Ride a towboat

With Capt. Clay Culp at the helm, the towboat David R. Hill nears Guntersville as dusk descends on the river. Towboat life on the Tennessee

Story and photos By David Moore

The electronic security gate clicks and whirs open to the walkway to Nickajack Dam where the towboat David R. Hill and seven barges wait to enter the lock. And, I fear, wait on me. For my part, I’ve been waiting and working toward making this trip happen for at least a year.

Long ago, through a military friend of my father, I was able to hitch a ride from Miami to South America aboard a commercial banana freighter. For a magazine story a few years ago, I hitched a freight train ride from Guntersville to Gadsden on the Alabama & Tennessee River Railroad.

Most of us know what it’s like to be on the Tennessee or Lake Guntersville for fun. Most of us don’t know what it’s like to be on these waters for work. I was keen to experience it by hitching a towboat ride, which I initially figured would be between Decatur and Guntersville.

Several friends who knew a guy at one towboat company or another helped this eventually come about despite dead ends, boat scheduling nightmares, Covid concerns and the closing of Wilson Dam for major repairs.

Finally, I was thrilled when Andrew Gobin of Tennessee Valley Towing in Paducah, Ky., texted the night before saying I was on for today; details in the morning. My wife, whom I’d volunteered to shuttle me, was far less enthusiastic than I. Would she have to find me at some midnight dark dock in Decatur?

Nope. Earlier this morning we learned Diane needed to drive me to Nickajack, Tenn., for an allday, 68-mile cruise to the Port of Guntersville. I’d left my car in the Davis Lee Companies’ parking lot, a block from the water at the end of Worth Street. We left there at 10:15 a.m., cutting it close to reach Nickajack by noon.

I’d further pushed my luck with Diane’s good graces when I inadvertently took us to the wrong side of Nickajack Dam to access the lock. My goof-up required a winding loop back across the Tennessee to reach the far side of the dam.

Diane and I are both thrilled when that security gate whirs open.

Without graciously catering to a curious journalist, general manager Andrew Gobin and executive VP Barry Gipson have their hands full at Tennessee Valley Towing, a division of James Marine in Paducah, Ky.

TVT operates a fleet of 20 towboats – not counting fleet tugs or other motor vessels – and has some 200 employees, most working on the water. The company provides barge transport on the Tennessee and Ohio rivers and parts of the Mississippi and Illinois rivers.

Andrew initially planned to ride with me, but real work called in Paducah this morning, so he sent safety manager Greg Vaughn, who drove across Tennessee to meet me here at Nickajack.

Greg waves from the lock as the security gate closes behind me, and a minute later we meet. His first order of business is issuing me a life-jacket.

We walk across the upper gates of the lock. Down to the right we hear the whooshing sound of the refilling lock that will drop us 41 feet from Nickajack to Lake Guntersville; just below us to the left, bound side by side, are the bows of three 35-foot wide barges. Lashed behind them are two sets of two barges each, altogether forming a seven-barge raft – it’s called a tow, I learn – the length of two football fields. The David R. Hill is behind them all.

“I cut it close,” I tell Greg, glad the lock is still refilling. “At least I didn’t keep you guys waiting.”

I follow him down a ladder and onto the first barge, then down the length of narrow steel deck between it and the center barge. I glimpse water between the two hulls as we step over cables and deck fittings. Six of the barges are hoppers with sliding arched covers to protect cargo; the seventh barge is designed for liquid cargo.

I try to remain professional but inside I’m as giddy as a kid at a water park.

Entering the towboat’s third-deck wheelhouse, Greg introduces me to the pilot, Buddy Russell, an 80-year-old riverboat character who couldn’t be much crustier were he named Mark Twain. Buddy has just spelled Capt. Clay Culp, who’d finished his six-hour shift and retired to his cabin.

Greg gives a brief safety talk. I sign some legal papers, agree not to go out on the barges, then get a quick tour of the David. R. Hill before he debarks to drive back to Paducah.

When the lock master opens the upper gates, Buddy gently revs the big engines and

Greg Vaughn of Tennessee Valley Towing, top left, heads for the towboat along the narrow barge decks. The “tow” is lashed in one row of three side-by-side barges and two rows of two. After pushing the tow into the Nickajack lock, Buddy Russell, the 80-year-old pilot, above, maneuvers the boat into the slot, immediate left, beside the two rear barges so the MV David R. Hill will fit. The boat, in the TVT photo below, is named for a longtime port engineer at Paducah, Ky. Completed in 1956, the boat is 149 feet long with a beam of 34 feet and draft of 9.8 feet. Vigilant behind 600 feet of barges, Buddy evaded the end of a large tree trunk, lower left.

nudges the tow – 105 feet wide at the front three barges – into the 110-foot-wide lock. The three-two-two barge configuration barely fits the 600-foot length of this and most locks on the Tennessee River.

