Wind In The Winches: Towing Up The Mighty Columbia

It was a busy March day aboard Tidewater Transportation’s Captain Bob, catchup time due to annual lock closures by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers on the Columbia and Snake rivers.

- Brian Gauvin

The locks, closed one month for maintenance, had reopened two days earlier on the Columbia, and crews were scurrying to make up tows as barge traffic resumed upriver to the Tri-Cities of Richland, Kennewick, and Pasco. The Snake River, navigable for commercial cargo to Lewiston, Idaho, opened the following week.

The Tidewater yard sits at mile marker 102 on the north bank of the Columbia at Vancouver, Wash. For Captain Bob’s deck crew, it was tough work making up the tow there, schlepping, coiling and cinching up heavy wire cable with hand-operated winches.

Kevin Maki, the deckhand on the after watch, appreciated the help from other deck crews in the fleet to prepare the tow for a mid-afternoon departure. He remarked that the tow — made up of two empty grain barges at the bow followed by two chip barges, one empty, the other loaded — was an oddball one.

With the tow assembled, the pilot, Phil Morgan, eased Captain Bob into the channel and began the push to Pasco, Wash., at mile marker 329. After making the Burlington Northern Railroad Bridge, the steel I-5 span joining Vancouver and Portland, Ore., and the modern concrete I-205 bypass bridge, the tow was clear of the two cities.

The 110-by-34-foot, 5,000- hp Captain Bob, the most powerful tug in the Tidewater fleet, is powered by two Caterpillar 3516 mains coupled to Reintjes reduction gears turning 108-by-84-inch, outward turning open propellers. That power would be needed to buck the river’s strong spring current, which was being fed by freshets of snowmelt. Mount Hood, sparkling white and dead ahead, portended more of the same. Then there was the unrelenting wind, cutting through the mountains and buffeting the tow.