Kai Hansen Talks About Tugboat Career October 1, 2020

In the video below Kai Hansen answers some questions and talks about his career as the last tugboat owner/operator in Fells Point, Baltimore, Maryland.

The transcription of the above video is below:

Hi, my name is Kai Hansen and I’m a retired tugboat captain. I was the last independent tugboat operators in Fells Point. I operated the tug Athena that was built in 1939. I operated her for 15 years out of Fells Point. If you have any questions about that time and what kind of work I did and where we go and what we did, you can go ahead, feel free to ask me the questions and I’ll answer them as good as I can.

Okay. I have some questions here. One is from Walt Mathers. The question is, can you let any information about the Charles D Gaither. If it’s the Gaither that was owned by Ralph Ford, then I don’t know much about her, but if that’s the boat, then I actually ran her because when he moved from Pratt Street over to the old licorice factory at Boston Street. I actually towed some of his equipment over there with the Gaither, but I don’t have much recollection of that anymore. So this is really all I can tell you. 

Then we have another question here. This is the question from mcJonesMcjones- I don’t know if you have seen the show, Wire, but… No, this sounds like Hollywood stuff and I’m not too much into that. It’s something about the crime and the decline of the city and the port and corruption. Baltimore had a lot of corruption, but so did Chicago and Philadelphia and New York and all the other cities. It’s the American way of life. It’s there and it has been there. But on the waterfront, I never saw any of it, really. Nobody ever approached me for money or anything like that. Going all the way back to when I first came here in 1958, on ships, we would dock down at the end of Clinton Street or we would dock over at South Locust point and the Scandinavian kids, 17, 18 years old, we would walk up to Fells Point where we used to hang out at a bar called the Viking. It’s very old. The H&H Bakery store is at now.

 We never, I never heard of anybody being robbed or assaulted. Of course, we were big boys. We were big guys, so nobody was going to fool with us, but then again, like I say, Fells Point was pretty darn safe. It was a neighborhood. People lived here. The people who worked in the canneries and on the docks lived here and the tugboat people lived here. So it was very safe. I think basically, Baltimore was pretty safe too. So I guess that answers your question. 

Then we have another question here from… I can’t tell who that is from. Did I ever assist in any sort of emergency rescue of people over board or stuck on a ship on fire? Well, not really, but, when I worked on the Port Welcome way back in the late sixties, one afternoon this lady fell over her coming off the gangplank and her young nephew jumped in to save her, just to find out that he couldn’t swim. So I jumped in and helped both of them up into the crew boats and put down a line and I tied a line around them one by one and hauled them out of here. That’s the only disaster that we really had in Baltimore. 

Then we have from David W Woodell. I look forward to seeing this. I’m a author of documentary, history and inspection. Okay, so he’s talking about the all steam tug in, Baltimore, I believe. Let me see. I knew about that old steam tug. Actually, in 1976, I was the liaison person on the tall ship Danmark, sailing down from New York to Baltimore. And we docked down at the Inner Harbor, before there was really an Inner Harbor. Right at the stern of the boat was the old steam tug Baltimore dock. They came over and invited us over for a beer. Some of us went over there and on the stern of the boat was a Coca Cola cooler full of beers. They kind of showed us around the boat. That’s all I can remember of that thing. 

There are two more questions from Mr. Jones and one of them, why was he the last tugboat operator Fells Point? In 2001, I sold out to a Philadelphia company and the boat ended up in Philadelphia. So that’s the reason why I was the last one at Fells Point. Anybody else who had been there, like Sadowski, they had left years earlier. 

Why did he eventually leave the tugboat life behind? I retired when I was 68 years old, I believe in 2008 and I was working for Vane Brothers at the time and my son had started out as a deck hand and I decided to stay two more years to train him. When that ended, that’s when I retired. 

And then we are back to David Woodell. I don’t really know… The only thing I know about the Baltimore was that it ended up I think, being owned by… I think it was the DuPont family. It sunk up in the river up there in the upper bay. And then it was brought up in… I don’t really know anything much more about it. The only thing I do know we is that I worked for two years on an all Norwegian tramp steamer. So I know a little bit about what steamboat is all about, but I think that the… I’m pretty sure that the Baltimore was a coal burner, but I don’t know if it was or not. The one that I’ve worked on was an oil burner, but I spent two years on there. Steamboats are nice because you can stand down in the engine room and talk because it’s so quiet. 

I have a question from a William Band and it’s about a German submarine that came in here and in 1916. I was born in 1940. That submarine came in here 104 years ago, and it’s way before my time, but I did read about it. I think all the information that you would want to know about that thing is in public records. I can’t answer that question. Sorry about that. That would be last question here, I think. Do we have any other questions? Okay.

Somebody asked me what kind of… I can’t find that here. What kind of work did I do with the tug? Pretty much anything that came our way. We towed muck scows. We towed container barges. We assisted in some ship docking. We towed a great big crane. We towed Viking ships. We towed hydraulic, a big generator that was supposed to work on the current. We towed that so they could see if it actually worked. I mean, we towed a lot of different things, but our main job for years was we towed 5,000 tons of caustic soda, sodium hydroxide mostly from Philadelphia. We unloaded it. We got a loaded from a ship that would come in and we would tow it over here to Curtis Bay, to WR Grace chemical company. 

