So, it's 1995, and we're three years into ACBL's acquisition of Valley Line, and I'm deep into the grind of a 40 days on, 20 days off work schedule. The only good thing about it was that I was able to do the whole hitch on my regular boat, the M/V Rusty Flowers. Leonard, my relief, wasn't so lucky; his life was home for twenty days, on the Rusty for 20 days, and then on the Jack Bullard for twenty days, with rental cars in between. Lather, rinse, repeat...
In the spring of that year, we were on the Illinois River, and it was wilder than usual due to a combination of a quick melt of the snow cover and a lot of rain. It got to the point that the river was high enough that the Coast Guard closed the river to navigation; this caught us northbound at Havana, Illinois, so we tied off our tow in one of the fleets and prepared to stand by with a full crew for a few days til the river went down enough for navigation to resume.
Things get a little relaxed under these circumstances; watch change times aren't rigidly observed, and people tend to drift off of them. Late on the night in question (It was about 2200 hours.), the pilot was up and about earlier than usual, so the captain had gone to bed. I was stretched out on my bunk, reading a book. As the only person on board attached to the engine room, my hours were even more flexible.
As I was reading, I thought that I heard some activity outside, but I couldn't really tell what it was by the sounds I was hearing. Oh well, likely nothing... I read for about another half hour and decided to hit the sack.
My lights hadn't been off for very long when there was a knock on my cabin door, and the door opened. It was Mike, the pilot. When he knew that I was awake, he started telling me that he had tried calling the crew over the intercom several times, and nobody had answered. He went on a prowl of the boat looking for them and didn't find anybody. What he had found was that the yawl was missing, too.
This is bad.
Evidently, these guys had launched the yawl and taken off to god knows where at night on a flooding river. Furthermore, due to several grain elevators being located in Havana, there were also barge fleets anchored on the side of the river where we were tied off. All it would take was for them to be in the wrong spot and have the outboard quit, and they would be swept under the bow rakes of a fleet of empty barges, and we would have multiple drownings on our hands.
Mike was near frantic. He wanted me to start the engines so he could get underway, and go looking for the yawl. I jumped out of bed, got dressed, and got both main engines started, along with the steering, and I went forward and untied the boat. He backed out from our spot and started slowly upriver.
After a quick round of dipstick pulling in the lower engine room, I trekked up the stairs to join Mike in the wheelhouse as an extra lookout. He was just putting along at idle with both engines engaged, using our searchlights to check the bank and the fleets we passed for any sign of the yawl. Nothing...
We kept working our way up the river this way, still with no results, and Mike is getting more worried by the minute. As we got close to the Highway 136 bridge at the upper end of the harbor, he started scanning both sides of the river. Sure enough, not too far above the bridge, here's the yawl, tied off to a small tree on the steep bank. He raises the searchlight and, what do we have here? It's the “missing” deck crew, half sliding down the bank towards the yawl, along with a cardboard box full of liquor bottles...
Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels banned alcohol on U.S. Navy ships with General Order 99 in 1914, and the U.S. Merchant Marine followed right along, drying out anything that sailed and flew the US flag, and it was still the case in the 1990s. Having alcohol on board was a firing offense, and the companies had no sense of humor about it.
They got the yawl around to the port side of the boat and tied it off under the davit. I lowered the hoist, and they got the bridle attached. I lifted the boat and set it in the cradle, and got my flashlight out for a better look. It was a big box, and there was a lot of hard liquor in it. This one was outside my pay grade...
As soon as the yawl cleared the water, Mike backed away from the bank and headed downriver, back to our tie-off spot alongside our tow. The deck crew had disappeared. I went to the wheelhouse and told Mike that he needed to have a look at the contraband and that I would tie him off, and then meet him back at the yawl.
We slid into place, I caught a head line that he backed into, and I flipped two or three more lines on between us and the barge, and met Mike at the yawl. I pulled out my flashlight and shined it in the box, and Mike let out a low whistle. I said, “This one isn't my decision. What do you want to do with this?” Mike didn't hesitate. “Heave it over the side. All of it. I don't want any part of this bullshit. The word always gets out, and I need my job.”
And so we did. The bottles went overboard from the second deck, and that was it. I went below and shut down the engines and steering and then went back to bed, and Mike went back to the pilothouse.
The next morning, the grumbling started. It seemed that in addition to the deckhands, the captain had three or four hundred dollars in that booze run. Nothing was said directly, but there were several people unhappy with the way that things played out. We were all pretty sure that the captain was having trouble with alcohol, we had watched his piloting skills deteriorate over a few years. He used to be able to wiggle twelve barges up through the bridges in Joliet, Illinois without touching anything, but by this time, he had trouble getting six or nine barges through Joliet without bouncing off of most of the sheer fences and cells at the bridges, but we didn't think that he was bringing liquor onto the boat. If the office ever found out about what went on, I never did hear.
I left ACBL and the Rusty Flowers for the gambling boat in downtown Joliet not long after the smuggling incident, but there was one more adventure in store for the captain.
About a year later, the Illinois was going wild again, and the three deck line boats were too tall to get through the lift span of the railroad bridge at Ottawa until after the river crested, so they were all waiting at the fleet downstream from the bridge. Joe, one of my pilots on the Rusty (we met Joe in the tale about the whistle), was on one of the boats waiting on the river to crest. I got in touch with him via walkie-talkie and told him that I would stop by and chat with him when I got off work at Joliet and was headed home to Utica.
We got to talking over the radios when I got to the fleet. We got caught up with each other, and Joe asked me, “Did you hear what happened with Charlie?”, meaning the captain from the contraband episode on the Rusty. I told him that I had not.
It seemed that he was also a mean drunk, and had a habit of taking it out on his wife. Joe said that Charlie had come home drunk one night a few months prior, and went after his wife, but she had had enough, and this time she pulled out a pistol and held him off. That state of affairs lasted till Charlie passed out, and at that point, his wife changed her grip to the barrel of the pistol and then proceeded to pistol whip her husband to the point that he had to be hospitalized.
Joe said that when Charlie came back to work, he still looked terrible. And while he was on the boat that trip, his wife started the divorce proceedings, and she got pretty much everything by the time it was over.
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| The Illinois River at flood stage. |
