Page 19: of Marine News Magazine (August 2006)

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August, 2006 • MarineNews 19 of deep harbor waters. Some southern waters are famously shallow, however, and any boat planning to navigate them must be proportioned accordingly. Their bottoms tend toward flatness, not many feet below the waterline. That's for starters. "A great many of the luggers have three engines and three screws," said

Ed Rodriguez of Rodriguez Boat Builders in Bayou La Batre, Alabama. "It's how you get bollard pull with the small pro- pellers required in a shallow-draft situa- tion." Mr. Rodriguez reports that many lugger tugs draw only four to five ft., although "we've built some that draw six ft., for coastwise work" in the Gulf.

That would be quite shallow for most tugs — most northern tugs, anyway — with something close to double that draft being common on tugboats of New York.

But the luggers share one further charac- teristic of tugs in the Big Apple and every- where — they're tough. "They have stain- less wheels and big gears," Rodriguez said, "and they're real multi-purpose boats. Sometimes they have to dig their own channel to open up a pathway through the shallows."

Not that that's the recommended prac- tice — but it's got to happen sometimes in bayou country.

Déjà vu All Over Again

The description of self-dredging boats rings a bell, having been mentioned in these pages by Capt. Bob Henry a couple years ago. In a past edition, MN described the Shelby Rose and the Rachel Marie of

Capt. Henry's Island Towing and Salvage of Staten Island.

The tugs formerly had been owned by

Brown & Root for towing oil rigs in the

Gulf. Hadn't those boats —closer to stan- dard tugs than luggers — also canalized their way from time to time, during their previous life?

Coincidentally, Capt. Henry happened to be in Morgan City when we phoned to confirm our recollection. "Dredging was- n't very prevalent down there," he said about those 1980s oilfields, "you'd make your path as you go. The theory was sim- ple — it was cheaper to overbuild a boat than to dredge. When it banged on a piece of wood, it wasn't the end of the world."

After founding then leaving Henry

Marine in New York, which continues expanding under the original name, Capt.

Henry's "boutique" idea was using the southern shallow-draft tugs in southern-

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If the Lousiana lugger looks familiar to old-timers, its passing resemblance to the old self-propelled harbor lighter might be an explanation. Here, Kosnac's K.M. Koehler is underway in the mid-1960s, delivering a propeller weighing something around 25 tons. (Photo courtesy K Tugs NY, scan by Don

Sutherland.)

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