Towboat on the Ohio

James E. Casto

• Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780813189208
• Topic: Technology & Engineering
• Subtopic: Marine Transportation
• Index: Technology & Engineering

To get a personal look at what it is like to work on the Ohio River, newspaperman James E. Casto spent eight days aboard the Blazer as it traveled the Ohio from Huntington, West Virginia, to Pittsburgh, up the Allegheny and the Mongahela, and then back to Huntington. The Paul G. Blazer, a gleaming white towboat owned and operated by Ashland Oil, pushes a group—or "tow, " as the rivermen call it—of nine barges on this trip. Along the way, Casto introduces us to Captain Ronnie Davis, pilot Ronnie Burge, engineer Steve Bellomy, the mates, the deckhands, and the cook, as well as the river itself, the life and the beauty that are the Ohio.

Interwoven with the narrative of the trip upriver and back is the history of commerce on the Ohio—of how the flatboats and keelboats gave way to the steamboats and how, in turn, the steamboats were replaced by today's powerful, diesel-powered boats such as the Blazer.

Mark Twain wrote that the Mississippi had a new story to tell every day. The same can be said of the Ohio. As engaging as it is informative, Towboat on the Ohio tells one of the many stories of the busy, hardworking Ohio River.

Chapter 1

Captain Ronnie Davis is not happy. And he’s getting unhappier by the minute. Davis, skipper of the Paul G. Blazer, is a veteran of twenty-six years working on the Ohio River. Seated in the pilothouse of the Blazer on this Saturday morning in a recent July, he is drawing up a chart showing the arrangement for the long tow of barges the towboat will shove upriver on its next trip. It’s a task which summons up all the lessons he has learned in his years on the river. The individual barges are of differing sizes and are bound for various destinations, so there’s a real knack to knowing just where in the tow to place each one. Put one in the wrong place and then you have to tear apart the entire tow to get to it when you’re ready to drop it off at its destination. That takes time. And time is money on the river.

A heavy smoker, Davis lights yet another cigarette as he works on the sketch he’s plotting on his clipboard. The blue jeans he’s wearing are worn and faded. The kind a concerned wife might be tempted to throw away if she thought she could get away with doing so. His sport shirt gaps to show a stomach with a decided bulge to it. His hair is short and neatly cut, with just a little gray showing through here and there. As he works on the chart, he has a pair of dime-store glasses perched low on his nose.

He finishes his task, takes off his glasses, and grumbles to a pilothouse visitor: “We’ve been here long enough that we could have put out a mailbox and started getting our mail. Shucks, we could even have registered to vote and signed up for food stamps.”

Kidding about it makes the time go a little faster. But only a little.

The Paul G. Blazer is a gleaming white towboat with a gross weight of 730.95 tons, a length of 150 feet, and a 45-foot beam (width). Owned and operated by Ashland Oil, she was built at the Quality Shipyards in Huoma, Louisiana, in 1987. Constructed for strength, not speed or grace, she squats in the water. She’s powered by two Caterpillar six-cylinder diesel engines, each of which develops an impressive 2,100 horsepower, providing the boat the considerable muscle that’s required to push a heavy tow of loaded barges that can be longer than a cruise liner.

But at the moment those big Cat diesels are silent, for the boat’s not going anywhere. It’s motionless, moored on the West Virginia bank of the Ohio River, at Mile 316 of the river. That’s 316 miles downriver from Pittsburgh where the Ohio is born when the Allegheny and the Monongahela Rivers join. Rivermen on the Ohio always calculate distances on its 981-mile length in terms of how far they are from Pittsburgh.

The spot where the Blazer is moored is Ashland Oil’s “fleeting harbor.” In this instance, the word “fleeting” doesn’t refer to time or anything else “passing swiftly.” Rather, it indicates that this is home base for the company’s fleet of barges and towboats and the locale where tows are assembled for their trip up or down the river.

The Ashland fleeting harbor is just upstream from the mouth of the Big Sandy River that, as it flows into the Ohio, marks the border between West Virginia and Kentucky. Just out of sight beyond the trees that line the riverbank above the harbor—”up the bank,” a rivermen would say—is the little (pop. 3,748) West Virginia town of Kenova, its unusual name compounded from the names of Kentucky, Ohio, and West Virginia. The name reflects the town’s location at the point where the three states converge.

When Kentucky was separated from what is now West Virginia, surveyors were sent in to establish and map the border between the two states. The boundary line, they were told, was to extend up the Big Sandy river to the point where the Tug and the Levisa Forks met to form the main stream. The line was then to extend southward following the largest of the streams, the Levisa. Mother Nature took a hand in the proceedings, however. The day the surveyors arrived at the point where the forks met, the elements were raging and the smaller stream, the Tug, was in violent flood. Or, as folks say in the mountains, it was at “high tide.” On the other hand, the Levisa was at normal level. The surveyors had been told to follow the larger stream. And that’s exactly what they did. But it was the Tug at “high tide,” not the Levisa, and a thousand square miles of what today would have been West Virginia territory went to Kentucky. Of course, some people suggest that the surveyors’ “mistake” was in fact no such thing, that they were swayed by certain unscrupulous Kentuckians who invited them in out of the rain to enjoy some liquid refreshment.