And then we would go down to Norfolk sometime and pick some up. At one time we were actually operating two caustic barges; one for a company up in New York. That was the bread and butter. That’s the only reason why I was able to stay in business, really. I have some pictures of the… Let me show you here. Here is a picture of my two crew members, dressed up like Vikings when we towed the two Viking ships from the Potomac River, actually into Little Italy on Columbus Day. We didn’t realize it was Columbus Day, but it was kind of funny.

You can see here, we are towing them side by side, two of them. They came over from Norway and then they… And then we have here a picture of a container barge, the New England barge that we towed up to Philadelphia. Let’s see what else we have here. Here’s an oil barge that we used to tow. We were common… I don’t know. That was probably up in the Delaware River. Here is a picture of the tug Athena and actually up on land, down in Newport News. We were having the bottom painted. Here are some other pictures. Let me see here. Okay. Here is a picture of us being lifted up by the crane, the Big Red, which we also towed. The guy never paid me so I took it out in trade. And that’s when the Bethlehem Steel Key Highway shipyard was being broken down so they could build condominiums. So basically, we were the last vessel ever repaired in the Bethlehem Steel Key Highway shipyard. They worked on my rudder there and like I say, he never paid me for a job I did for him, so he did this in trade.

And then I had some pictures here from down in the engine room. This is the old electrical board because the boat was built in 1939 and she was a DC boat. We had her rectified over to AC. The galley was AC, but all the motors, the pumps and everything in the engine room was DC. This is the old DC boat. It looks very much like the one, the Frankenstein that Dr. Frankenstein used to jumpstart his… You know, the guy, whatever his name was. 

Here are some other pictures from the engine room. Okay, that’s the engine room here. The boat was built in 1939. And then it was bought in 1940 by the Navy. It ended up in Boston as a submarine net handling boat during the war. There were bunks for 12 people. There were four bunks up in the superstructure. And here is the galley, the old galley with the refrigeration underneath. Here is a picture of me with the old diesel stove sitting in the corner. Here is the sink and the cabinet. So there would be 12 crew members. You would have 12 crew members during the time that the Navy operated her.

In 1945, she was sold back to private business. I think she ended up in Baltimore in 1966 and was bought by Charles Harbor. He used her to tow coal barges from down here at the coal pier to Bethlehem Steel and also from Norfolk to Bethlehem Steel. A partner and I bought her in 1986 for $36,000 because there was absolutely no work. The harbor was almost at a standstill. We thought it was going to pick up again, but it really didn’t pick up for a while. We did the best we could, and we made a living for 15 years. Actually, I owned 10 boats and this is the only one that I actually made money on. I lost money on nine boats. The Athena, I bought it for 36,000 and sold her for 65. So that’s the moral of the story- Don’t buy a pleasure boat because you are going to lose money. 

This is about it for this section, I think. I don’t know if there are any other questions to be answered. Maybe we’ll wait for somebody else to send in some questions. Oh yeah, there was somebody who asked, but I think I have already answered that question about what we did, what kind of work we did and I think that has already been answered. 

I have a question from Scott Roberts. What was your favorite tug? There were actually two of them that were my favorite Tugs. It was the Britannia that was owned by Baker Whitley and then later on by McAllister. We did ship docking with that. That tug, you could back it. Most tugs when you back, they have quite big rudders. We call them barn doors. They would back hard to the left, because that’s the propeller usually turns. And then it’s almost impossible to bring it back straight. But Britannia would back straight from Baltimore to Norfolk and also she would turn in her own circle. She was like… She would turn on a dime. The Athena was exactly the same way; she would turn on a dime. She would back completely straight, which is really handy with… Today, it doesn’t matter because you’ve got twin-screw tugs and you can back straight. But with a single-screw tug it’s a totally different ball game. 

The difference between single-screw tug and a twin-screw tug is the same as the difference between a horse team and a car. So there you go. Single-screw tugs, you know, you only have one shot and you can’t stay there and work yourself sideways and do all these tricks that you can do with a twin-screw tug. Back then, we were always underpowered. We’ve always underpowered. They used to say a good tugboat captain has 800 horsepower in the engine room and a thousand horsepower up in his head. And then they always say tugboat captains are loud. I’ve been thrown out of bars for being too loud, because we had to overpower the engine and shout orders to the crew and make sure that they heard stuff. There is an old saying that the only one louder than a tugboat captain is his wife. Okay. Thank you. That’s about it, I guess what this section.

Note, Kai referred the submarine question as being from William Band, it actually came from Walt Mathers. The fault is mine as he was reading the questions from my phone.

Click here to see the video from the previous week looking for questions for Kai to answer.

Big shout out again to Bertha‘s of Fells Point for hosting us. Click here for my little review of them. I had their crabcake a second time after this video recording session.