Marine News, April 2006

<BODY> <div> being asked. Like yesterday, setting that pilot house. I hadn't set that as a goal. I figured these guys have been through hell. Two weeks is all they had to get that boat packed — the two coldest damn weeks we've had the entire winter. I thought they'd want to take it easy yesterday, but they wanted to get that pilot house on." Crafted for the Job There's no evidence that Mr. Doughty set-out to preside over the northeast's most successful tug-building operation, but working-out that way probably wouldn't surprise those who knew him. Two skills required would be hands-on savvy of how to work boats, and hands-on administering of them as well. Starting with an early partnership in a lobster boat with his father, Mr. Doughty was appar- ently on course from a young age. "My brother and I had owned some trawlers, it got to be time that one of us did something else, so I went back to sea," Mr. Doughty recalls. "I went to sea for several years. Marine engineer. Graduated from Maine Maritime." Coming ashore, Mr. Doughty took what he describes as "a good job" with Bath Iron Works. "I went in there as a machin- ery and piping estimator, new construc- tion, and you could look the entire length of the shipyard and there was not a thing on the ways. The last of the Sea Witch containerships was in the water, and all of their building bays were empty. So we bid everything. Anything that was made out of steel, we bid it. We bid on tunnel sec- tions for the Chesapeake Bay Bridge Tun- nel." BIW began offering in-house design services, Mr. Doughty recalls, and some roll on-roll off business came in. "We wanted to do the superstructure--and so I transferred over to the machinery, piping and design group, and from there to the planning and scheduling group, and then back to estimating." Mr. Doughty and Mr. Washburn, then designing for BIW, chanced to discuss a yet-unbuilt design Mr. Washburn had drawn-up. With a third partner, Carl Pianka, "we pooled some money," said Mr. Washburn, "bought some steel, and rented a facility that was about three miles from the water — we learned a lot since then. I think it was on Valentine's day we incorporated, in 1977. We started building a 69-ft. dragger on speculation" The yard moved to the water at Wool- wich, until 1984 when negotiations with Edward T. Gamage in East Boothbay worked out. "That was right at the height of the condo fever," said Mr. Doughty. "Every bit of waterfront was getting bought-up by people who had ideas of building condos, and Eddie really had in his heart that this had always been a ship- yard, and I guess he found a couple of guys young enough and stupid enough to keep it that way." Maybe not so stupid. As Paul Tregurtha put it on February 28, ""Right now we've had a pretty good run and our customers keep demanding more power. As long as our customer demand keeps up we plan to keep coming back to East Boothbay." Said Mr. Doughty, looking over it all, from that first dragger forward, "We bought ourselves a job." 24 • MarineNews • April, 2006 Clockwise, from Top Left: Freedom, W&D's hull no. 77, shown a couple months after delivery to Boston Towing in 2003, struts its stuff past a couple Boston landmarks. Being a Z-drive, the first of two deliv- ered to BT, the tug couldn't resist strutting in reverse. (Photo: Don Sutherland.) Despite icy winds, the pilot house of the just-launched Edward J. Moran was set in place in less than an hour. (Photo: Don Sutherland.) The next 92-footer for Moran will be the April Moran, the fourth in Moran's Kaye class. (Photo: Don Sutherland.) Gramma Lee T. Moran, the second member of the Diane class, W&D's hull 74 delivered in 2002, conducts the QM2 on her maiden entry to New York two years ago. (Photo: Don Sutherland.) APRIL MN2006 3(17-24).qxd 4/7/2006 3:07 PM Page 24 </div> <span id="lblContents"></span> <br /> <br /> <a href="http://www.digitalwavepublishing.com/" title="Digital Magazine">Digital Wave Publishing</a> </BODY>