A Tale of Tugs of Two Cities Year: A Tough Season on the Circuit
It's been a rough year for tugmeets. Charleston, Boston, and Portland, whose Musters we've covered in the past, were respectively, skipped, canceled, and postponed. The World Ship Society tells us they'll be back next year with the Boston event, and the Portland muster, pre-empted by Hurricane Charlie, is taking place as this is written. We wish we could have gone north. While there are all sorts of good reasons to attend a tugmatch, we, being media people, think mostly about the good press they bring the business. The way things are shaping-up in such realms as national security, the price of fuel, environmental cleanliness and such, waterborne transport displays more and more advantage for the good of all.
Boston Tug Muster 2002
A tugmeet is bound to be a local event, as harbor extravaganzas go. For starters, how far do we expect people to drive boats, just for the chance to strut? Okay, hundreds of miles if they could, but the cost of fuel and time off from business are both to be reckoned with. Even when they do arrive from afar, local conditions define the event. In Boston, for example, a tugboat race would not be advised. It's truly a crowd-pleaser when a field of tugs, a dozen abreast, tears up the waters like a raging winter storm. But it's environmentally unfriendly on Boston's confined waters, and anyway, a race is not such a true measure of a tug. Tugs are built more for power than speed. At the Boston Tug Muster on August 17, it was the push-off, the head-to-head contest, that measured you up.
Feature: Boston Tug Muster 2003 Classic Powerhouses and Modern Behemoths
There was a tense moment at the Boston Tug Muster, held this year on the last day of May. At 10 A.M. sharp, the official opening moment of this 19th annual event, there were no tugs at the rallying point, Pier 4, Charlestown. At 10:05, still no tugs. By 10:10, only Innovator, possibly the shortest tug in town, had cruised by. It passed along the pier as if looking for old friends, and finding none, performed its trademark about-face and seemed to be departing. Maybe the gents aboard had got the date wrong? Last year's Muster, after all, was in August. On the pier itself, among Muster officials, a nasty question was starting to form: What if you gave a Muster, and nobody came?
