Sturdy tugboat, captain provide steadfast presence on water

From the shore, the Potlatch gives the illusion of grace – a trim, green-and-white tugboat slicing through the waters of Lake Coeur d’Alene.

But looks are deceiving here. The vessel is more bulldog than swan. The Potlatch sits squat and low in the water, pushed by a 150-horsepower engine that belches diesel exhaust. Pushing bundles of logs requires a certain brute strength, even in boats.

“It’s not like a pleasure boat,” says captain Oscar Mooney. “It doesn’t go as fast.”

Mooney, 45, has piloted the Potlatch for more than two decades. He’s part of a fleet of 11 captains and tugs working the lake and the Spokane River.

For more than a century, tugs have been vital to lake commerce. Logs cut in forests to the east are floated across the water and stored in booms at Cougar Bay. Every morning, Stimson Lumber Co.’s two mills radio in orders. Mooney delivers by the bundle: white fir, red fir mixed with larch, cedar, spruce, hemlock and pine.

The picturesque tugs attract film crews, usually for advertising spots. Often, they get a shot of the bearded captain, a broad-brimmed leather hat shadowing his watchful gaze.

The style is practical. “I need the shade,” Mooney says. “I’m red-headed enough that I burn.”

By 6 each morning, Mooney is on the water. He works a five-mile stretch of the Spokane River in ever-changing conditions, including wind and fog.

The job of a tug captain is solitary, and sometimes dangerous. Mooney gets called out of bed at 1 a.m. to corral bundles of logs that break loose in storms. He wears caulk boots so he can walk out on the floating logs to unsnarl jams.

His perks are glimpses of the river others seldom see – black bears swimming upstream, whitetail deer hitching rides on log bundles, a bobcat snoozing in a goose nest. On a recent morning, however, Mooney’s job was sheer grunt work.

Low flow conditions had dropped the river to a mere six feet deep in places. The water wasn’t deep enough to keep heavy log bundles afloat, and cedar needed at the DeArmond mill was mired on the river bottom.

Mooney backed up the Potlatch and made a run at a bundle to knock it loose. The impact jarred like a battering ram. “Hear that?” asked Mooney, listening to a grating noise. “That’s the bottom of the river. The propeller’s picking up rocks.”

A chill westerly wind riffled the water. Mooney’s hands are rough and red, but even in winter he eschews gloves.

Mooney grew up on a farm in Mica Flats, which he still helps his dad run. He trained as a machinist and worked at a factory and a mine before hiring on as a deckhand at Lafferty Transportation in 1982. The firm, founded in 1918, has had several owners. It’s now called North Idaho Maritime.

In a sign of the times, developer John Stone purchased the tugboat company and its marina last year. North Idaho Maritime is working to cultivate new lake business, so it can continue operating when the last two mills leave the waterfront, said General Manager John Condon.

No one wants the tugs to disappear, especially not the captains.

“Our work is a lifestyle, a calling,” Condon said. “It gets in your blood.”