You're starting to 

 look all tugboaty " 



Captain Jimmy Donnelly says as I clamber up metal steps into the wheelhouse of the Island 

 Express. It is my third morning aboard the tugboat, and I'm feeling tugboaty, too. 



Bleary-eyed, beard-stubbled, and bed-headed, I'm functioning about half-speed given the 

 restless few hours of sleep I just logged a few feet away from twin 800-horsepower Detroit Diesels. 

 I glance out the wide wheelhouse windows at the marshes just south of Sunset Beach, green-gold in 

 the early light, and take long sips of black coffee. And then I break out into a huge grin. 



After all, what kid hasn't wished he could crew a tug, whether the inspiration is the cheerful 

 Theodore Tugboat or, in my case, river pilots from the writings of Mark Twain? 



I got my wish three days earlier, when I stepped aboard Island Express near Charleston, S.C. 

 Operated by Stevens Towing Co., a family-owned shipping business dating to 1913, Island Express 

 was bound for an Edenton, N.C., manufacturing plant that would turn the tug's barge cargo into 

 nailing plates for framing joists. 



To get there, we'd log days and nights on the Atlantic Intracoastal Waterway (ICW), a 

 protected shipping channel that sneaks just inland of the coastline from Miami to Norfolk. 



The ICW is the watery Route 1 of eastern America, in places a dredged canal through dense 

 forest, elsewhere a marked channel crossing vast sounds or a tidal river flowing past industrialized 

 waterfronts. Built for commercial shipping traffic, the waterway these days is just as likely to be 

 plied by shrimp trawlers, sailboats, power yachts and even sea kayaks. 



Tugboats, though, remain its most colorful users. 



Threading the Gauntlet 



Donnelly, a cherub-faced 47-year-old, has navigated the ICW for nearly three decades. He 

 greets this sunrise while perched in a barber's chair bolted to the wheelhouse floor, and from which 

 he can consider a large radar screen, rudder position gauge, wind direction, and tide all at once. 



He grasps a joystick between his thumb and forefinger — it manipulates the tugboat's rudder. 

 It is almost inconceivable that such a tiny apparatus is the primary means of steering such an 

 elephantine rig, but Donnelly lines up the tug, the barge, and 4.5 million pounds of galvanized steel 

 for the run through the heavily developed stretch of waterway behind Sunset Beach. 



On each side of the narrow canal, docks bristle like teeth in a comb. "Every year there are 

 more of 'em," Donnelly grimaces. "A lot of places that were wilderness 10 years ago are lined with 

 houses and docks. Now, there's no place to go if something goes wrong." 



I watch, spellbound, as he calmly threads 3 1 5 feet of tugboat and barge through a gauntlet of 

 docks. It reminds me of something his boss, Boz Smith, told me when I asked about the personali- 

 ties of his tugboat captains. Smith knew I was after colorful tales, but he shook his head. The 

 wheelhouse of a tug, he said, "is no place for a gunslinger." 



Continued 



LEFT: In the belly of a barge, 3,000 tons of new steel dwarf mate Thomas Hutson. 



COASTWATCH 17 



