Tugboats: Pushing Their Way Around Since 1803
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Welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and Jerry's here too for the present moment. And this is Stuff You Should Know. That's right. Another listener request. These are just kind of pouring in now. Or rather, we're leaning on them more than we have before, I guess.

Because they're great ideas, but this one came also from the live show in Atlanta. Yeah. And do you remember this guy? Do you remember his name? Yes, I do. It was Thomas, because this episode is Tugboats for Thomas. Tugboats for Thomas, and Thomas, I believe, works on tugboats, suggested it, and this has turned out to be just a bread and butter, stuff you should know, episode. Yeah, I remember when he was at the mic asking the question or making the suggestion, he kept moving around because he still had his sea legs. Right.

He's bumping into people. They're like, dude. So, yeah, hopefully we'll do Thomas proud because we know a little bit about tugboats now after researching them for a little while. Big shout out to our friend Dave Ruse for helping us with this. You could do worse than going to check out Ruse's podcast, Bible Time Machine.

And that has nothing to do with tugboats. But let's talk about that. That's right, because we're going to we're going to sing the unsung like we like to do on the show, because no one ever thinks about tugboats. You see them all the time. If you live near a harbor or vacation or visit cities that have harbors, you see those tugboats and those big ships and barges get all the all the sexy headlines. But those tugboats are doing the yeoman's work.

That's why they called them nautical laborers early in their, I guess, mission when they first started coming online on sea. Yeah. So we'll get to that in a minute about the history of tugboats because it actually goes back way further than you would think or not as far as you'd think, depending on what you're thinking. But 1320? Nope, not that far. Yeah.

2020. But one of the things that tugboats are that makes them like the workhorses of the sea, as you could put it, is that they have really impressive power to tonnage ratios. Yeah. So the size of the tugboat, the actual weight the tugboat weighs compared to the amount of power output its engines can create, usually in horsepower, is really lopsided.

So that these fairly comparatively light boats, compared to like the horsepower they create, can pull, pull, pull. And they can push, push, push. And they can do all sorts of amazing stuff, which is why they can move these enormous, huge oil tankers and shipping container ships with just the mighty might of their little hearts.

You'd think I would have practiced something like that. It would have been way better. Yeah. I mean, not to undersell tugboats. They are dealing with things that are floating in water, which helps. But these are big, massive things floating in water. Like you could get in a lake, my friend, and you could pull a rope attached to a pontoon boat.

And you could pull that thing around a little bit. You could swim that thing around a little bit because it's floating in water. What universe do you live in? That may be where you max out. You are the tugboat of the lake, Josh, if you can do that to a pontoon boat, because these tugboats are little compared to these huge barges that are floating around. Is that making any sense at all? It's making too much sense. Yeah.

I've never considered myself the tugboat of the lake. Can I be doing this with my teeth? Can I be holding the rope with my teeth? Because that'd be much cooler. That's up to you. Okay. That'd be better swimming with two arms. We'll go do some, some third leg trials for it and figure out the most, the one right way to pull a pontoon in a lake.

We should tell them what bollard pull is, too, because that's the other big sort of measurement when it comes to tugging and pushing. A bollard, first of all, is that big sort of chunky thing on a dock that you'll tie a boat to, the big daddies. And bollard pull is the total amount of towing force generated by a tugboat. And they measure that in kilonewtons. They do. And I've seen that often converted to tons.

And it's the same thing. The more kilonewtons you have or the more tons you have, the more pulling power, towing power, pushing power that tugboat has. So...

There's this one boat that Dave found called the Island Victory. At least one article called the most powerful boat in the world. I saw other articles that named some other shipping container vessel. But this tugboat, say it's probably the most powerful tugboat around. The Island Victory has a bollard pull of 4,680 kilonewtons, which converts to 477 tons.

A typical harbor tug, which is nothing to sneeze at, has a bollard pull between 500 and 600 kilonewtons. 600 kilonewtons converts to 61 tons. So this is an enormously powerful boat. And that's the whole point. They're not fast boats.

They aren't pretty. They're cute in a really weird way. But they can generate so much power that they can push a shipping container vessel around. More importantly, if you have a really high bollard pull, the reason that this rating is even there is to find out which tug you can connect to which vessel. Because if a vessel's starting to go in the wrong direction and it's about to crash into, say, a bridge,

the tugboat has to be able to go from zero, not moving at all in the water, to pulling that boat in the opposite direction away from that bridge in a moment's notice. And it has to have that much power. And they do. They do. I think they're very attractive boats. You can tell a tugboat

because it has, you know, they're built to tug and push. So they have a very wide beam, which is the widest point of the boat. They sit very low in the water, which is called a deep draft.

