Tug Boat Life

What follows is from a memoir, “Tug Boat Life,” soon to be published by Gerald Bell about his 50 years working on tug boats.

My first few months of work for Dunlap Towing were spent towing logs. One night we were departing Port Ludlow on the tug Vulcan with a tow that had several extra boom sticks tied along side. The sticks were fanned out from the tow, and we decided they needed to be tied in tight. The captain let me off on the tow with a pike pole and a flashlight and some tie line and continued towing out of the harbor.

Balanced out there on the log tow, I managed to get the center portion secured and was working on the tail end. I was using the light of the tug’s spotlight to get the job done, when suddenly the captain turned it off. This left me in the dark with no night vision, on a moving tow.

Fumbling in the dark, I started to lose my balance and made a leap for the boom stick that I had been trying to secure. But, of course, I missed and went into the frigid water. I managed to grab the end of the last boom stick at the end of the tow as it was going by. If I had missed, I would have been left floating alone in the dark for who knows how long. But I did manage to get back on the log tow and finish securing the sticks.

One of my coworkers, Ron Peterson, told me about his own experience falling off a log tow. It happened during daylight hours at Anacortes. Ron, the deckhand, and Bill Ishmo, the captain on the tug Jerry D, were delivering a log tow. Ron ran across the tow to tie the logs to a dolphin. When he reached the far side, he failed to stop, and he ran right off the tow. When his feet hit the water’s bottom, he got stuck in the mud, just below the surface. Bill did not see him go overboard but didn’t see any sign of Ron. He quickly tied the tug to the tow and went to investigate. He found him under the water and was able to reach down and pull him free.

By Claire Swedberg

I had no expectations when I first came to the senior center in La Conner, nearly 10 years ago, and asked Janna Gage, the director, if there was any interest in a writing class. I was thinking of offering something along the lines of memoir writing. After all, everyone has a few interesting stories to tell, I figured.

A decade later, probably 100 people have passed at one time or another through Maple Hall with a pen and paper in hand — a rather staggering number, considering the size of our community.

They include artists, farmers, administrators, teachers, a boat captain, union organizer, engineer and everything in between. They range in ages from 20s to 90s, and they tell stories that have made me — and each other — laugh, cry and drop our mouths open in shock. Many of these stories have stayed with me for years, leaving an imprint that just slightly alters the way I see the world.

Often we say to each other around that classroom table, “Wouldn’t it be nice to share some of these stories?” and in fact several of the class members have published or are publishing their memoirs. But one of the hard and fast rules of the class is this: What’s said in the class stays in the class.

This year members of the class are going to loosen the confines of that rule and share a few stories with our community. The “La Conner Weekly News” has agreed to publish abbreviated versions of stories that class members are able to share. You will learn some history and a lot about the life of the Skagit Valley and beyond.