All hail the tugboat! Suez Canal ship saga puts spotlight on ‘secret industry’ of small, working boats

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This article was published 29/03/2021 (1404 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Freed from mounds of sand and mud, the Ever Given glided north to Great Bitter Lake, and life after single-handedly blocking a crucial trade route.

Its escort was a flotilla of small but mighty tugboats. While the Ever Given floated, doing its best not to move for risk of running aground again, about a dozen tugboats pushed and pulled the great container ship Monday with the unlikely strength of honeybees hauling loads many times their size. The great shipping vessel — unharmed, according to divers, by its five-day washup on the sandy banks of the Suez Canal — floated passively while the tugboats heaved with the force of 3,000-4,000 horsepower engines.

From its new position at Great Bitter Lake, a wide point of the canal, other shipping vessels would be able to pass the skyscraper-sized Ever Given while it underwent further inspections. Trade through the Suez Canal resumed.

When the story of #TheBoat is retold, there is no question: The little boats will come out as heroes.

All hail the humble tugboat. Perpetually dwarfed and always punching above its weight, the great freeing of the Suez Canal ship has finally given the world’s oft-ignored workboat its moment to shine.

At a time when more and more people were already paying attention to disruptions in shipping because of the pandemic, the blockage of the canal by the Ever Given brought both the necessity and the fragility of the global shipping network into even sharper relief.

It’s unclear exactly how the great ship ended up wedged in banks of sand at a narrow point in the canal, but it is clear that there was only ever one way of getting it out. Sophisticated logistics and schedules all over the world be damned — to dislodge this ship would require dredging the sand beneath it, and simple pushing and pulling by working boats, however long it took.

On any given day, it’s tugboats that are doing the dirty work in ports. The Port of Vancouver, the third largest port in North America and the most important for trade in Canada, could not operate as it does without the harbour tugs that fetch container ships and bring them to port. Almost 30 per cent of the boats that arrived in the port of Vancouver in the past 30 days were tugboats, and the Port Authority estimates there are more than 100 tugboats that serve the port regularly.

To those who work with tugboats, watching the dislodging of the Ever Given was like marvelling at the kind of puzzle that might come once in a lifetime.

Mark Mulligan, a naval architect and founding partner of Capilano Maritime Design Ltd., which designs tugboats and other workboats, says he’s been through the Suez Canal a number of times and knew right away the Ever Given would not be stuck forever.

“We never thought of a total catastrophe,” he said “You’ve got it mucked up into sand, not rock. So we knew it was a matter of time, and getting the big tug out there.”

And if a tugboat seems an unequal match for the 224,000-ton container vessel, Mulligan will tell you the small size of a tugboat is part of its strength.

“They’re powerful, they’ve got big engines. They’re small so they’re manoeuvreable,” he said.

If anything would draw the world’s attention to the strength of the little guy in the maritime industry, it could be this story, he said.

“They’re the working vessels,” he said of the tugboats and dredger. “And you’ve got one of the biggest ships in the world stuck in the narrowest channel.”

Early Monday, a video began circulating on social media of about a dozen men, celebrating the freedom of the Ever Given by chanting “Mashhour is number one.”

The cheering and smiling men, who jumped up and down and put their hands in the air with the canal visible in the background, were identified as the crew of the Mashhour — the dredging vessel whose job it was to displace the sand in which the Ever Given had gotten stuck.

It was a moment of pride for working boat workers, who seldom have the opportunity to take a bow for their work.

Daniel Gould, a tugboat engineer off the coast of Washington, said it could be a moment the public appreciates the humble tugboat a little more.

“We’re sort of just this secret industry,” he said. “It’s very low profile. But it’s vital — like trucking or railroads or air freight.”

Gould said he hadn’t really stopped to imagine what it would have been like to be on one of the tugs that helped free the Ever Given. He guessed there was a lot of co-ordination going on, directing the tug crews when to push or pull the boat.

As the engineer, he said, it would have been his job to hold the winch for the ropes connecting the tug with the ship.

“We operate in a lot of really high-stress situations, and you just have to deal with it,” he said. “In those situations, it’s tunnel vision. Everyone’s just trying to get the job done.”

He chuckled when he saw some people posting on social media, saying things like “just push the boat out.” He knows it’s not that simple. But he was glad when he saw the footage of the Ever Given floating out of the way.

At that moment, logistics and shipping professionals worldwide cried with relief, probably. Makers of internet memes mourned the end of a golden age. And all gaped at the humbling of our modern global trade system, brought down by the ineptitude of a towering symbol of global capitalism, and freed by the pushing, pulling and dredging of working boats.

Alex McKeen is a Vancouver-based reporter for the Star. Follow her on Twitter: @alex_mckeen