EVERETT — Operating a tug is rarely a day at the beach, but it sometimes seems like that for employees of Brusco Tug &Barge at the Port of Everett.
The four crewmen operating the company’s two local tugs, which guide ships to port and now also will move oversized containers between the port and its satellite facility near Mukilteo, all previously worked on offshore tugs.
“All four of us were always gone all the time,” said Dave Brusco, manager of the Everett operation, noting that in his previous job he was away from home 290 days each year.
Now he goes home every night. “It’s a change of pace,” agreed Brian Long, who said he worked on the ocean for the past 13 years.
He now uses his “spare time” to help his wife run a horse farm in Monroe.
Long, Brusco and the rest of the crew, Steven Kehrli and Nathan Smith, have less spare time these days following the May 2 opening of what’s officially called the Mount Baker Terminal. The facility is being used to handle odd-sized containers, some of them are as large as 23 feet wide and 40 feet long, called “fat boys” by Boeing Co. workers.
Last Thursday, the Brusco crew made a 7 a.m. run to the pier, designed to accommodate huge barges loaded with the containers. Their job was to pick up a load of empty containers and return them to Everett to be filled with Boeing parts.
Dave Madill, the port’s marine terminals director, said the barge pier is designed to handle any large containers — mostly for the aerospace industry.
But the only customer to date is Boeing, which has parts for the 777, 767 and 747 made in Asia, shipped to Everett or Tacoma and then unloaded near Mukilteo. The parts are loaded onto rail cars, then sent on a spur line directly to Everett’s Boeing plant.
Madill said the port has been working closely with Boeing to ensure it gets the parts it wants when it wants them and in the order that they need to arrive. Before the new pier opened this month, each Boeing shipment meant the main Burlington Northern Sante Fe rail line running through Everett had to be shut down for at least two hours. Now the move to the Boeing spur takes only a few minutes.
“It opens up the main line for a lot more activity,” Madill said. “There were significant pressures being put on the line here.”
Last week, as a Brusco tug tied up to the barge before 8 a.m., Burlington Northern trains breezed along the track unaffected while hauling several hundred Hyundai containers. At the pier, the crew secured three ropes to the barge, which was 200 feet long and 60 feet wide, and untied it from the dock.
Long put the tug in reverse and eased the barge away from the pier. The fog was dense, and the only other vessel that was visible on the water was the nearby Mukilteo ferry to his right. After the barge cleared the pier, Long steered it forward and headed home.
At the pier, Brusco had remained on the barge to look for other boats that Long couldn’t see during the return trip.
“I use my radar for the rest of it,” he said.
In addition to radar equipment, he also carried a pair of binoculars and a laptop computer with navigational charts.
Long said the crew has a “track line that we follow to stay out of everybody’s way.” The idea is to push the barge in an arc over deeper water so it doesn’t interfere with fishing pots or crabbers. Occasionally he spots a moving boat on his radar and radios Brusco to see if he sees it, too.
Long said he grew up in Longview, where Brusco Tug is headquartered. The company, once operated by Brusco’s grandfather and then sold, was re-established by his father.
“I have been on the ocean most of my life,” Long said, explaining his father was a commercial fisherman.
As Long glides toward his destination on the north side of the port’s Pier 1, Brusco picks up the pace of his chatter.
“He’s giving me everything I need because I can’t see the dock,” Long said. Above him is a big wall of gray ship containers. Beyond that is the fog.
Asked to talk about how the new service was helping the rail line, Long shrugs. “They throw ‘em on, we move ‘em,” he said.
Brusco called for a hard right, then a “half-half twist to the right” and Long steers the barge alongside the pier.
Brusco opened the mike of his radio, but said nothing. “I was just thinking out loud,” he later explained. “That was a thinker.” Then he called, “Give me a left 10. Give me an easy, easy left twist. All stop.”
There’s another exchange with Brusco asking for Long to “kick it in and out with 10 degrees left rudder.”
“OK. We’re going to wrap it up here,” Brusco said.
The giant barge sits within inches of the pier and is tied up to be unloaded, then reloaded with containers.
The one-way trip takes about an hour. For the crew, it’s just another day on the water.
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