And, you know, they're little short, stubby, wide guys that sit really low. I think they're adorable and cool looking. They're very, very stable. They're not tippy at all when, you know, they're bumping against other things or pushing other things. And so they have to be just super stable and also love that they have beards. That front bumper or a or a bow fender, they call it a beard in that lingo. And I think that's pretty great.

Yeah, that's it's just what they use. Like you said, when they purposely or accidentally bump up against a larger ship, you can't just have the tugboat like crack up. So you have a fender. They're built to bump. They are built to bump in some tugboats aren't necessarily built with a beard. They'll have tires strung along the side to use as a bumper as well.

Yeah, I think those are additional. I think the front always has a built-in beard. Okay, fine.

So one other thing that you're going to find about tugboats that we'll talk about more in depth later is that they're extremely nimble. They're agile. They can move in a different direction very quickly. And that is a really important thing, too, because one of the big jobs that the tugboat plays in, say, like a shipping lane, like a port, is to help ships avoid other ships coming in or out.

So they have to be able to move, not just pull a ship very easily, but they have to be able to move quickly and move that ship out of the way of, say, like another ship. Yeah, exactly. And I say we take an earlier break. Oh, my gosh. Because we're at a great spot to break here before we talk about the history of these things. You want to do that? Let's break it. All right. Let's break on three. This is S.Y.S.Cast. This is S.Y.S.Cast.

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All right. I promised talk of history, and here we go, because if you wanted to invent a tugboat, the 18th and 19th centuries was a pretty good time to do it because we were using sailing ships at the time for –

for transporting people and goods and all kinds of things. And those things are gorgeous, beautiful in the water. They sailed great out on the high seas, but they did not do well, especially because they were just sailing ships when they got around land and small, tight spaces. Right. So they would, you know, you've seen it in movies. They would dock,

Or not dock, but they would anchor, you know, a couple of hundred feet from shore and then start shuttling people and stuff in little tiny boats because that's about as close as they could safely get. And that's not efficient. Taylor would be rolling over in his grave. That's right. There's another problem, too, even for a ship that could it was nimble enough to kind of navigate its way into port, say, like the mouth of a river in a harbor or something. Right.

Once it got in there, it had to wait for the wind to whip up again to set sail once more. And this was not something that happened every hour on the hour, even twice a day like the tide. Sometimes you would have to wait for days or weeks for the right wind to come up that you could catch and ship back out to sea again. Also not at all efficient. So there was like a real need for tugboats to be invented again.

But what's nuts is tugboats were invented and then ignored for decades. And then finally, the guy who invented them, who was just totally made fun of, as we'll see, for inventing tugboats, was vindicated. But I think he was dead already.

Yeah, I think he was. He was from England, 18th century inventor. His name, no lie, was Jonathan Hulls. That's nuts. It is pretty nuts. And he thought it was like a helper vessel is what he called it. It was powered by a steam engine. But what he was talking about was tugboats. It could tow a sailboat in and out of port.

This was in 1737 when he filed for a patent. It was called a description and draft of a new invented machine for carrying vessels or ships out of or into any harbor port or river against the wind in tide or in a calm. And it was totally genius. 30 years before James Watts steam engine hit the scene. Yeah. And everyone was like, what a dumb idea.

Yeah. Not only that, the people in his hometown of Gloucester, they wrote a song about him. Oh, no.

They wrote a song. They wrote, like, they thought this guy was so terrible and just such a lousy inventor that there was a song, I'm guessing people would sing in pubs. Yeah. About him specifically, his name's in the song. It went, Jonathan Holes with his patent skulls invented a machine to go against wind and stream, but he, being an ass, couldn't bring it to pass, and so was ashamed to be seen. You're not going to sing it? Imagine sitting there nursing like you're mead.

Well, everybody around you is singing that song about you. You're not going to try? Whip up a melody. Oh, oh. Jonathan Holes with his patent skulls invented a machine to go against the wind and stream.

You should finish. Okay. But he being an ass couldn't bring it to pass and so was ashamed to be seen. Wow. You went with the Gilbert and Sullivan version. I guess so. All I know is we're getting kicked out of this pub any second now. They're like, get out of Gloucester. Yeah. We're going to get so much for that.

So, yeah, Hulls was definitely ahead of his time, but it would be 60 years before the first steam-powered tugboats. His invention were actually put into good use and they were deployed in Scotland.