After tucking in the barges, Buddy reverses, then pulls into the slot created by the two-wide section of barges. Deckhands lash us up. The gates close, and with a hiss the lock begins draining. It takes 15 minutes for the water level to drop. All goes quiet for a few minutes, then the tall, lower gates slowly open.

Buddy amazes me with what, to my thinking, is a fancy towboat dance that all commercial captains and pilots can probably do. From our position in the outside slot beside the two-by-two barges, he nudges the entire tow out the gates for about the length of the David R. Hill. After we’re unlashed, Buddy uses both steering rudders and forward and reverse thrust on the props to literally move the towboat sideways, lining it up where we initially began behind the liquid barge.

The dam is at river mile 424.75. About 1:45 pm we finally clear the lock and surge forward – more or less. We’re making 8.2 miles per hour, according to the Rose Point Navigation System – a computer whose screen displays a continuously scrolling digital chart of the river – beside Buddy. Later, with the water a little deeper, we’ll hit 9.2.

Even at 80, Buddy’s eyes must be 20/20. In the narrow channel above South Pittsburg he spots in the distance what may be a buoy floating loose of its mooring. He keeps to port and, using binoculars, soon determines it’s actually the hefty trunk of a mostly sunken tree. We pass it just to starboard of lead barge, 600 feet in front of us.

For most of the first hours I hang out with Buddy in the wheelhouse or step out on the flying bridges on either side of it.

Buddy, who lives in Shelbyville, Tenn., worked as a dockhand at 17, only to get laid off because he was too young. He later ran boats on the Ohio River for 27 years, spent 23 on the Tennessee, a few years on the Black Warrior and Tombigbee and did dredging work in Florida.

“The Ohio is good river to run,” he says. “The Tennessee has nice scenery, but it’s crooked above Nickajack and the farther you get above Chickamauga.”

Having spent most of his career as a captain, Buddy is now content being a pilot.

“Being captain is too much bull,” he mutters.

Still, he’s sharp. I’m oblivious to it, but he senses something in the boat and radios a deckhand to tighten a gap between barges.

In the course of conversation some miles past South Pittsburg, Buddy explains that, like most towboaters, he spends 28 days on the river, then gets off two weeks. Also like many of them, he’s divorced.

“You can’t be married and work out here on the river,” he says. “Ain’t too many of them that stay together.”

Buddy says he’ll likely retire in another year when his five-year license comes up for renewal. Maybe sooner. What then? Buy a boat for fun?

“When I get off this river and go home,” he says. “I ain’t going to get on no boat. I used to have one, but I sold it.” Besides the captain and pilot, the crew is comprised of an engineer, mate, cook and five deckhands. The latter –who earn about $195 per day – rotate in two sets of two, six hours on and six off. The fifth deckhand is on call, sleeping unless the boat’s locking through or picking up or dropping off barges.

In my quick tour at Nickajack, I had learned my way to the head – boat-speak for bathroom – engine room and galley. There I met the cook and learned we’d have lasagna for supper. Lasagna had been on my mind all day, but now it’s the engineer I want to find.

Opening the engine room door, I’m engulfed by heat that might come from a sub-basement of hell; no tortured souls scream, but two big engines churn out an unholy din. I hurry through the narrow passageway to the far end where I spot the engineer behind the window in his cabin, which overlooks his hellish domain.

Robert Allen waves me in and gladly agrees to be a tour guide – but not before I don a required sound-baffling headset, which renders the engine room to merely loud while still hot as hell.

Robert introduces me to his world of two huge, 16-cylinder diesel engines, oil pumps, compressors, circuit breakers and forced air induction blowers. We squeeze down a short flight of stairs to see two spinning shafts that, beyond the bulkheads and hull, turn the big props that churn the river.

The term “towboat” arises from the end of the steamboat era. With declining profits they started “towing” wooden barges alongside to earn additional revenue. Today, “tow” refers to the group of barges a towboat pushes. The David R. Hill and its seven-barge tow, far left, approach the arched span of the 1,514-foot Shelby Rhinehart Bridge at South Pittsburg, Tenn. Left, engineer Robert Allen reigns over the engine room. The noise from the two big diesel motors, one shown here, is deafening –so much so that ear protection is required. Robert rates the combined diesels at 4,200 HP.

Fortunately, it’s too loud and muffled to talk, so I can’t show Robert my mechanical ignorance. Instead, as he silently points out gauges and knobs to me, I nod in what I think is an intelligent way or give him a thumbs up.

After the tour, we sit and talk at a table with a red and white checkered cloth in the cool, lasagna-infused air of the galley.

Robert grew up in Chicago and southern Illinois, did an Air Force stint and lived a while in Las Vegas. He has a total of about 13 years with TVT, including five as a “deckineer,” a sort of apprenticeship program that’s half deckhand and half unlicensed engineer.

