on a barge, a two week closure in 1978 when the Chevron Hawaii blew in half at Shell when lightning struck it immediately after mooring, and spills of various types.
In the ‘70’s, a gasoline spill at GaTex Pasadena occurred when an inbound ship came by and stretched out the loading hoses, broke the hose and aviation fuel started pouring into the channel. Steve recalls, “The guys that worked at the terminal ran—smart guys—and the fuel was coming out into the channel. It was such a massive spill it came across the channel to our boat dock at Warren. The water was red with the dye in the fuel, and fumes were awful. They wanted us to go over there and rerun some lines, but all we had were gasoline boats at the time. We had a boatman—Eddie Thompson—only guy down here that would do it, and Eddie said “I’ll go over there”… and he did. He fired the boat up, puttered amid all the fumes and fuel, and tied up the ship. I think if something had gone wrong that night, it would’ve blown up the world.”
Bobby nods at the recollection “I remember going to a dock in the 70’s—used to be Charter Oil, was Traywick dock at the time—went between the ship and the dock and there was gasoline in the water—must’ve been 6 inches deep. Nobody knew it was there ‘til I found it.”
Of course, these incidents involved larger response units and shoreside investigations as to their causes and how to ensure they wouldn’t happen again. But the boatmen have to keep their eyes out for other less-catastrophic hazards as well. Steve laughs “One time, I came around the stern of a ship with Captain Eddie to go after lines and got a stream of something coming into the boat—we looked up to see a crewman relieving himself off the side of the ship… that’ll teach you to be careful.” As the gathered linemen laugh at the memory, one is quick to point out “We had the Elissa come into the new Cruise Terminal dock a few years ago—Steve was working the boat and the girl running the galley was making cookies. When she was cleaning the dishes, she tossed a pail of dirty dishwater over the side, right on top of him… but she brought him cookies afterwards. So it all works out in the wash.”
“One thing I will say—so many of these stories happened before there were containers or contraptions aboard the ships to catch spoils. Used to be you could almost walk across the channel the water quality was so bad.” As the assembled boatmen nod, Rick continues, “The water quality has come up tremendously. Sometimes it doesn’t look it with people throwing in Styrofoam and plastic, but the water itself is clean—I mean, they’re catching redfish and shrimp up here at some of the City Docks. We see a lot of osprey and eagle a lot—never used to see that, and we even see dolphin come up some of the channel up towards Vopak, Houston Fuel Oil and ITC. And shrimp.”
Don quickly interjects, “Some guy wrote an article after canoeing down the channel saying it looks nasty—all he’s looking at is the plastic that people are tossing into the channel. Now I’m not defending that—it’s disgraceful, but the water used to be virtually black from the 610 bridge all the way up. There were two paper mill discharges—one at the Washburn Tunnel, and one down below the Bulk Dock—a paper mill up off of I-10 had a discharge down here and that wasn’t good for the water.”
Port Historians
With decades of experience securing every type of ship imaginable, the line handlers have knowledge and stories of Houston’s maritime history going back to their own time using cypress boats with gasoline motors. Their sea stories run the gamut from old ships to on-the-job hazards to tales of on-the-job creative thinking that may seem dated in today’s security-conscious, safety-conscious environment.
"Twenty, thirty years ago, a 500 foot ship was pretty huge, but around that same time I remember a massive ship that came in— she was just short of 1100 ft long, probably had a 285 ft beam, we used a four-wheel-drive truck to tie her up. At that point, we were just laying her up for a time, but she was so big that she couldn’t get close to the dock, so they just drove her into place, and basically sunk her—ballasted her down to the bottom. We got in the mooring boat, brought lines to the bank, then a couple of guys took the mooring lines up the hill in the truck tying the lines to pylons and trees. That was probably a six or eight hour job just for that one ship, dragging lines across the pasture.
There used to be an American wine ship that came into Old Manchester—the Angelo Petri. She sailed here out of Fort Stockton, California, and I remember that one year, they blended the wine by accident—they had several kinds of wine on the ship, and got the valves mixed up somewhere, blending a whole shipload of wine. No one knew what to do with it—it was pretty good, just different, so they sold it as a “special blend” around here for a year or so. They stored it in stainless steel tanks near Old Manchester, and if the tank overfilled, they’d take a gallon bucket, empty it out, throw it into the sea."
The boatmen describe working with crews—seeing liner services come in and out, they’ve witnessed a changing of the guard when it comes to the seamen tying up in Houston. “You know when I started,” mentions Don, “American ships had an American crew, Greek ship had a Greek crew. We used to see a lot of Norwegian, Swedes, and Japanese, and they were very efficient, very professional crews… now, you may still have Norwegian officers, but with the economics of crewing, you’ll have Romanian, Croatian, Filipino workers”
Talking about the pragmatic effects of crew changes, a boatmen mentions “Well, the difference is that you don’t see the same sailors quite as often, so crews don’t necessarily watch out for you as much. You have to be very careful when they’re lowering combination lines down to the boat because if the crew isn’t paying careful attention, you’ll have the line come down on your head. In that same vein, when they throw the heaving line over, you have to make sure your windshield isn’t in the way.”
The advent of modern communications has had an effect on more than dispatch and direct accountability. “You used to be able to see the entire crew of a ship as she tied up lining up to see the pay phone. Now, if they can get off, everyone’s got access to a cell phone, or the Seaman’s Center takes care of a lot of things. It’s better in some ways, though it’s obviously a lot harder on the crew just to be able to get off the ship when it comes to US Immigration.”
The boatmen share observations from their waterfront history: “It’s not just seamanship that’s developed, but shoreside too” mentions Bobby, “You don’t have the bars with women who’d line up coming to the boat as soon as it tied up, and crime’s gone down as that’s changed. We lost a boatman in 1990—Earl Brock—who was shot as he was taking his boat under Broadway. Earl never knew what hit him—calling dispatch, he thought that he’d hit something in the water and hurt himself when he was knocked down.” Brock’s murder has never been solved and stands as a sober reminder that not all the dangers faced by the boatmen come from the sea.
Into the Future
With changes on the dock and off, David Halbert summarizes the discussion by talking about how each of the boatmen that operate on the Houston Ship Channel are working to become more skilled at their craft. “We’re all constantly striving to get better.” says David, “We used to determine when a ship was going to dock by calling the pilots and getting a passing time from the Marine Exchange down at Morgan’s Point. Now, these guys are able to watch the ships on their phones, HarborLights has an AIS picture and dispatch runs off of real-time information.” Steve echos his thoughts about enhanced communication. “Another thing that we’ve seen is that the community who we work with value what we do. When building new facilities now, terminals are coming to the boatmen — and all of the service providers — and asking for our input when they’re designing a dock. Now, they’ll use a mooring hook instead of having a fixed bollard which you’d have to climb up to a ladder to get to, and that makes things safer and helps us do our job faster.”
Line Handling is a very physical job where new-hires need to be trained extensively before they have the eye to see every-thing that’s going on around them. With experience comes technical competency, a sense of responsibility, and the humble pride of a skilled professional who knows what’s going on 360 degrees around them. Before the boatmen adjourn, David Halbert sums up their job: “At the end of the day, this is still a longshore job where people work for a living—a manual job that takes a lot of strength and endurance. We’ve done everything we can to make things easy, but constantly exposed to the heat, snow, mosquitos, winds, rains, I think this is one of the hardest jobs out there.”