A Cold Day In The Shipyards

The morning was cold and gray. A Blue Northern had blown through the night before. As I got ready for work in the shipyards, I knew what was planned for us. Since the Northern had passed us, the tide would be low, which meant the Howard would be mostly out of the water. The evening before, we had tied the boat up to a post on the bank of the bayou. The Howard was a towboat with push knees, and over the years, some damage had occurred to the knees that were normally underwater. So instead of going through the expense of dry-docking the Howard, the plan was to repair the knees by taking advantage of the tides being out for most of the day. I am not a fan of the cold; in fact, I hate the cold. I would rather be hot and sweaty than be cold.

I dressed in layers upon layers of clothes, starting with thermal underwear. I don’t recall how many layers of clothes I had on, but I felt like the Michelin Man as I walked into the shop that morning. We had prepared the work truck the day before, with welding and metal-cutting gear. We also had a trailer with sheets of half-inch metal, angle iron, and rubber mounted on ¾-inch steel plates. We knew it was going to be muddy out there, so the plan was to get the truck as close to the Howard as possible and leave the trailer near the road. There was a wench truck that we planned to use to transfer the heavy metal out to the boat.

We sat at the table in the shop, drinking coffee and going over our plan. We knew there would be some metal we needed to cut out of the lower part of the knees, but we really did not know how much. From the shop, the drive to the shipyards takes about 20 minutes. The heater in the truck was taking its sweet time warming up, and my feet were freezing. As we arrived at our worksite, we saw we had a field of mud to wade through to reach the boat. We dropped the trailer off near the wench truck and drove the other truck with the welders out to the Howard. Fortunately, we did not get stuck, but we were throwing mud everywhere from the truck's dual wheels. We backed the truck up to the bow of the boat; I climbed onto the flatbed and raised a ladder so I could climb onto the deck. I needed to start the boat’s generator so we could get the heaters going, especially in the galley. But I had to be careful that the generator did not overheat, since the cooling channels alongside the boat, where the generator's cooling water was located, were out of the water due to low tide. I don’t think we will have to worry much about overheating since the day air was so cold, but I needed to keep an eye on the temp gauges.

With the truck blocking the north wind and the cutting torches lit, I was starting to warm up some. We got the bad metal cut away, so fabrication of the new push-knee parts started. We had brought out some of the metal materials we needed using the wench truck. Once we had the frame for the repair tacked into place, it was time to weld up all the metal to add as much strength as possible. We had to get this finished today since the tide was going to come back in tonight, and where we were working on the boat will be underwater tomorrow.

We were about to finish when I started to feel warm, even hot, on my back. My co-worker yelled at me that I was on fire! It took me a second to comprehend what he was saying. I saw him grab a bucket of water and was heading my way, and that is when it sank in that I WAS ON FIRE! I had taken my jacket off since it was making it difficult for me to move my arms. The outer layer of the shirt was on fire on my lower back. I struggled to get out of that shirt as quickly as I could because I did NOT want that bucket of water thrown on me. Fortunately, only the outer shirt layer burned, not the other layers of shirts or the thermal top.

We went back to work to finish welding. That evening, we were talking about this at the shop. The fabrication of the lower part of the push knees is complete, and tomorrow we will prepare the boat for another job pushing barges. This was just another day to laugh about at Stapp Towing!

I circled the push knees on this picture of the Howard to illustrate what we were working on.