Kai Hansen’s Maritime Stories November 5, 2020
Last night Kai shared some more stories with Baltimore Shipspotting including a Thanksgiving tale. He is hoping there will be some questions about his time as a tugboat Captain for the next time we meet. See the 20 minute video below!
Below is the transcription (by Shana Henry, check her Fiverr page) of the above video:
Hi, my name is Kai Hansen. I’m a retired tugboat captain. I was the last independent tugboat operator 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 and feel free to ask me the questions and I’ll answer them as good as I can.
Okay, there were no requests anyway, so I’m just going to quickly go over what kind of tows we used to do with my tug out of Baltimore. Basically, it was the caustic barges that we would haul up to Philadelphia or down to Norfolk, and then bring it up here to Curtis Bay and load it off. In between, we would get all kinds of jobs. We would tow some mud barges, we would tow… Sometime we would help out docking the ships and we would help out when they built the tunnels out here, and this, that, and the other, whatever came. We did some container barges for a while. It was just a little bit of everything. Whatever would come our way we would do.
One time we actually got a call; it was a tug that had lost the wheel down in day in the Cohansey River, which is in New Jersey. It goes up from the Delaware River up into New Jersey there. That’s a title job. We went there, and I couldn’t get a mate. So we just went down there because I figured that that boat had a captain and a mate on it. So once I got down there, they could take over. So we got down there, we got hooked up to that tug, the disabled tug and the barge. We were coming out of there, and once we got outside in the Delaware Bay, I was really tired because now I’ve been up for 24 hours. So I told the captain over there on the other tug that he could take over. We were supposed to go up to Wilmington and drop off this tug and barge.
After about an hour, hour and a half, the engineer came and woke me up. That was the engineer from the other tug. He came and woke me up. He said, “You better get up here because something is not right.” So I got up and there was a snow blizzard. We couldn’t see a thing. I asked the guy; I said, “Where are we?” He told me where we were and I looked at the radar, but it just didn’t look right to me. It looked strange. And then I heard the two pilots from ships talking, and they were saying there was a little tug towing another tug and a barge way down here at Brown Shoal, and be careful because he is kind of running all over the place. And then I looked at the radar again, and I realized that the guy had gone the wrong way. Instead of going up the river, he was going down the river. So I said, let’s get down here, let’s get outside the channel and drop the anchor and I’m going to bed, and don’t wake me for six hours. So that’s the end of that story, but stuff like that happened.
Since we are close to Thanksgiving, I’ve got a story that I would to tell. It may sound like a sea story, but it’s not. It’s actually the truth. This was either 73 or 74. I was the Ab deck hand on a big twin screw 4200 horsepower tug with an upper wheel house. We were married to a 150,000 barrel barge. Our main job… It was owned by NEPCO, New England Petroleum and run by McAllister. So we actually worked for McAllister, but the owners were NEPCO. Our main job was to supply a big power station, Niagara Mohawk Power station in Oswego, New York, which is in Lake Ontario.
We would have to go to Montreal or Quebec which was 24 hours to Montreal light from Oswego and then 36 hours loaded back to Oswego with one hundred thousand barrels of black oil. We couldn’t load it all the way because they weren’t going to be able to see over in the sea way. And then sometimes we would go down all the way down to the bay of St. Lawrence and load off a ship, but could only work up there in the summer time. December 15th, we had to be in Montreal because that’s when they closed the seaway. There were a couple times where we barely made it out of there because the ice builds up in the locks and they can’t open the lock to us. Ice gets in between. And then we had a long time leaving there.
One time we got stuck in a little place in Dalhousie. It was called Dalhousie on the north shore of New Brunswick. We were there for Christmas and New Year’s, pretty much frozen in and waiting for the weather, because every 36 hours you have an [inaudible 06:46] up there. In between you have a snow storm. It freezes down to 22. We were kind of stuck there in this little town. On one side of the street was a paper mill by the water and the other side of the street was… In the middle of the street were railroad tracks. There was a train that went over to Montreal from there. I don’t know how. It must’ve gone across a bridge somewhere. And then there were all these little stores and they were like wooden shacks, basically, just one story. The closer we got the Christmas, the emptier the stores were.
There was a little… We had nothing to do because we were just sitting there. There were two gin mills in town. One was a country and western place with a Chinese country and Western singer. The other one was… What are they called again, the ones with the flashing lights? Disco and the Micmac Indians were hanging in there. They were carrying trash bags full of marijuana. That was back in the good old days when you could drink and smoke pot. But then after that, since the company that owned the barges and the tug, they also owned part of the refinery down in Freeport Bahamas. So during the whole window, we would work out of Freeport and kind of go to Florida to West Palm Beach and Miami and different places with black oil.
One time, a couple times, we would load a hundred thousand barrels of black oil and take it out what your Port Canaveral. We would just sit there and wait, because there was a small tug and a barge that took 10,000 barrels and he would come and load, and then one way up the river to a power station. It took him like three days for a round trip. So we would be there for a long time. We would sit there and there was a little bait store that also had a cooler with beer and sit on the liars bench outside and watch the rockets go up, because that was back in the seventies, in the early seventies when they were shooting up a lot of rockets. Sometime at night, we would go to Cocoa Beach and watch the floor show over there.
