I just heard a pretty good sea story about an auditor and a tug skipper.

As usual the auditing company hired a guy with a ship background to audit a tugboat and they picked the wrong tug skipper to audit.

The auditor started judging the skipper by ship standards and the two of them butted heads and damned near came to blows. Tugs and ships are two entirely different animals and you can't judge a tug by ship standards.

Truth of the matter is if I ran a shipping company I would much rather have to use a tug skipper to run a ship than a ship's captain to skipper a tug from a plain 'git 'er done' standpoint.

Still, the two of them went round and round and the skipper's argument held a LOT more water than the auditor's did. The skipper pointed out that he had more important things to do while negotiating, say, the Houston Ship Channel than walk away from the wheel to fill out meaningless paperwork.

Of course the tug skipper was right. With about maybe 50 feet to spare on either side it would take a matter of a couple of seconds for the tug and barge to leave the channel and run aground. He had to pay full attention to what he was doing. There was no time to play paperwork games.

Ship captains that come ashore are in demand because of their real and/or percieved knowledge of all things nautical. While most of them do have a decent base of knowledge, they often forget that tugs are not ships and with a small crew can not be run the same way.

Anyway, I can't post accurately what went on between the two, I know the tug skipper involved and I can say reasonably certain that hilarity ensued and that the poor company representative that was stuck in the middle.

Still, the line in the story that made me laugh the hardest was "The skipper told me (the cargo mate) to simmer down and keep my temper. I did and the auditor went into the tug wheelhouse."

He continued.

"About 20 minutes later I could hear those two going at it it from the deck of the barge I thought that the skipper was probably going to knock him cold and throw him over the side!"

Knowing the skipper I can say it must have been a real donnybrook!

To find out why the blog is pink just cut and paste this: http://piccoloshash.blogspot.com/2009/12/my-feminine-side-blog-stays-pink.html NO ANIMALS WERE HARMED IN THE WRITING OF TODAY'S ESSAY