“You make good money out here on the river … probably twice the pay I could get at home, unless I worked in a coal mine.”

Robert, 39, lives in Rosiclare, Ill. – which is on the Ohio River – along with his wife, three kids, two step kids and his wife’s teen-aged cousin, over whom they have temporary custody. That’s a lot of family needs, both in terms of paychecks and desired quality time. He splits the difference, working 28 days on the river then taking 28 days off.

“Unless they are very dedicated to you, it’s hard to keep a wife and work out here on the river,” Robert says. “You pretty much can’t make it work out on the usual 28/14 schedule, but it’s doable at 28/28. The wife still doesn’t like it, but it’s definitely doable.

“You can’t beat the money though – $76,000 for six months of work. And I make all that I can out of the six months I get off.”

I have lasagna even more on the brain now, but I go back to the wheelhouse for the changing of shifts to meet Capt. Clay Culp. He comes on early at 4:35 p.m., relieving Buddy, whom he’s worked with for years.

After settling in, Clay checks the navigation system and says we’re still five and half hours from Guntersville. Now, he adds, would probably be a good time to talk to deckhands while they’re on supper break. It’s music to my stomach.

The galley is located beyond the engine room. With a radar lock on food – and interviewing deckhands, of course – I shoot through the engine room so fast I hardly notice the heat and racket.

No one is in the galley except Robert Allen and the cook, Carla Austin.

“The lasagna is on the stove. Help yourself,” she tells me. “And there’s some left-over red velvet cake that I baked yesterday.”

“The grub is generally good,” Robert says. “But it depends on the cook. Carla’s one of the best I’ve had, honestly.”

I dig in. The grub’s not generally good – it’s great.

Carla’s been with TVT since 2017. She lives in Poplar Bluff, Mo., a couple hours west of Paducah.

Crews tend to stay together. Carla and Robert will be among those rotating off tomorrow morning when the David R. Hill and its tow lock through Guntersville Dam. A company vehicle will drop off their replacements and take them to Paducah, after which they go their own ways.

“I got on at Guntersville my first day ever on a big boat,” Carla recalls. Being with strangers in a strange environment on a strange river made her a nervous wreck.

“But the whole crew was friendly and helped me out,” she says. “And I love cooking for hungry men. It’s just like cooking for my family – and we’re out here together about as much as we are with our families at home.”

Carla wakes at 3:30 a.m.; has breakfast cooked by 4:30. She naps a few hours before waking again to have lunch ready by 10:30. After cleaning the kitchen she starts dinner about 3 p.m. After everyone eats, she cleans up once again before turning in. If not sleeping, off time is usually spent in her cabin watching a small TV, TikTok on her phone or texting and talking to family.

“I can say it’s beautiful out here on the Tennessee,” Carla says. But she’s worked an extra two weeks this cycle and is ready to see her three grown kids and seven grands. Plus she’s ready for some peace and quiet.

“Hear this …” she says. To the constant background rumble of the moving towboat, the galley adds rattling eyes that vibrate on the two stovetops. “I’m ready to sleep at home where I don’t hear anything.”

Sitting at the helm of the David R. Hill, Capt. Clay Culp is, literally, in his wheelhouse. Being a towboat captain runs three generations deep in his blood, figuratively more depth than the river. His father, Donnie, is still a captain with TVT.

The Tennessee flows past Clifton, Tenn., where his grandparents lived and his parents still reside. His grandparents had a houseboat, and during summers the family, Clay included, would sail off for weeks, long ago establishing this as his favorite river.

He and his wife, Christy, have three grown children and live in Tupelo, 45 minutes from the Tennessee-Tombigbee. Unlike Buddy, Clay’s off days were always – and still are – about getting out the pontoon boat, jet skis, bass boats or even racing.

Not surprisingly, straight from high school in 1998, Clay became a deckhand. He went to work for TVT about 2013, earned his maritime pilot’s license in 2014, his captain’s in 2018. He did contract work for a time when TVT leased its boats to Inland Marine Service, then rejoined the company when it again handled its own boats.

About the time we enter Marshall County

Just upriver from Bellefonte, the David R. Hill passes the St. Paul, a 76-foot towboat operated by Marquette Transportation of Jefferson, La. According to TVA, 13 locks along the 652-mile length of the Tennessee River provide passage for 25,000-30,000 barges annually, carrying 40-50 million tons of goods, saving consumers $400-$500 million in transportation costs. In 2021, Nickajack handled 408 commercial barges hauling 2.1 million tons of product. Guntersville Dam handled 813 barges with 4.3 million tons. One barge has the capacity of 15 jumbo rail hoppers or 58 truck trailers. At far left, Capt. Clay Culp goes over reports with ships’ Mate John Reed of Smithland, Ky. After a big lunch, cook Carla Austin, left, made a “light” dinner of lasagna.