Yeah. And as we'll see, actually, Scotland was where the tugboat got its name at the time. I'm not sure what they call them. Maybe still helper vessels. I don't know. But one of the first things they did was to start pulling cargo along canals, because at the time, if you wanted to move cargo easily over land, you did it over water that was cut into land and you would do it with a donkey pulling your your cargo.

along the shore. The donkey was walking on the shore with the line going from the donkey to a little barge that was being pulled down a water-filled canal. That was the state of the art at the time. Yeah. Have you ever walked along an old riverway that has those built-up banks for that purpose? Yeah. Toledo has something called the

canal experience or historic canal experience. There's some canals running through part of the town from the early 19th century that you can walk along and you're like, wow, this is an old donkey path. Yeah, I had my experience doing that in Akron. So that may be an Ohio thing. I believe the waterway through Sand Run is where that was. And it was the same deal. And Emily or her mom or somebody, you know, because you're up higher.

And, you know, it's an obvious path. And they're like, yeah, this is where the donkeys and pack horses would pull these things. Yeah. Oh, it's a donkey. There was a paddle steamer named Charlotte Dundas that was the first tugboat in operation towing for the very first trip, I think, two fully loaded sloops, 18 miles long.

along the Forth and Clyde Canal at Glasgow at a scorching two miles per hour. Yeah, but still, like, it was working. That was the key. That's all that mattered. Yeah, they had all the time in the world. Right. And you can bet that every donkey in Scotland was like, whew, thank God they invented these things, right? Yeah, probably.

So there was also, as we talked about, one of the big problems with sailboats as shipping vessels was that they had trouble getting in and out of harbors. They had trouble navigating. They had to wait for the wind. So very quickly, it seemed kind of obvious that you could, if you could get one of these boats into port, into harbor, which you could use a tugboat for, you could also transport

pull it up river. It wouldn't have to navigate any longer because you could just pull it by a helper vessel into some of the cities that were not located on the coast, but they were located on a river. One example I can think of is London and the Thames. That's right. 40 miles inland. So that was a huge boon for London at the time. There was a steamship called the Majestic

that worked with the East India Company towing things back and forth up the Thames. And Liverpool had one as well. So they were getting in on the game there in the UK. They were. So, like I said, it was in Scotland that tugboats got their name back in 1817 in Dumbarton. I think I'm saying that right. Okay. How would you say it? I would say Dumbarton, but I don't know. I'm just guessing. No, it's got to be Dumbarton. Okay. Okay.

Okay. Well, we'll go with one of those two. How about that? Sure. Somebody built a steamship, a tugboat. They named tug. They weren't called tugboats until this time. And I guess that name stuck because it also makes sense practically. You're tugging a boat behind you. So that from henceforth on, they were known as tugboats. Yeah. And, you know, earlier I was saying that...

They said, oh, this idea is so dumb. I don't know if it was that it was so dumb, but steam power and stuff that came along a little bit later, like they didn't have steam engines at the time, so they wouldn't have even known it was dangerous. But when they did come online, why do I keep saying that? I don't think it fits, right? It's a little anachronistic. I think so.

But online doesn't mean just on the Internet. Online just means like it's beginning to function right as a thing. Yeah. Remember that Simpsons where Lenny goes little kid Lenny's like, oh, I just logged on to my Internet because he pooped his pants out of he pooped his bathing suit with the little Internet. So he said he logged on to his Internet. Oh, that's so good. Yeah.

That's a good line. Oh, boy, Lenny. It's locked onto my internet. Where was that? Oh, yeah. Steam engines were dangerous. They would blow up a lot. There was, you know, when tugboats first started using, you know, coming online, using that steam, they were like, I don't know. I mean, is it better to have this thing that might blow up a port? Yeah.

Right. And then the owners were like, well, we don't go on these boats. We just own them. So sure. I mean, that's fine. They can blow up. But yes, they were viewed skeptically, I think. Right. Like it was it was not just a done deal that these things were like going to save the industry or shipping. Yeah. But there was a proving ground. What ended up being a proving ground on the Tyne River that connected Newcastle to the North Sea.

They were facing a problem, right? They had these barges that were called colliers, and they were sailboats, but they were coal movers because Newcastle was a huge coal producer. And these colliers could do a lot of damage because they were hard to navigate. They had all the same problems that any sailing vessel had.

So there was a guy named Joseph Price who in 1818 was like, I think I've got a solution to this. I'm going to buy some of these steamships that they're now being called tugboats. And I'm going to have them pull these colliers, these coal ships up and down the Tyne. And I think it's going to revolutionize shipping. And Joseph Price was right on the money. The price was right. Oh, man, you almost had it right out of the gate. Yeah.

So now you could get 400 ton ships because, you know, I don't know if we mentioned they were loading like railroad cars onto these things for the first time. So it was very, very heavy stuff. They could go to Newcastle for the first time. All of a sudden people in Newcastle.

more distant places could get coal. So it wasn't just like, hey, it made, you know, make things cheaper and more efficient. It like was literally changing like lives all over the world. Right. And these new towns that were getting coal for the first time were able to give up having to burn dried donkey poop that they scraped up off the donkey trails along the canals. It was huge for them. Totally.

