Page 60: of Maritime Reporter Magazine (September 2013)

60 Maritime Reporter & Engineering News ? SEPTEMBER 2013 The inland towing business is Þ lled with history, characters and long tales of business partnerships extending years, decades or even centuries. The partner- ship between LeBeouf Bros. Towing and Karl Senner LLC is one such story, a partnership forged more than 45 years ago between Karl Senner and Dickie Gonsoulin; a partnership solidiÞ ed again this month with the delivery of M/V Karl Senner and M/V Dickie Gonsoulin in Houma, La.A Strong Start The partnership forged by Senner and Gonsoulin and extended today by their two sons, Ralph Senner and Jon Gonsou-lin, all started in 1967 aboard the M/V Mary R, which was a single screw tug-boat purchased by LeBeouf Brothers Towing after its incorporation in 1944. Mary R was originally powered with an Atlas six-cylinder, 160 hp engine. In 1955, the vessel was repowered with an Enterprise 6 cylinder inline ?M? engine rated 400 hp at 800 rpm. Mary R sank in 1957, and after the vessel was recovered from the waters of Texas City harbor, it was refurbished and placed back into service.In 1967, Karl Senner sold his Þ rst Reintjes gearbox for installation in the United States to LeBeouf Brothers tow-ing. The Reintjes WAV 721 gearbox was installed in the Mary R for use with the Enterprise 6 cylinder inline ?M? engine. The Mary R operated successfully with no major repairs to the Reintjes gearbox from date of installation until the vessel was taken out of service in December 1981.According to Jon Gonsoulin, President, LeBeouf Bros. Towing LLC, after the vessel was decommissioned ?we pulled the gearbox out and gave it back to Karl Senner as a momento. They cleaned it up, polished it and put it on display at the Workboat show.? Ralph Senner said that the gearbox eventually was sent back to Germany for display at Reintjes, but that it will be back in the U.S. at the double christen-ing, which was planned for September 14, 2013.This boat will be the Þ rst ever to bear the name M/V Karl Senner, an honor that Gonsoulin said is appropriate. ?Consid-ering that Mr. Karl and dad were very dear friends for all of these years, it?s a beÞ tting time with the delivery of sister boats to have them both be named in their honor.? Changing with the Times While Karl Senner LLC still is a pri-vate, family run business, and maintains much of the same character and principle upon which it was founded, it has been undergoing a transformation of sorts, with the ascension last year of Ralph Senner as the company?s leader and the naming of Steve Valdes as CFO. Just last month the company opened a new training facility on its premisis, a fa-cility which is intially aimed at training and maintaining its own staff, but even- tually intended to accomodate training needs for its customers as well. ?Finding quality trained personnel that can live the lifestyle of a service techni-cian is challenge in our business,? Ralph Senner said, noting that this was a driver to develop its own training center. The new training center, combined with ex- pansion of its facilities Paducah, Ky. and Houston and buoyant business in nearly all of the sectors it serves, has the com-pany running at full speed. But the busi-ness, as always, comes with fresh chal-lenge.One of the main challenges today is consolidation, the loss of small privtely held companies which are being bought by capital groups or public companies. ?Publicly traded companies are not look-ing to the future as much as privately held companies like Jon?s, which are willing to spend a little more money up-front because they wanted to know what that asset would be worth 10, 15 years from now,? Ralph Senner said. ?Some companies are looking to see how much money they can make now, getting that asset to work as quickly as they can, as cheaply as they can.?Gonsoulin agrees, noting that he is willing to spend more money upfront, for example to build barges with thicker steel plate, or to invest an extra $25k in a heavier duty gear, with the assumption that the investment in quality will pay off in the long run with less downtime and trips to the reapir yard. ?Having your own yard allows you a lot of ß exibility,? Gonsoulin said. ?It might cost a bit more in the short term, but in the long term, building yourself, building it better to your spec, it makes a lot of sense to me to build it stronger from the beginning.?Jon is third-generation in the busi-ness, and he said the decision was made to start building its own boats in 2005 in the wake of hurricane Katrina, when a local shipyard who had bid on one of their jobs essentially said they could not bid the project.The Workboat Edition The Ties that Bind This month the M/V Karl Senner and the M/V Dickie Gonsoulin will be christened in Houma, La. While the event is centered on a pair of new, high-speci Þ cation towboats, the celebration is the culmination of more than 45 years of business partnerships between Karl Senner, LLC and LeBeouf Bros. Towing. By Greg Trauthwein, Editor MR #9 (58-65).indd 60MR #9 (58-65).indd 609/6/2013 10:34:19 AM9/6/2013 10:34:19 AM