Between 1897 and 1910, the Corps of Engineers built three locks on the main stem of the Big Sandy, and one lock each on the Levisa and Tug Forks—the latter being the scene, in the 1880s, of the feud between the Hatfields and the McCoys, one of the most enduring legends of Appalachia. Songs, books, and movies all have perpetuated the myths surrounding this real event. But the coming of the railroad to the region not only wrote an end to the isolated way of life enjoyed by the Hatfields and McCoys, it also diminished the need for navigation improvements on the Big Sandy. Plans for the construction of nine additional locks on the Levisa and seven on the Tug were abandoned.

Today, the Big Sandy offers a navigable depth of nine feet for only 8.6 miles from its mouth at Kenova. Because of a severe sedimentation problem, the Corps of Engineers must perform frequent dredging to keep the channel clear enough for commercial traffic. In recent years, traffic on the Big Sandy has increased, because of increasing demand for the region’s bituminous coal and the already high density of river terminals on the Ohio River around Huntington. At last count, there were fifteen coal terminals located on the navigable portion of the Big Sandy. In 1988, some 12.5 million tons of traffic—79 percent of it coal—were moved on the Big Sandy. Since 1980, coal shipments on the Big Sandy have tripled and total commerce has doubled. This growth has been driven by shipments of low-sulfur coal and is expected to continue over the next several years, a result of the new federal Clean Air Act, which requires that power plants either burn low-sulfur coal or install expensive smokestack scrubbers aimed at eliminating discharges of sulfur dioxide, said to be one of the chemical culprits responsible for “acid rain.”

The Blazer Makes Ready

Although occasionally dispatched on a quick run down the Ohio to Louisville, the Blazer—named for Ashland Oil’s legendary founder and longtime chief executive, Paul G. Blazer—mostly operates on the stretch of the river between the Huntington area and Pittsburgh. It comes in from an upstream trip and goes first to the company’s repair and fueling dock at Catlettsburg, Kentucky, a thriving Ohio River port since the 1840s. There it takes on fuel and other provisions and then heads back upstream for a mile or so, to Kenova to pick up its tow of barges for another trip.

Generally this whole process is accomplished in only a matter of a few hours. Again, time is money on the river. The quicker a boat can be serviced, pick up a new tow of barges, and be back on its way, the quicker the cargo in those barges can be delivered and the sooner the boat and barges are ready for another trip.

The Blazer had arrived at Catlettsburg at 7:00 P.M. the night before, completing its latest round-trip. (Actually, to be completely accurate, we should say it arrived at Catlettsburg at 1900 hours. Rivermen use the same twenty-four-hour clock that’s utilized by their brethren who sail the high seas.) At Catlettsburg, the craft took on 41,900 gallons of diesel fuel and 10,000 gallons of water.

“The tank will hold 100,000 gallons of fuel,” explains Davis. “But we seldom take on more than 72,000 gallons because it makes the boat ride too low in the water.” A boat that rides too low is a boat that’s in trouble if it finds itself in a shallow section of river.

Fueled and ready, the Blazer made its way back upstream to the fleeting harbor to pick up a new set of barges for the next trip. But all of the barges weren’t loaded yet. And so, midmorning of Saturday finds the Blazer still here, having spent the night. It can’t go anywhere until each barge is filled and ready. It’s a waiting game.

Davis crosses the pilothouse to a little table where the coffeepot has stopped its gurgling, indicating that yet another pot is ready.

“Well,” he says, “I don’t reckon we’re going anywhere for a while yet, so we might as well relax and have another cup of coffee. Looks like it’s gonna be a long morning.”

The radio blares to life, and Davis puts his coffee cup down and hastens to answer it. He listens, copies down the brief message, and shakes his head. The dispatcher, it seems, has added yet another barge to the tow. This means the chart that Davis has so artfully drawn will have to be done over, with a new scheme that takes into account the addition of the extra barge.

That will take time. But then right now, time is something the captain has plenty of. He laughs—and thinks of another joke.

“This reminds me of these two old boys who were talking one day. One of ‘em said he was gonna fatten his hog on acorns. ‘Won’t that take a long time?’ the other one asked. ‘What’s time mean to a hog?’ says the first.”

Davis takes his carefully drawn barge chart from the clipboard, crumples it into a paper ball, and tosses it in the wastebasket. The glasses—”I just went down to the dime store and kept trying on different pairs of ‘em until I found one that did the trick”—go back on his nose and he sets to work on drawing a revised version.

As you doubtless have guessed by now, I am that visitor with Captain Ronnie Davis in the pilothouse of the Blazer on this July morning in 1992. I have wangled an invitation from Ashland Oil to ride the towboat upriver to Pittsburgh and back so I can get a firsthand look at what it’s like to live and work on the Ohio.