So, yeah, Joseph Price proved to the world, like, no, these things are extraordinarily valuable, so much so that they're going to completely change shipping from this point on. And they definitely have. And they're still just as useful as ever. And they made a name for themselves so much that when the Royal Navy purchased their first steamships of any kind, they were tugboats. Yeah. The Comet and the Monkey. Comet and Monkey. Yeah.

And I can't decide whether it's a band name or a cartoon name. Comet and Monkey. That'd be a fun cartoon. I'd watch that. Or Drug.

I'd also take that. Come in, monkey. Just kidding. So, yeah, they definitely proved their worth pretty early on. I mean, this is 1818, and the first ones were used shortly before that, right? Yeah, and these were paddle boats, by the way. Up until the late 19th century, if you're picturing, like, your little friendly tugboat in your mind as we talk about all these stories, erase that.

And now picture a tugboat with two paddles on both sides. It wasn't like the big paddle in the back, like the sort of fun things you ride around on at Stone Mountain Park here in Georgia. Sure. That's where they're most famous. They were paddle wheels on both sides, which...

Seems a little wider and more cumbersome, but that really, really, really made them much more maneuverable and able to steer in tighter places and to steer in two different directions. Like, I got one of those zero-turn lawnmowers. You put those things in two different directions and you're spinning like a top. It's the exact same thing because those two paddle wheels were able to be moved independent of one another. And once you can do that, yes, you just start doing donuts to show off in the harbor, you know?

Yeah. So the 19th century came and went and those paddle wheel tugs were replaced with screw propellers, which is another term for a propeller like you see on a ship. Like that's that's just called a screw propeller. So like any ship, they were propelled by propellers.

And then diesel engines came along and that's when everything really kind of changed because when you have a diesel engine, you can get some amazing horsepower out of it, way more than steam. It's also less dangerous. I think we talked about all this in our Rudolph diesel episode. And that's when the tugboats became, started to become the tugboats that we think of today. That's right. Shall we take our second break? You bet. All right. We took an early one, so we're going to take this one and we're going to come back and talk a little bit about the,

Well, tugboats right after this.

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So you mentioned tugboat strike, right? I didn't. Oh, well, there's a tugboat strike we have to talk about that really kind of demonstrates how important tugboats made themselves over the years. In New York Harbor in 1946, every single tugboat operator, there were 300 of them in the harbor at the time, they all went on strike.

And this was very quickly, it became evident how essential tugboats were for everything in New York, because there was coal coming from Lake Erie through the Erie Canal to the Hudson down to the harbor. And there would be

spread all throughout Manhattan and all throughout New York. Food shipments came in by barge. Garbage went out by barge. Oh, yeah. New York operated on barges. And if you're using barges, you need a tugboat to tow or push those barges. So when the tugboat stopped working, New York stopped working. And within 12 days, the tugboat operators got their demands fulfilled, which turns out to have just been nicer hats from what I read.

Yeah, they rationed food. They literally shut the lights down on Broadway. It was their backup plan of just, you know, using smaller boats to ferry stuff in and out. They were just like Manhattan is far too big for this already. Right. And the tugboat operators, I guess, I mean, what a moment to sit back and just sort of like say, yeah. Float?

Now, yeah, gloat a little bit. Now, now who is important? The tugboat driver, Thomas, one day we'll be in Atlanta so we could get the word out about tugboats. And New York Harbor was a great place to sort of make that point because, you know, if you didn't have tugboats, then those containers with all those goods and services are essentially useless. Right. Right.

I said float, by the way, but gloat works even better. Oh, you said float? Yeah. They were gloating while they were floating. Oh, okay. So there were some things that changed. Stuff you would not at all connect to why tugboats became less vital over the years. Still incredibly important. And you can make a case that world shipping would essentially just

if tugboats stopped. So they're really important, but just not in exactly the same ways as they were before because we started getting our energy over things like pipelines. We started using things that weren't coal. Trucking and shipping containers became a much bigger thing than, say, barges over the years. So with each of those things, the tugboat became larger

less and less able to do what it did in 1946. And yet it's still so vital that you just can't do anything without them. Yeah, for sure. You know, they've got electric tugs now. I saw that there's one called the E-Wolf, right? Yeah, it's a good looking tug. I mean, it's interesting. I never really thought about electric boats, but that's becoming more and more of a thing, which is kind of awesome. It is awesome. And let's talk about why. Here's why, Chuck.