It was just a time… I don’t know if any of you guys are old enough to remember that there was a stripper and she was only like 17 years old, but she put on a hell of a show. This crew from a nuclear sub, they invited her down and she was stripping on the galley table, down at this nuclear sub. I guess word got out and there was a big stink about it and the captain got fired. But anyway, we left there. We loaded the barges with a hundred thousand barrels of black oil. The barge was 465 feet long and 70 foot wide. It loaded like that. It would have about a six foot freeboard. And then we headed from there to… We were going up to New York and of course, it’s winter time. Soon after we left, the weather got shitty. Two tanker men on the barge, they had to ride the tug. They disappeared into one of the rooms and we didn’t see them for two weeks.
This was a Thanksgiving afternoon, maybe around 3:30 or 3 o clock or something like that. I was the mate’s watch. So I’m sitting in the galley at this long table and down one end, was a thing come out there with a door and there was a shower and a toilet in there. And then there was a door back to the fiddly with the wash machine and drier and then into the engine room. On this side was a big electric stove. On the side over here was the sink, a double sink. And then like here were the big refrigerator freezers. When you go around that side, there was the room where two deckhands lived. And then there was a door with a very steep stairway going up to the second where the captain’s room and the captain and the mates and the two engineers at their room. And then there was another set of steps going up to the lower engine room. I mean, to the lower wheelhouse.
Over here, behind… On that side over here was the door where the cook and the ordinary seaman lived. We were a 12 man crew, I guess, with the two tanker men. I’m sitting here, over here. I kind of had myself snugged in because the weather was getting really bad and we were towing really slow because the trip before, we broke the hawser, the cable broke right on the stern and the barge was drifting for two or three days before we could get on it and pull the cable up and then attach an emergency hawser. When you have big, heavy seas like that, and a loaded barge, you just have to slow down, because the cable, even that the thing is 1800, 2000 feet behind the cable will come tight and that’s when it breaks if the top goes down this way and the barge go back that way. So you just have to slow down so you have a catenary in the cable. The cable is two inches thick.
I’m sitting back there reading my book and the cook guy, he was from North Carolina. His name was Roy. He’s sitting on this little chair. Actually, it looked very much like this one here. It was metal with a nice seat and vinyl back. And then on each leg was this big round metal, stainless steel metal thing, so it wouldn’t dig down into the vinyl floor. The boat would go way, way, way up and then shake like this, and then go down and then shake. It would go on like that. Roy had told me earlier that he was a part Cherokee and part Irish and part Jewish. Something bad always happened to him. He was really a melancholy guy. It would really weigh heavily on him. He was divorced from his wife and she was an alcoholic. He had gotten custody of his two kids that were like 8 or 10 or something like that. His girlfriend was watching the kids, but the ex-wife would get drunk, and then she would go to the school and steal the kids.
Every day at noon time, the captain would call up the office in Philadelphia on the single side band radio and they would say, “Oh, tell the cook that his ex-wife stole the kids.” And then there was nothing he could do about it, but he would be really, really down in the dumps. So anyway, Roy is sitting on his chair and he is peeling potatoes. On the stove, was that was a big pot boiling. It was locked in with this contraption that you have on all boats to hold pots and pans in different places so they won’t slide around. And then he would be peeling the potatoes and sliding. He would slide over to the trash can and dump the potato peels. And then he would slide over and dump the potato in the pot, and then slide back over here and grab a potato out of his thing he had full of potatoes. He would go back and forth like that.
Every once in a while he would slide over in front of this big stove. There was a big bar like that, and he opened up and there was a turkey, the biggest turkey I have ever seen. It must have been 30 pounds. It was in there and it was getting nice and brown. He looked at it and then he based it a little bit and closed it again. And then when the thing got up, he would slide. He didn’t even have to move it, because he would just slide back and forth.
That went on for a while. Every once in a while the boat would just bang into a big sea and go up, up, up. And then the bow would come crashing down. I don’t know if you have ever seen these big 747s where they train the astronauts. When you dived, you become weightless, and you actually… Every once in a while it looked like Roy was actually floating in the air because he was weightless. I’m watching him. I’m reading and watching him. And then all of a sudden, I see him, he’s over there. He opens the door to base the turkey again and the boat comes up, up, and down and bang, here comes to turkey out of the oven. It’s bouncing around all over the place and in the meantime, it’s greasing the linoleum floor too. So now he is sliding and he is trying to catch the turkey and he is sliding after it. The turkey gets over in the corner, and you’ve got a hold of it and pulled up, but it was so hot, he had to let it go. And then he goes over and he opens the drawer and he got two big forks out, and then he is chasing the turkey around. He is sliding. Every time the boat rolls, he slides over this way and the turkey rolls and he is chasing this big god damn turkey around.
And then all of a sudden, he gets a hold of it. The door to the oven is still open. He gets a hold of it and he gets it back in the oven and smacks the door closed. He rolls over and he puts the fork and the knife in the sink or whatever. And then he turns around and he has this great big smile on his face and then he saw me. He didn’t realize I was there. His shoulders just came down like this. It was like the weight of the Trail of Tears and the Irish famine and the Holocaust all hit him at one time. He had this horrible look in his face. I said, “Roy, if you don’t say anything, I won’t say anything.” He had a great, big smile on his face, and then he grabbed the mop and he started to mop up the floor. That evening, I made sure I had white meat. That’s the end of the story. But these things happen and you never hear about them because people think it’s a lie.
If you have questions for Kai you can ask them below if you have a Disqus account or on my Twitter or Facebook pages. As always thanks to Bertha’s of Fells Point for letting us use their space!