Before Phil Moore led a media tour of a massive ship in dry dock Wednesday, he offered a few words of advice for the novices in tow.
“Keep one hand for the ship and one hand for yourself,” the fleet superintendent of the Ohio-based Interlake Steamship Co. said as a reminder to use the handrails.
The ship, a 767-foot iron ore and coal hauler named the Kaye E. Barker, is docked at Fraser Shipyards in Superior. The tour wound across catwalks, up narrow staircases and onto the deck that towers above the deep cargo holds of its interior.
The ship bustled with workers in oil-stained coveralls and overalls. They moved freely, clipping in and out of scaffolding when necessary. The media members moved gingerly.
“There’s no falling here,” said Todd Pietrowski, a 30-year Fraser man clad in welding leathers. “If you did, we’d have to finish you off with a hammer. It’d be the only humane thing to do.”
Looking over the side of the Barker at the dry dock floor several stories below, Pietrowski’s words resonated. Even when the ship is not being rocked by waves, theirs is not a job for the faint at heart.
The Barker is one of five ships wintering in Duluth during an offseason that started Jan. 15 with the closing of the Soo Locks, which separate Lake Superior from the lower Great Lakes, and ends when the locks reopen March 25. Compared with the 10-year average of 10 ships in layup in the Duluth-Superior port, 2015 is a down year. But there are reasons for that, said Tom Curelli, Fraser’s director of operations.
“Five is a little low, but last year there were some issues with extreme weather, and people were being a little more conservative this year,” he said. “They were less aggressive because they didn’t want to get stuck in a bind.”
Additionally, a sixth ship scheduled for Duluth, the 1,000-foot Edwin H. Gott, did not make it through the Soo Locks in time because of ice delays.
Still, Fraser has more than 200 workers hustling along different local docks, addressing the ships that are berthed here.
In the roughly nine weeks of offseason, there is much to do. The Barker requires several new plates of steel along what’s called the turn of the bilge - the steel that curves low along the length of both sides of the vessel to meet at a point underneath.
“It’s a nice wear point,” Curelli said of the turn of the bilge.
Much of the other work is routine maintenance. Two men, among a small group near the exposed metal flower that is the propeller, strained in tandem to rachet a come-along. They were replacing seals, inspecting rudder bearings, all as part of a mandatory five-year dry dock inspection.
Normally “ship-shape with everything stowed away,” Moore said, it’s all now open work space. Tool boxes that are typically battened down are rolled into the aisles, displaying sockets the size of coffee cans and wrenches that look like splitting mauls. There are welding machines everywhere, and the red and green lines that indicate acetylene and oxygen, respectively, snake along the length of the top deck and to all points that require attention.
“The name of the game with ships is keeping them highly maintained,” Moore said.
The Barker was built in 1951 and was repowered in 2012, exchanging a steam engine for diesel. There is a place along the hull, too, where rivet construction meets up with a more modern welded section.
“Here’s a piece of trivia,” said Curelli. “In the late 1970s, this boat was lengthened by 120 feet.”
The ship is also now what Moore called “highly automated with an unmanned engine room” that has computer access points throughout the vessel. But near the end of the tour, in the pilot house at the bow of the ship, one can still find the ship’s wooden wheel. It’s under a sheet of plastic, like all the rest of the currently dormant instrumentation, and protected from the sparks and dust from the work going on around it.
Out of dry dock, a typical route for the Barker will find her running from Marquette, Mich., to steel plants in Detroit, Moore said.
That will come soon enough. In the meantime, there’s plenty of work to do.