Remember we said that these things generate crazy amounts of horsepower? Yes. Some harbor tugs are ocean-going tugs.

generate 27,000 plus horsepower. It's like having 27,000 horses just running at the back of this thing, like kicking their legs all at once, right? And to do that, you use a lot of fuel, a ton of diesel fuel. Some of these boats can carry way more than they need in a day, like 30,000 gallons of diesel. But I saw that the average harbor tug, which

which is working almost constantly, will use about 3,000 gallons of diesel fuel a day. And that is a lot of fuel to use, right? So it's using this non-renewable resource. It's also putting out crazy amounts of diesel emissions. Yeah. And that's just one tugboat using 3,000 gallons of diesel a day. Yeah.

The reason also I was like, why do they carry so much more than they need? Because doesn't that make the tugboat heavier and therefore you have to use more fuel to get more horsepower out of it?

And the reason that I came up with that I found was that time is of such value in a harbor at a port that it's more costly to stop what you're doing and go refuel than it is to carry around all that extra fuel. They have those capacities so that they take way longer in between refuelings. That's the point. That's how crazy important time is in ports. Yeah.

Yeah. I get it. You know, especially in a place like New York Harbor. Um, very busy, very busy. So you've talked about, that's the motto. It is the entrance down to the dock. It says that, uh,

What also you need to be is maneuverable because it's very busy, very busy. And you mentioned that a little bit earlier on that they need to be able to move really in any direction very accurately and as quickly as possible. And the asthma thruster was a big change in that because that is a

Imagine a propeller inside a housing sort of like an e-fan or something like that. And it can just turn. That's exactly what it looks like. I never thought that. But it can turn 360 degrees. So it's not a fixed propeller.

propeller and a rudder for steering and it's not even a non-fixed propeller that can move left and right as a propeller that can spin in any direction which means you got one of those little joystick controllers as a tugboat pilot and you can inch that thing in the most minute uh little ways with just a flick of the stick yeah isn't that amazing

Pretty cool. I also read about something called a tractor tug, which has basically two outboard motors, like those two side paddle wheels.

And so you can move them independently. And they have a lot of power, too, just not as much as the azimuth, I think. But they're controlled by two joysticks. So it's hard enough. Just think about using one. Imagine using two to move a tugboat around like a huge ship that you're trying not to knock into other ships. It's just I can't. It's got to be one of the more stressful jobs around piling a tugboat, right? I bet.

We'll have to ask Thomas.

Uh, we did mention a lot. I mean, we've talked a lot about moving boats around. That's obviously what you think of when you think of a tugboat. Um, but they do a bunch of other stuff too. Um, salvage operations, uh, SNR, uh, or SAR or search and rescue ops that we've talked a lot about on the show. Uh, if there's ever a, you know, if there's a busy canal that's blocked or something, uh, or a ship that is gone offline, say that,

that is gumming up the works, you're going to send a tugboat in there to get those things out of there. So, yeah, we talked about that, the ship, the Ever Given, which blocked the Suez Canal for, I think, weeks, which is a huge dent in global shipping, right? We talked about that in detail, and I could not for the life of me remember what episode that was in. Do you?

Was it in, did we do one on the Suez Canal or just the. No, I looked. If we did, we didn't name it that. Which canal did we do an episode on? I don't remember doing any canal episode. Oh, we did something on canals, right? I don't think so. That seems very familiar to me. I think we just earlier talking about donkey paths and stuff did our canal episode. Hmm. Wait, wait, wait. I guess that's possible.

We might have done one that included like the Panama Canal. Yes, I'll bet it was in the Panama Canal episode. I think we did that one. Yeah, we did Panama Canal. Okay, there you go. And Love Canal. We did. A little different, but yeah. Also, by the way, the Navy just unveiled a whole new group of search and rescue ships. They're called Navajo class tugboats, and they're pretty cool looking.

All right, what else? Firefighting tugboats, of course. Yeah, they're called FIFIs. Cute. Either FIFI or FIFI. I've only seen it spelled out. I bet it's FIFI. FIFI would be weird. Yeah, FIFI is not weird in the sea. Well, I don't know, Captain. I don't have my sea legs, but FIFI is at least a cutesy name. FIFI is nothing. Let's try this out. Arrgh, look at that FIFI.

Oh, look at that Fifi. I think Fifi wins the day. Okay. What else? Icebreakers? And I don't mean at office parties either. Right. A tugboat just goes in between two people struggling to find something to talk about. And now all of a sudden they can talk about the tugboat that just went in between. Yeah. He goes up to and says, if you could invite anyone from history to dinner, who would it be? I hate this question so much. It's the worst.

There's also anchor handling. There's actually special tugboats called anchor handling tugs, appropriately enough. And the anchors they're talking about are oil platform tankers. And these are ocean-going tugs, the ones that carry 100,000 gallons of diesel fuel because they're out to sea for indefinite periods of time. And the anchors that they're pulling around are

are massive. They're like keeping oil rigs out in the open ocean from floating away. So obviously they're really big anchors, but it's hard to get across how big they are unless you go look up photos of them. Try to find a photo of a human being standing or working near an oil rig anchor and it'll really kind of drive home what these tugboats are pulling around. Makes it even more impressive.

