WORKING IN L.A. / THE TOWBOAT CREW : They Can Push the Big Guys Around

Li’l Toot it’s not.

A full 105 feet in length, with twin V-12 diesel engines generating a total of 3,500 horsepower, the Point Vicente is a massive piece of machinery.

To the uninitiated, the Point Vicente is a tugboat, but the men who run the 150-ton vessel prefer the term towboat.

Its job is to push, pull, nudge and tend Gargantuan ships and barges as they maneuver through the maze of anchorages, channels, turning basins and docking areas in Long Angeles and Long Beach harbors.

The man in charge of one of the 10-hour shifts this week was Mark Fuette, who calls himself the operator rather than the captain. He runs the boat from the spacious, airy wheelhouse on the top deck, hands flitting from the twin throttles to the little hydraulic jog stick that steers the craft in place of a wheel.

“Captains are older guys,” said Fuette, who looks even younger than his 34 years as he sits behind the controls in a T-shirt and jeans.

The other members of the three-man crew were chief engineer Bill Pratt, 42, the barrel-shaped man in charge of the engine room, and Mark Begovich, 39, the lanky deckhand whose principal job is to handle the heavy cables that tie the boat to whatever is being hauled.

The Point Vicente was sitting at her dock at the foot of 5th Street in San Pedro when a radio call came in from the dispatcher at the Wilmington Transportation Co. offices.

The engines throbbed to life on the Point Vicente and her sister, the Point Fermin, two of the company’s six towboats.

The call directed the boats to a mooring point in the outer harbor, between Terminal Island and the breakwater, where they would hook up with the Philadelphia Sun, a 34,000-ton tanker, and escort the ship up the Main Channel into the berth at Slip No. 1.

A few minutes later, with the towboats poised near the bow of the 612-foot-long tanker, pilot Jim Haley arrived on a small harbor boat and clambered up a ladder on the side of the big ship.

Taking his position on the bridge, Haley orchestrated the movement of the tanker into the inner harbor and to its berth.

“He’s one of the best,” Fuette said. “Used to be a towboat operator. He tells us what to do and we follow what he says. A good pilot like him, he makes it look easy, but it’s not.”

Fuette seemed destined for his work.

“My grandfather was with the company for 46 years,” he said. “My mother’s dad was a deckhand for 20 years. My dad worked here until he was injured in an auto accident. I learned my way down to the union hall when I was pretty young.”

Fuette studied engineering in school and by the time he was 21 he was working as chief engineer on one of the boats, getting in practice turns at the helm whenever he could. “You can read all the books you want, but the only way to really learn this is by doing it,” he said.

With Haley directing, the Point Vicente nuzzled up to the big ship’s port side.

Begovich took a weighted ball called a “monkey’s fist,” attached to a rope called a “heaving line,” and slung the rope up, 30 feet over his head, onto the deck of the tanker. Crewmen on the tanker pulled in the heaving line as Begovich and Pratt quickly wound their end of the heavy towline around several deck-mounted mooring posts and snugged it up with an electrically powered capstan.

It was hard and dangerous work.

“You’ve got to take up the slack slowly,” Fuette said. “If you don’t, it can snap and take out anything in its way. It could tear a man in half.”

With a tugboat lashed to each side of its bow, the ship began moving slowly forward under its own power. The boats were there in case an emergency maneuver was needed that was too abrupt for the big ship to manage on its own.

As the three crafts moved in tandem up the Main Channel, Pratt and Begovich descended to the towboat’s galley for a cup of coffee.

“When I was a kid, everything I got, I took apart,” Pratt said. “I’m a hands-on kind of guy. I like doing what I’m doing. Where else do you get to ride around in a $2.5-million boat all day and get paid for it?”

Begovich said he likes his job “OK,” but it is not his life’s ambition. “I plan to hit the Lotto and retire,” he said with a grin.

Ten minutes later, the boats and ship passed under the Vincent Thomas Bridge and slowed to a halt in the wide turning basin just north of the bridge.

“Point Vicente, break off and go to the starboard quarter,” Haley radioed from the bridge of the Philadelphia Sun.

Taking in its line, the Point Vicente backed off, wheeled around behind the big ship and reattached itself near the stern, on the same side as the Point Fermin. Then, with the Point Fermin pulling and the Point Vicente pushing, the two boats slowly twisted the ship on its axis--Haley’s orders barking out over the radio every few seconds, the boats answering with toots on their whistles.

“Point Fermin, back off . . . Point Vicente, come ahead easy. Mark, you can swing the Point Vicente out to a 90 (degree angle) now. . . . Point Vicente stop, let her flow.”

With the ship turned around, it reversed its engines and backed slowly up the Slip 1 channel toward Berth 168, the towboats alternately pushing and pulling until the Philadelphia Sun was parallel to the dock and about five feet from it.

“Point Vicente ahead easy. Point Fermin ahead easy.”

Very slowly, the ship edged up to the dock, deckhands scrambling to secure the mooring lines.

“He’s got to do it just right,” Pratt said. “It doesn’t take much for one of these ships to crush through a dock.”

A few minutes later, with the bowlines made fast, Haley released the Point Fermin. It took a little longer to tie down the stern, but eventually--three hours after the start of the five-mile voyage--that, too, was done.

“Mark, that’ll do it,” Haley said. “Thanks for a fine job.”

A Towboat’s Trip

The 150-ton, 105-foot Point Vicente spends its days pushing, pulling and tending Gargantuan ships and barges through the maze of docking areas, channels and turning basins in Long Angeles and Long Beach harbors.

Recently, it plied the route below, accompanying a tanker. At one point, the ship was turned 180 degrees to ease its later departure. The three-hour trip was typical for the towboat, which seldom ventures outside the harbor.