A native of Huntington, I have spent better than a half century living little more than a stone’s throw from the banks of the Ohio. Yet, like most other people up and down the river, I long took the Ohio for granted, remaining mostly ignorant of its history, its heritage, and its importance. In that sense this book is something of a personal journal of discovery.

I am keyed up for the trip and ready to go. I had been told that we would be leaving late Friday night so I had come aboard about 8:00 P.M.—er, make that 2000 hours. I’d been escorted aboard by Zane Meek, Ashland’s administrative manager of marine services, and welcomed by Captain Davis, who showed me where I could stow my gear and then took me on a brief tour of the boat.

A Quick Look Around

One of seven towboats in the Ashland Oil fleet, the Blazer has three decks, topped by a glass-enclosed pilothouse. The pilothouse is surprisingly spacious. As I would discover during the trip ahead, all that glass makes it so bright that dark-tinted shades must be kept drawn over the windows much of the time. Nonetheless, the view the large windows offer is a nearly unobstructed 360 degrees. The big discovery the pilothouse offers for a visitor who is unfamiliar with modern towboats is that there’s no pilot wheel. Instead of a wheel the boat is steered by a set of chrome tillers.

Within easy reach of the captain—or the pilot—are both a radio and a cellular telephone, two radars, and a two-way intercom system that’s piped into every part of the boat. On a table only a step or two away from the captain’s chair is a cabinet with a fax machine and the boat’s official log. That’s also where the coffeepot perks away. There’s a chair for visitors; over the next eight days my bottom would become thoroughly familiar with it. A padded cushion on a storage chest at the rear of the pilot house provides still more seating. Rivermen call this the “lazy bench.”

The boat is totally air-conditioned. It boasts two units, one with a fifteen-ton capacity and the other a ten-ton, and there’s also a big window unit in the pilothouse.

Just below the pilothouse is the smallish third deck, which includes the captain’s cabin, a guest cabin where I would be staying, and a small closetlike room that houses some of the ship’s electronic gear. An exercise treadmill takes up most of the little unused floor space in the electronics room. (During my eight days aboard, I would never see anyone use the treadmill.)

The enclosed portion of the second deck is bisected by a narrow hallway. On the port side—to those of us who are landlubbers that’s the lefthand side of the boat, as you face forward—is the cook’s cabin and two cabins for the deckhands. On the starboard, or righthand, side are the pilot’s cabin and two more crew cabins. Each cabin has its own toilet facilities, with a washbasin and shower. Outside on the second deck, at the rear, are the boat’s two smokestacks and a small motorboat carefully stored away, ready for use.

Across the bow of the third deck is a work area that’s dubbed the “doghouse.” It’s from here that the deckhands make their way to and from the barges. Like every part of the boat, it’s clean and neat. Tools are stored away in a neat and orderly fashion. On the starboard side of the third deck is the dining area, the galley (kitchen area), a pantry, and a toilet. On the port side is a crew lounge, a laundry room, the chief engineer’s cabin, and, right beside it, the control booth for the engine room. The separate control booth—which looks for all the world like something from mission control at Cape Kennedy—is necessary because of the tremendous noise produced by the boat’s diesel engines. Earplugs are mandatory for venturing into the engine room, and, as I discovered when Captain Davis and I paid it a brief visit, even with the plugs the noise is so intense as to be almost physically painful.

My ten-minute tour of the boat left me totally confused and absolutely convinced that I would never be able to find my away around the various hallways and stairs.

Returning to the pilothouse, Captain Davis and I chatted for a while, obviously feeling each other out, sizing each other up. I learned that, like most captains on the river, Davis started out as a deckhand and worked his way up over a period of years.

“The river,” he said at one point, “is always changing. If you ever think you know all there is to know about it, you’re not fooling anybody but yourself.”

I dutifully wrote the quote down in my spiral-bound reporter’s notebook, sure I would want to use it somewhere. But I wasn’t up to talking any more. I was tired. And the prospect of that bed down in the guest cabin suddenly seemed very inviting. So I excused myself, called it a night, and headed for my cabin.

There, I quickly undressed and climbed into bed—not the cramped, militarylike bunk I had anticipated but a real, honest-to-goodness bed. And a mighty comfortable one at that. Within minutes, I was sound asleep.

Finally, We’re on Our Way!

The boat’s intercom, I would find, is used by either the captain or pilot to give sleeping crew members a wake-up call shortly before they’re to report for their watch. But, in recognition of my special status as a visitor, a crewman was personally dispatched the next morning—and each morning thereafter—to politely tap on my door and rouse me. I rolled out of bed, quickly showered, and dressed. Other than its small size, the bathroom might easily have been mine at home. It was hard to believe I was aboard a riverboat, getting ready—sooner or later—to head up the river to Pittsburgh.

“Should I shave?” I asked myself. No, I decided, I think I’ll just let it grow and see what it looks like after a few days. A decision that, though I had no way of knowing it at the time, eventually would prove a s...