On a quiet Monday morning, Captain Linda Weiss cranks up the 700-horsepower engines on the tug Marilyn McFarland and heads out to survey her “yard” — Tampa’s International Ship Repair near Ybor City, where goliath ships and smaller vessels are repaired, restored and built.
While the daily drill varies, hers is mostly a push-and-tow operation. When she’s not maneuvering ships into massive dry docks – the largest of which is 99 feet wide with a lift capacity of 20,000 tons, she’s coaxing 200-foot-long barges with cranes in and out of tight dockside spaces so they can move equipment on and off ships being serviced.
And then there are the emergency jobs, when a ship breaks a shaft, loses an engine or propeller. “It’s round the clock until they’re good to go and we can get them back into service,” Weiss says.
Pushing a ship into drydock is a complex operation that can involve multiple tugs and take several hours. International Ship Repair’s dry docks rest about 30 feet above the water line. Crews “sink” the dock by flooding their tanks so they can accept vessels, and tugs push the vessel onto blocks that raise the ship for repairs.
“You can never get complacent,” says Weiss, who has piloted tugs for International Ship Repair since 1998. “You have to pay very careful attention to the gages and try to catch something before it happens.” And even with the best planning, crews have to be prepared for problems that can turn an otherwise routine job into an emergency.
Once, while Weiss was pushing a crane barge down to Big Bend, the seas whipped up and water starting splashing over the bow. When the barge started to list, the crane’s 150-foot boom pivoted at its base, putting even greater weight on the listing side of the vessel. “We held the stern into the wind (to reduce the amount of water coming over the bow) and got the pumps going, and another tug helped us secure the crane,” she said.
“Another time, I lost an engine turning into East Bay with a 200-feet dry dock with an inbound tanker approaching," Weiss said. At that point, Weiss was concerned about making the turn and avoiding a collision with the tanker. The momentum of a big tanker is such that it can require miles, not feet, before coming to a stop has the tendency to travel in the direction it’s already moving.
The Marilyn McFarland awaits duty.
Weiss was ultimately able to manage the turn and avoid a collision, with lookouts on the wingwalls helping to navigate through the junction.
“That’s where experience comes in – you do the best you can to predict a situation and handle it the best you can. It also comes down to having good people whose judgment you trust along with your own.”
While such incidences are rare, Weiss says they underscore the company’s priorities: ensuring the safety of vessels, people and the environment. That’s why each day starts with comprehensive checks of the tugs’ mechanical and electrical systems.
Weiss is a modern-day Tugboat Annie, a character popularized in a series of stories in the Saturday Evening Post and made famous by Maureen Sullivan in the 1930s movie about a comically quarrelsome middle-aged couple who operate a tugboat.
She is the sole female among three tugboat captains at International Ship Repair and one of only a few female tug captains in the area.
Dressed in a blue jumpsuit with a baseball cap and sunglasses, she trades jocular banter with dockhands and crews. Working in an industry dominated by men, “you kind of always feel like you have to prove yourself,” she said.
Weiss grew up in south New Jersey in the town of Tuckerton, where her father fixed and refurbished boats. Her grandfather ran a marine salvage business.
In the early 1980s, Weiss got her captain’s license working on a fishing boat out of Madeira Beach, taking anglers on overnight trips to the middle grounds. “It got to the point where I really didn’t know what I wanted to do, but I knew I didn’t want to fish,” she says.
A series of odd jobs followed before Weiss joined the St. Petersburg Times overseeing ad inserts at the newspaper’s warehouse. A few years later she answered an ad for a tug boat captain, although she had never operated one. “It was a whole new world,” says Weiss, whose experience as a mariner and on-the-job training helped her master the job.
“I try to learn something all the time,” she adds. “At my level of license, there’s so much to learn – it’s just that kind of environment that propels me.”
In her free time, Weiss grows herbs and pineapples at her home in Safety Harbor. “Gardening really ‘peaces’
me out.”
