Tugboat for the day

The New York Times has an article by Corey Kilgannon about a nice-looking boat:

Pamela Hepburn walked on the steel decks of the Pegasus (photo, left), in the shadow of its big black, stately stacks. “She’s a bit tired for towing,” she said, her black Labrador, Cocoa, bounding alongside. “But mechanically, she’s in amazingly good condition.”
Hepburn, 68, is a rarity in the maritime world: a female tug captain. And, her boat, the Pegasus, is also a rarity: at 108 years old, it is still able to pull barges.
Many in New York City have grown accustomed to seeing the Pegasus, a working tugboat, docked on Manhattan's West Side. But the old tug, which has served as something of a floating museum, classroom and symbol of New York City’s maritime history, is absent this summer.
The tug has lost its berth at Pier 25 and, after being part of the Manhattan waterfront for thirteen years, it is now docked unceremoniously at the end of a canal in New Jersey.
Its operator, a nonprofit group called the Tug Pegasus Preservation Project, says it no longer has the money to oversee and maintain the tug. The organization has canceled the insurance for the tug and says the boat’s days in New York City waterways may come to an end.
Pamela Hepburn bought the Pegasus in 1987 and operated it commercially for ten years, then restored it for educational purposes. Hepburn, the group’s unpaid executive director, said she hoped to have the Pegasus operating this summer. But fund-raising has become more difficult, she said, and operating costs are high.
In addition to maintaining and skippering the Pegasus, Hepburn said she had put in increasingly long hours trying to handle its administrative affairs and raise money, but had run out of the energy required to keep the tug going. “I’m not capable of doing what I could do ten years ago,” she said as she walked the deck of the Pegasus the other day at its current berth in the Morris Canal in Jersey City, New Jersey.
The tug had long relied on government grants, private donations and sponsored trips, Hepburn said, adding that, to raise money, the Pegasus had even begun offering Hudson River rides last summer, charging per person, but had few takers. “And now people will be disappointed we’re not coming back,” she said.
Hepburn said that after taking a group out on the harbor last weekend, she canceled the boat’s insurance policy to avoid more payments.
In the search for a group to take over the tug, Jan Andrusky, the chairwoman of the Pegasus project, said the group “would consider any offer, even relocating the vessel” outside New York City.
“It’s like a death we’re trying to handle, but we’re just not sure what to do,” Andrusky said. “It’s just sad. We’ve got this beautiful asset, the engine runs, but financially, we weren’t making it.” “Wouldn’t it be a horrible thing if this ends up in a scrapyard?” she added.
Hepburn, whose life has been intertwined with the Pegasus since she bought it, said the scrapyard was “the worst possible scenario” and not being considered. She said she and other volunteers had taught tens of thousands of visitors over the years about New York City’s maritime history and its current status as a thriving commercial port. The tug, which for the past four years had been docked at Hudson River Park’s Pier 25 and before that at Pier 62, was used for educational trips up the Hudson and around city waterways.
The tug is still in fairly good operating condition, and it underwent a million-dollar steel hull renovation in recent years, said Hepburn, who has spent nearly her entire adult life working on tugboats. She grew up on the Massachusetts coast, and was an avid sailor. After going to art school, she jumped at an opportunity to work as a deckhand on a tug, and, over the years, she earned her captain’s license. After working for various companies, she bought the Pegasus for $25,000 and towed barges, mostly in New York Harbor, hauling oil barges, construction rigs, and railroad barges.
Hepburn lived on the Pegasus for many years and, as a single mother, raised her daughter, Alice, on the boat. Hepburn would bring the baby while working and hand her off to a crew member while executing difficult maneuvers.
Andrusky, who manages a fleet of fourteen tugs for Weeks Marine, a large marine construction company, called Hepburn a pioneering woman in the maritime trade and as much a vital resource as the aging tug itself. “She’s really been somebody who women admired in the industry; she propelled the growth of women in the industry,” she said. “She’s put her whole life into the Pegasus, her blood, sweat, and tears, and lots of personal money into it.”
Hepburn not only skippers the tug, but also has intimate knowledge of its aging, idiosyncratic mechanics. The Pegasus was built for the Standard Oil Company of Baltimore, Maryland and was converted in 1953 from steam to diesel propulsion.
After retiring the Pegasus from commercial work in 1997, Hepburn decided to turn it into a floating museum and worked with many volunteers, with donated materials, to keep it afloat.
Roland Lewis, the president of the Metropolitan Waterfront Alliance, called the plight of the Pegasus “part of a slow-moving tragedy, of losing a huge part of our historical heritage on the waterfront. We’ve done a good job of landmarking buildings and securing funds to keep them,” he added, “but we’ve fallen down in trying to do the same for our equally important maritime heritage.”

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