All right. I'm going to look that up and tell you what I think before the end of the episode. Okay, good. Line handling too, like these tow ropes, if they're like, hey, we need to get this tow rope out to that ship. You don't just throw it on a guy's shoulder. Like these ropes, like those anchors are the most massive ropes you've ever seen in your life. Yeah. And so there's Thomas saying, just throw it on guys. I got it. I'll take it out there.

Yeah, I was reading an LA Times article about, remember the shipping shutdown, the cargo container backup in LA and Long Beach at the pandemic? Oh, yeah.

that just killed everything. The writer went out on a tugboat and he was just kind of chronicling like a morning in the life of this tugboat. And they were talking about how recently two deckhands, one had been injured and one had been killed by a line tightening and pressing them up against the side of the tugboat. Oh, like jaws. Yeah, exactly. But killed them. Yeah. Yeah. So it was a, I mean, you can just imagine like this is a three inch thick rope

that just suddenly is, you know, thousands of kilonewtons pressing you against a metal, a big piece of metal, which is the inside of the ship. That's not the place that you want to be. So it is being a deckhand, which is one of the jobs on the tugboat, is very dangerous. And as we'll see, kind of the job you want to work your way up out of, I think. Yeah. You've also got engineers who...

You know, they take care of those engines. They take care of all the getting things online, mechanical systems, electrical systems. You have your mate, your second in command and secondary pilot. And then you got that captain, the primary pilot that's running that ship. If you work in, let's just pick out New York City because people think about tugboats a lot there in New York Harbor. Do they? Yeah, everyone does. Okay. I took a poll. Okay.

They work two-week shifts, two weeks on, two weeks off. You live on that boat full-time. And then on those days that you work, you work two six-hour shifts, six hours working, six hours off, six hours working, six hours off. And that is – I'm sure Thomas would verify that this is tough, hard work. That is too short. I mean, you're like, oh, six-hour shift, that's not bad. But then you have to eat and sleep in the next six hours. Yeah.

That's, yeah, I don't know why they do it like that. It seems like you would wear your crew out really fast with that schedule.

Would you have them work 12 hours straight and then 12 hours off? No, I think even eight hours, that extra two hours to unwind and eat and then get six hours sleep is adequate. Because, I mean, seriously, you think about it, you're like you're not doing six hours off and then you just fall over and sleep where you were just standing while you were working. Now that you're off the clock, you're going to like unwind, you got to eat, you're going to just do whatever, shave, shower. And then you're going to get what, three and a half, four hours sleep if you're lucky, maybe five.

I think that's a little whack, as they say. Yeah, it's whack, but I think it's one of those things with shift work, like you get used to sleeping all day and working at night. Those people probably get used to sleeping in two, four-hour sets. Yeah, and I'm sure they're signaling to others like, oh, you're awake again, huh? Yeah, but then they're at home for two weeks straight. That's what I mean. Can you get back to work? I don't know, man. It's a hard life. I'm sure Thomas can tell us. Oh, yeah, for sure. There are...

Push boats. These are pretty fun. A push tug. That's a tow boat that has a squared off front at the bow and these padded beams called push knees. And you basically push those knees against the stern and you even lash it together sometimes and you're just pushing something around. Yeah, that one's fine. But I like the articulated tug barge or ATB.

The sexiest link. It's an improved version of this, right? So the barge and the tugboat have like a notch and a corresponding like pointy part.

You put them together and put a pin through the two. And now you've got like one single machine. But the tugboat can still maneuver like fishtail and move that barge in all sorts of crazy hard angles. Right. And I was like, why don't you just mechanize or motorize the barge? And apparently they use this mostly for oil tank oil shipping.

and you just get more oil out of it, and the barges are cheaper because they don't have any self-propulsion. So it's kind of like a shipping container in a truck. Like the tractor is different than the trailer, and so you can hook all sorts of different trailers up to the same tractor time and time again rather than just having to pilot that trailer all the time. It made more sense to me when I was researching it than it is now that I'm explaining it.