– with little or no fanfare around river mile 373 – I ask Clay about any romantic notions he might have regarding the days of old steamboat pilots.

“They had it rough,” he laughs. “No air conditioner up there. The old boats were hot. Those guys also actually mapped the river. They were the ones who started this.

“That’s whats wrong with the industry now,” he adds with a nod to the sophisticated Rose Point Navigation screen. “My granddaughter can do this, can hold the sailing line. But turn that off and run by even just this,” a nod to the radar, “or by the book of charts, and it’s a different story. You can’t beat experience. There’s nothing that can replace that.”

Towboats, it seems, fit Capt. Culp like a generational glove.

“But it’s not for everybody – just like working in a factory is not for me,” he says as river miles scroll away on the navigation screen and the afternoon wans. “You have to have a good strong woman to stay around when you are gone nine months of the year.”

Christy, whom he married in 2015, “is one of a kind. Most people working on the river are divorced.”

The money is good. So is TVT. And the Tennessee River is scenic. But Clay finds a further sense of job satisfaction, one tied directly to the tow he’s pushing.

“Commerce and transportation … the older I get the more important I realize it is,” he says. “I feel we’re doing something for the greater good of the world. Feeding people. Making sure they have what they need. We feed the cats of the world,” he laughs because of the loads of corn TVT delivers to the Meow Mix plant in Decatur.

On the way to Chattanooga, the David R. Hill delivered four barge loads of gypsum for a drywall plant in Bridgeport; in Chattanooga, where it turned downstream again, the towboat delivered three barges of steel coils, two of aluminum hydrate, one of coke and another of equipment. It’s now returning empties except for the liquid barge, which carries caustic soda.

In Guntersville, the crew will pick up two more empties to take downstream and three barges of wheat.

Dusk has settled over the river as we push our tow within sight of Guntersville.

“There’s an old captain’s joke,” Clay says: “‘It’s easier to drive at night because you don’t have to worry about hitting things you can’t see.’ But you really have to be more aware. It’s where these come in really handy,” he adds, head-pointing to the radar and nav system.

He brings us to a near stop as we veer out of the channel and into the three-quarters-of a-mile-wide mouth of Spring Creek between Signal Point to our port and City Harbor to starboard. On the radio to the small harborworking tugboat Jack Rose, Clay explains his tow size, configuration and what he needs to pick up in Guntersville.

In the towboat world, things happen slowly – as you want them to. When something happens fast, it’s not usually good.

It has been fully dark a while when Clay slowly maneuvers us so that the Jack Rose can nudge up to the tow and assist him in deftly swinging us alongside the outer edge of what he calls “the fleet.” This is a

The Guntersville pusher-tug Jack Rose, top, comes to assist Capt. Clay Culp in maneuvering the towboat and its barges to the fleet mooring area. Clay uses a spotlight on the wheelhouse to light up the destination, center. Once in place, deckhands lash the David R. Hill’s barges to the fleet, below.

mooring of dozens of towboats off the point occupied by the Pilgrim’s Pride feed plant. Deckhands lash our tow onto the huge island of barges so work can begin on picking up the five additional barges. It’s about 10 p.m. – time to get me out of the way.

Clay radios for two deckhands to launch the towboat’s skiff to shuttle me to land. The far dark shore, more than a half-mile from the fleet, is punctuated by scattered lights, none of which stands out as a landmark to identify the end of Worth Street.

“Is there a place to dock the skiff there?” the captain asks.

“I don’t think so …”

“Do you know where Worth Street is?”

A dark, embarrassed dread creeps over me. “Well …” Then it hits me.

Ipull out my cell phone and open “maps” to locate the street, forgetting the clever app also shows my location. And there I am, pulsing on the screen, a blue light with a beacon to one side. It’s out in the middle of the water.

“Cool!” I show Clay. “That’s us. And here is Worth …”

And it gets cooler still. There on the map on the screen, a block from the edge of the water, is a little blue icon labeled “Parked Car.” As I often confess, my phone’s smarter than I am.

Clay and I laugh and shake hands. I thank him profusely, gather my camera bag and laptop – and phone – walk down the steps from the wheelhouse and out to the deck where two hands await. We board the skiff and, relying on the warmly glowing screen in my hand, I point them in the direction of the beacon and my car.

The lights of the David R. Hill fall away in the night as we cut a wake across the dark water toward the black shore. Looking at my phone, I recall Clay’s comments about today’s advanced navigation system captains and pilots rely on – “You can’t beat experience.”

I certainly don’t begin to have Clay’s experience. Or Buddy’s. Or even that of the greenest deckhand. But now, every time I see barges on the river, I’ll be reminded of my experience today, reminded that I do know a little about towboat life on the Tennessee.