Except that expression* means "raise the anchors", not "drop them on the tug boat".
I shouldn't have laughed, but I did. For a while. But this shows you just how dangerous the day-to-day life of the mariner is. The tug was pinned to the bridge by the incoming tide. The energy in the tow cables is so great that if the cable snaps, anyone in line with the cable has a good chance of dieing from the rebounding line.
* Intentionally misspelled.
This is a part of nautical terminology that often causes confusion. An anchor is said to be aweigh, not away. At the same time, when a ship begins moving, she is said to be underway.
ReplyDeleteDad did 20 years in the Navy and he had a lot of stories to tell. Some of them were even true. One was about a ship trying to get under way in heavy seas. Rather than risk losing someone off the dock trying to release the hawsers as the ship strained against them, the captain decided to have crewmen cut the ropes with axes. One guy didn't get the message to cut when the rope was slack, and when he cut the rope under tension the backlash took off a leg.
ReplyDeleteI am struck by how quickly the "stuck" tug comes to a near upright position after being freed from the bridge. I'm no nautical guy, clearly the boat is designed to stay upright/stable under heavy conditions.
ReplyDelete- Brad
Brad: A low center of gravity is a good thing: TUGBOAT
ReplyDeleteBob, yeah I used this intentionally. This wasn't exactly best nautical practice.
ReplyDeleteI remember watching a video one of my "A" school instructors had of various mishaps. Mostly filmed from the plat cameras.
ReplyDeleteOne clip was an arresting cable breaking as an aircraft was landing.
The broken cable cut two guys in half.
Sobering to watch as an 18 year old, learning to work on airplanes on a flight deck...
I remember a video floating around (har....see what I did there?) a few years back with a tug that was struggling against tide/current. Tug got pulled under barge/bridge (sorry, memory of vid is hazy), ended up rolling completely over and popped up ready to go on the other side. Not a normal occurrence, by any means, but still really cool.
ReplyDeleteThe other thing I noticed about that tug is that she must have deck beams from the ninth circle of hell. My compliments to the architect who specified her scantlings.
ReplyDeleteMy first ship was the USS Kittyhawk. As we newbies were walked around the ship we eventually got to the fight deck and on the tower was a very large, long dent on the starboard side of the tower.
ReplyDeleteMy 1st class made a point of showing it to us. It was from when an arresting cable snapped and whipped around the deck hard enough to dent the steel.