Well, it does sort of lend itself to the question of like, why don't these huge barges have a little secondary azimuth propeller system that can be deployed? Yeah, I think the expense, the added expense, I think they're cheaper because it's just a barge that is just basically a floating container that a tug can hook onto. Well, maybe so. And the other thing that I also regret not investigating now is,

is how the finances of this work. Is it a tugboat company that just says, all right, we're going to contract with this barge company for a certain set of time. Yes. And we'll just handle all your tugging and pushing needs basically in this harbor? So I think it kind of, from what I understand, it bears a bit of a resemblance to like the shipping, like trucking industry, where

where somebody needs a tow or an escort or something like that in or out of the harbor, and you just contract with somebody then. I don't know if you contract with one specific shipping company or you just kind of go back and forth depending on who needs what when.

or it's a mixture of both. I'm not sure. But I know that back in the day, they, it used to be whoever got there first. So as a ship was coming in, tugboats would race out to meet them. And whoever got there first had that contract right there because they were the first ones on the scene and they were the ones who were going to pull the ship into its birth. Surely it's an all-inclusive thing though. And it's not just like, Oh, you need to get over there. Uh,

500 bucks. You know? Yeah. No, I don't think it's like that for sure. But I read another article, the AP did an article on the Francis Scott Key Bridge collapse in Baltimore last year, earlier this year.

You remember when that ship ran into the bridge and the bridge collapsed in Baltimore? Oh, yeah, yeah. Yeah, of course. So there was like heavy criticism because that ship wasn't being escorted by a tugboat. And everybody's like, where was the tugboat? Why was this allowed to happen?

And the AP was explaining that's just not how it works. Like the tugboat pulls the ship out of its berth and kind of gets it on its way. And then it goes back and attaches to another ship. And then that ship has to find its way out of harbor, including navigating under and next to bridges and other stuff. Right. And the reason why is money.

It costs an extra 10 grand to pay a tugboat to pull you safely out into a harbor so you can make way. And the shipping industry holds the cards now. Because if you start charging more at a port or you start, say, requiring ships to have a tugboat all the way out into the harbor, it's going to cost more money. And if another port nearby doesn't force you to do that, it's going to be less expensive.

And so everybody's going to go to that port and all of your dock workers are going to lose their jobs and you're not going to get reelected as mayor of Baltimore. You see what I'm saying? Wow. Yeah. It's crazy how weirdly entrenched it is. And again, it's just so discouraging. It seems like every episode we talk about, you can trace it back to some group of people who are cutting corners because of money.

And then something bad happens and nobody does anything about it. I'm so sick of it. Yeah. That sounds like a new episode of The Wire, too. It does. You okay? Yeah, I'm all right now. All right. Let me just apologize to Thomas. Sorry, Thomas. If you want to pick up your spirits, my friend, go to New York City.

And take a ride on the W.O. Decker because that's one of the fun things you can do in New York. I have not done it yet, but I'm going to make a point to go to the South Street Seaport Museum in New York where you can actually take a ride on the classic and beautiful W.O. Decker tugboat. Yep. Pretty neat. I'm going to do it. There's some other stuff you can do too, but that's probably the best. Okay. Good. I'd like to do the best thing. Good. Good.

You got anything more on tugboats, Charles? I got nothing. I just love these pictures. There's something about a tugboat. I like the way they look. Yeah. Got those tires hanging off of them, and there's something about the utilitarian aspect, and especially that W.O. Decker with that big old nose on the front. I don't even know what that is. That's the beard, right? Yeah, but it's not a beard that I've ever seen. It really looks like a beard. I was reading a kids' maritime museum website recently,

tugboats and they were trying to explain why everyone loves tugboats because it's true. Like there's nobody who doesn't like tugboats, especially if you have nothing to do with the industry, right? You're just watching them from afar. And they explained that they're very powerful and they're small, but they're also very helpful. And I think they kind of nailed it on the head.

Yeah. Actually, some of these beers are very beardy, so I get it. Okay. So Chuck gets it, and he mentioned beards twice in Quick Succession, which of course unlocks Listener Mail. That's right. And it also conjures Beetlebeard. What? Sorry. You know, you say Beetlejuice three times. Oh, gotcha. I gotcha. Yeah. I got it now. I saw that sequel last night. What did you think? Did you see it? Yeah. You know, I enjoyed it. I thought it was fun. It's not some great movie.

But none of Tim Burton's movies are great to me. Oh, I don't know about that. I mean, I think Ed Wood was great, but I think that's his only truly great film. What? I mean, tell me another. Edward Scissorhands, Sleepy Hollow. I enjoyed Edward Scissorhands. I don't think it's great. Sleepy Hollow I thought was mid at best.

He's got a whole, I disagree. Sleepy Hall is one of my all-time favorite movies. That's one of those ones I can watch like any time. Yeah. Hey, I like most of his movies, but I just don't think they're great films. I understand what you're saying. You know what I mean? The 1990 Batman, not the best. I would say that that's not a great movie too, for sure.

Yeah. But I mean, I like most of his movies. I understand what you're saying. Fair enough. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, I thought it was good. It was fun. It was good enough for what I wanted out of it, which was a bit of nostalgia. And I LOL'd quite a few times because I just think Michael Keaton is really funny. And Catherine O'Hara is really funny. Yes. I think Catherine O'Hara did great.

