Besides the captain and the cook, a tug needs a chief engineer, an oiler, a fireman and a deckhand. The deckhand works with the hawsers that are often used when a tug has to pull a big ship.
This is what happens: An AB aboard the ship holds a coil of light line, called a heaving line. At the end of the line is a ball-shaped knot called a monkey fist. The AB gives a big swing and sends the monkey fist and line flying down to the tug. The deckhand on the tug grabs for the line. He’s not an outfielder trying to catch the ball. The monkey fist is there only to make the line uncoil and go straight.
The deckhand pulls on the heaving line, which is attached to a hawser on the ship. (Sailors don’t say the line is attached or tied. They say it’s “bent” to the hawser.) The hawser is so big that it can’t be thrown, but it can be hauled onto the tug by the heaving line. The deckhand makes the hawser fast to a bitt on the tug’s deck, and now she can pull.
For pushing jobs the tug has a thick pad called a bow fender made of heavy rope hung over the bow. After the fender has been used a while, it gets worn and shaggy and is often called a “beard.” It protects any ship the tug is pushing. There are fenders along each side of a tug, too. Sometimes they are made of rope. Sometimes they are old automobile tires or just logs hung loosely over the side. The logs get so much banging around that they may have to be replaced every few days.
Very often a tug has something on its bridge that looks like a gun. It’s not. It’s a water nozzle attached to a pump, and it’s there to help fight fires on ships.
The kind of tug that you can see on the Mississippi River is called a towboat. She doesn’t tug, and she
doesn’t tow. She just pushes. A Mississippi towboat gets behind a whole string of flat-bottomed barges and shoves them up and down rivers. She often pushes ten barges at a time, loaded with twice as much cargo as an ordinary seagoing freighter can carry.