Note: This remembrance was submitted by Sam Smith, editor of the Progressive Review (prorev.com), after he read The Working Waterfront’s recent story, “Tales of the ‘Buoy Snatchers.'”
The Spar was 180 feet long. Unlike most Coast Guard cutters that were painted barn-siding white, the buoy tenders had black hulls and white superstructures. We sometimes referred to them as The Great Black Fleet. The Spar was equipped to break ice and her rugged construction and towing ability made her an excellent heavy weather search and rescue craft. She was also used to bring fuel, water and crews to the Nantucket Light Vessel and to the several of the nearby lighthouses. But her main task was to maintain 170 buoys from Block Island to Buzzard’s Bay.
My main task, other than to make sure the ship got where it was going, was to put the buoys where the charts said they were.
For every buoy we knew the correct angles of three fixed shore objects such as towers or buildings. On each wing of the bridge a quartermaster would take hold a sextant horizontally and read off the the bearings between two of the objects. A single screw ship, the Spar was not easy to maneuver and we approached the buoy location dead slow, the quartermasters calling out their angles: “76 degrees, 13 minutes on the left—correcting.” From the other wing” “82 degrees, 52 minutes on the right—uncorrecting.”
I would stand on a wing of the bridge with a chart and three-arm protractor keeping up with the position of the ship. As the position plotted over the right black or red dot on the chart I would tell the captain, “She’s on.” He would cry to the chief on the buoy deck below, “Let her go.” A seaman swung a mallet to the chain stopper. Fifteen tons of sinker and buoy were released and as she settled into her position, a final check on the angles was made we backed away.
But other things affected buoys besides wanderlust. The pockets that hold the light batteries might leak water, shorting the electrical system. The batteries might discharge sooner than expected. The flashing device might be defective. All four bulbs in the automatic lamp changer might be burned out. A clapper might be off a bell. A light might be burning steadily instead of flashing its proper characteristic. Bird droppings might obscure the lens. Or the buoy might simply be scheduled for replacement or servicing.
Brenton Point Lighted Whistle Buoy S2 was a large buoy in Rhode Island Sound near the entrance to Narragansett Bay, in plenty of deep warter. On a Friday in February, she was scheduled to be serviced. It was a good day for tending buoys. Not too cold and not too rough. If your specialty was repairing lanterns you appreciated this. You could remember a night deep in that same winter when you had climbed aboard an ice-covered buoy that was careening carelessly against the side of the ship. You could remember mounting 15 feet of slippery cage to the lantern, almost losing your grip every time you inched higher. And you could remember sitting atop that rocking pinnacle trying to rewire a lamp-changer in the winter wind. Your memories made you glad for a day like this.
The officer on the port wing of the bridge could see the buoy a hundred yards ahead. “God damn current’s setting me down too fast.”
The buoy approached almost imperceptibly as the ship edged forward. It rolled gently in the slight swell and every four seconds a weak red flash came from its light. The officer shoved the stick beside him forward and called to the helmsman inside the wheelhouse, “Increase to right full.” The helmsman spun the wheel. There was a groan from somewhere deep inside the ship as the diesel engines responded to the thrust of the throttle and released their full energy. The officer returned the stick to a vertical position and the groan ceased.
There was no surge of speed when the lever moved forward. The ship continued to creep towards the buoy, but the engines and the rudder had combined to turn her bow to starboard. The buoy was off the port bow now. “Shift your rudder. ” The turning of the bow was checked. Down on the buoy deck, below and forward of the bridge, a small group of men in safety helmets and dungarees watched the buoy. Over their heads a large buff-painted boom hung in wait.
“Ease your rudder.” The buoy was close and the officer shoved the lever aft.
This time there was the groan and more. The whole ship shook in protest as the engines tried to stop the forward momentum of 1,000 tons of steel moving through the water. The buoy struck the side of the ship and started scraping its way aft. Before it had traveled more than half the way down, its motion was checked. The officer returned the lever. The roll of the ship and the roll of the buoy didn’t coincide, but the men on the buoy deck anticipated the erratic movement. A wire strap was led through the cage of the buoy and back to the hook that hung from the boom. The chief in charge on the buoy deck held up his hand.
The electric boom motor started to spin, the boom cable became taut, pulling at the strap. Up on the bridge a second officer was plotting the position of the buoy. “She’s 200 yards north of station, captain.”
“Very well,” the captain replied, without lifting his eyes from the operation below. A half-dozen men were trying to bring a 12-ton buoy aboard a rolling deck and there were a half-dozen things that could go wrong.
* * *
Only last week the nylon cross-deck had suddenly snapped with the crack of a rifle. The men tending the lines were thrown to the deck. Others nearby ducked and headed for what protection they could find. The buoy had swept a path across the deck. “Drop it,” the chief had yelled and the boom operator had let the buoy crash to the steel surface.
Fortunately it had been a calm day and no one was injured. But it had been a sharp reminder that things can go wrong without warning. This day, however, the buoy came aboard smoothly. As it arose from the water a large cylindrical body was revealed, coated with mussels and green slime. And extending down from the body there was a long tube that counterbalanced the upper portion of the buoy when it sat in the water.
Light, cage, body and tube were dragged aboard, restrained by the boom and the cross-deck line. For a few seconds the huge buoy hung suspended, but the moment the chief could see that the chock was properly placed underneath, it was quickly lowered to the deck and secured. The helmeted men set about the familiar routine, scraping the body and tube of its marine growth, checking the lantern, replacing the long black batteries that rested in two pockets in the body.
The buoy chain rested with one of its links securely slipped into a chain stopper on the edge of the buoy deck. Now the chain would be hauled and checked and then the whole buoy would be replaced, refreshed and properly positioned on its station in Rhode Island Sound.
* * *
By their nature, buoys are frequently near bad water. The Aids to Navigation Manual blandly stated that a buoy tender skipper is often called to go “where no ordinarily prudent navigator would take his ship.” A prudent navigator, for example, doesn’t let his ship get within a hundred feet of a rock that could slice his hull, but marking that rock for other mariners might require that one do just that.
Capt. Jimmie H. Hobaugh, who had commanded the Woodrush, a 180-footer in the Great Lakes, told an interviewer, “I used to put her aground all the time—that’s the only way you can set some of the buoys that you work. If you work Sand Point bouy in Munising there is the actual imprint of the bow in the sand. When you go aground, you drop the bouy and you know it’s on station.”%u2028