Yeah. But, you know, it was it was just OK. The I keep forgetting to recommend a movie to you that I I'll see it and remember how great it was. And then I forget to tell you about it again. It's called A Dark Song. OK. It's about a woman who seeks revenge. So she finds an occultist to help her conjure demons to enact revenge.

How do you find movies that no one else has ever heard of? I don't know how I found that one. I really don't remember. But it's on Amazon Prime, if I'm not mistaken. And it sounds like a hokey premise. But the research that the writers did is so, like, dead on that it's entirely possible there's people out there who believe that you can do this exact thing that they're doing and conjure this exact demon. It's nuts. It's really a good movie. It's pretty rough. I would not watch it with the kids.

But it's a very good arthouse horror film. Well, Ruby went as Megan for Halloween, so she's pretty into that stuff, but this sounds too dark. It's a little. There's a part in there that she should not see. Okay. And I'll also say this. I just looked up a dark song really quickly, and there's a Reddit thread. A dark song. Is it real? So apparently it's pretty convincing. It is very convincing. All right. So that's been Movie Minutes. Yep. Did you ever read the listener mail?

No, man, I'm waiting on the cue. I said that you said something in quick succession and you unlocked listener mail. Jerry already ran the chime. I got sidetracked. Hey, buddy, I don't jump unless you tell me to, so. I did tell you and you didn't jump. And everything broke down as if the tugboat stopped tugging. Oh, that means another lashing tonight. No, I'm going to lash you to the tugboats. Yeah, put me up there with the beard. Okay.

All right. Hey, guys. Love the show, especially the Unsolved Mystery episodes. Needless to say, I loved the one a couple of months ago about the mysteries of the Internet and the mysterious song that caught my attention. Oh, I know where this one's going. Boy, they came pouring in, and I have to say, the mystery seems to have been solved about the most mysterious song on the Internet. It is not the one that people sent in right after we published that was not even the same song. Right.

Those people were lazy. But yeah, it broke. And we've gotten like 100 emails that that artist has been identified. There's a Reddit thread. It's a Reddit user tracked it down. The song is called Subways of Your Mind by the group. I don't know if it's FX or F-E-X. Not sure how they pronounce it.

The user found the band from an old newspaper article in the Nordwest Zeitung archive. Wow. While they were researching Hurfest bands, the band that performed at that music festival was a lead band.

Wow. I read through the subreddit. They said, wait a minute before you go wide with this, because I want to talk to the rest of the band first.

came back and said, I talked to the rest of the band. They're into it. And we want to like rerecord it and, you know, get back together and rerecord this thing now that it's got some fame. Yeah, they're going to do an acoustic country version. This is for Michael, but big thanks to everybody who wrote in because it's pretty exciting. You know, Somerton Man was found on our watch.

On our watch. Right, thanks to us. Thanks to us, and this was solved on our watch. So the longer we do this show, the more these mysteries are kind of, you know, maybe they'll find that guy who disappeared from the airport. Remember that guy? Oh, yeah, that poor kid from, yeah, I don't remember what island he was on. He was like Swedish or something? Yeah, that was a sad story. Yeah, so we're hoping to clear up all these mysteries. But yeah, the mystery song has been solved. Great.

And it was "Fex Subways of Your Mind." And who wrote in? Because, I mean, a million people wrote in. I don't think we've ever got more email about the same thing in less time than on this one. It was astounding. It was like when those post office workers come in at the end of Miracle on 34th Street and start dumping Santa letters onto the judge's bench. It was like that, but with emails about the most mysterious song on the internet.

Yeah, and it's going to get worse because this isn't going to come out because we're front-loading for Christmas break. And so, like, we're going to be getting these emails for weeks and weeks and weeks. Oh, dude, we'll be getting them for years, Chuck. We got an email from somebody this week, and the subject line was, Chuck predicted Sharknado. Right. That is an old, old classic. Oh, man. Wait till they hear about Jared from Subway and Hugh Jackman playing Subway.

P.T. Barnum. Who was it? P.T. Barnum. The greatest showman, yeah. Anyway, that was from Michael. Thanks a lot, Michael. Very much appreciated. Thanks to everybody who wrote in. We don't mean to sound ungrateful. We're just joshing around. Yeah, we love it. Yep, thank you. Yeah, keep us informed as best you can all the time. And since I said that and you want to be like Michael, I should tell you that you can send us an email. Send it off to stuffpodcasts at iheartradio.com.

Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. All right, we're all set for the party. I've trimmed the tree, hung the mistletoe, and paired all those weird-shaped knives and forks with the appropriate cheeses. And I plugged in the Bartesian. Bartesian? It's a home cocktail maker that makes over 60 premium cocktails, plus a whole lot of seasonal favorites, too. I just got it for

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