Nick Stama might just have the most enviable commute in Chicago.
Home is exactly three boats away from his office, a retired New York State Police boat docked at Belmont Harbor.
From mid-April through mid-November, the 28-year-old is on call 24/7 to jump-start speedboats, deliver fuel to boats and salvage sunken vessels. It’s the perfect job for a man who, by age 16, had saved up $5,000 for his first vehicle: a 21-foot Larson powerboat.
“I’ll always be on the water,” Stama said.
From the vessels that push 9,000-ton commercial barges to services that assist recreational boaters, marine towing is poised for a growth spurt — as long as it can attract enough young employees like Stama.
Almost 80 percent of Chicago’s lakefront harbors are filled by potential marine towing customers, and the federal government predicts steady growth in employment opportunities for water transportation.
But it has proven difficult to steer young people to towing, where jobs require rigorous training, and are physically demanding and fairly isolating. Across the maritime industry, a typical captain is older than 50 and approaching retirement.
Stama is one of the youngest assist-towing captains on Lake Michigan, but his boss is seeking others to ease the burden. Community colleges have added marine towing programs, and companies are offering tuition assistance and making their presence known at high schools, maritime academies and veteran job fairs.
Without aggressive recruitment, a maritime employment shortage could stymie the trade, said Capt. Sean Tortora, an associate professor of marine transportation at the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy in Kings Point, N.Y.
“It certainly puts a strain on the industry,” Tortora said. “If they don’t have the manpower, they can’t run the boats.”
‘A numbers game’
The job description for assist-towboat captain includes pretty much everything but a regular schedule.
Stama might spend a morning dragging 80-foot boats from open water to a marina. He might spend the afternoon cleaning up spilled pollutants.
About once a week, he salvages boats that sink at the dock or puts his diving certification to use untangling dock lines from propellers. And he regularly tows boats with busted engines across Lake Michigan, spending upward of 12 hours making the 38-mile trip from Chicago to New Buffalo, Mich.
On sunny days cooled only by blustery winds, the two radios strapped to the ceiling of his towboat drone endlessly. The Chicago Air and Water Show, Fourth of July, Memorial Day and the nights of Navy Pier’s semiweekly fireworks, Stama said, are his most lucrative days.
“It’s a numbers game. The more boats out, the bigger chance we have of going out, too,” he said, recalling one 26-hour shift. “You can’t exactly say, ‘Give me a couple hours, I need a nap.’ If you’re the closest guy, you’re the closest guy.”
Conditions that snag and strand boaters tend to complicate Stama’s job, too. It can be hours before he locates a vessel on the lake if the air is thick with fog or rain, wind keeps relocating his customers or their navigational lights die along with the boat’s battery.
Then, on Lake Michigan’s unwelcoming days, Stama just as easily spends hours upon hours on his houseboat waiting for a call.
Last month, the call came from Calvin Oosse, whose engine shut down just after his powerboat pulled out of its slip at Burnham Harbor.
Because he had only paid a minimum membership fee to TowBoatU.S., Stama’s employer, the incident cost Oosse $260 and an hourlong wait.
Still, Oosse, 43, of Logan Square, said he’s glad he took experienced boaters’ advice and paid for towing insurance when he bought his first boat, “Bear Necessities,” in September. A tow from the Chicago Police Department’s marine unit runs a flat fee of $500, a bill matched by most other commercial towing options.
“There are just lots of little things that can go wrong on a boat,” Oosse said. “You just don’t know. On the highways, there’s always cops (and) other cars … Going on Lake Michigan, yeah, there’s a lot of other boats, but they can’t always help you.”
Need for assist towing
If you’re a boater, jet skier or sailor cruising the Chicago shoreline, chances are you’re in Rich Lenardson’s territory.
Lenardson’s 10 TowBoatU.S. franchises form an aquatic AAA covering Lake Michigan from Wisconsin’s southern border, across Illinois and Indiana up to Grand Traverse Bay, Mich. His region is part of the national company’s network of more than half a million boaters who pay a yearly membership for services like tows, fuel deliveries and jump-starts.
In the 1980s when the Coast Guard started responding only to emergencies, TowBoatU.S. was one of a handful of corporate, owner-operated chains that jumped in to fill that gap, according to Jeffrey Sanders, who runs six maritime schools across the country, including one in Chicago.
“There’s still people doing it, little bits and pieces, but predominantly the industry has gone over to a couple of larger companies that are nationwide,” Sanders said.
In the decades since the Coast Guard stopped towing recreational vehicles, he said, business has boomed.
“It has grown enormously,” Sanders said, “by leaps and bounds.”
In Chicago, the police marine unit still regularly provides tows to broken-down and gasless vessels, Officer Kevin Williams said.
Williams, a 16-year-veteran of the marine unit, said local assist towing has swelled in recent years, particularly with the 2012 addition of 31st Street Harbor, now home to 391 vessels.
According to Chicago Park District data, the number of available harbor slots has grown by 510 over the past five years while the number of vessels occupying the city’s harbors has dipped slightly, from 4,493 in 2011 to 4,341 this year.
Even though overall occupancy across Chicago harbors has dropped 11 percent since 2011, a jump in peer-sharing vessels has actually enticed more people than ever to Lake Michigan, said Bill Russell, a trainer at Chicago Maritime School in Portage Park. But, Russell maintained the assist-towing industry is still a niche.
Five seasons ago, Lenardson said, his fleet of four boats served about 200 members. Membership has since quadrupled, he said. In the Chicago area, his crew now numbers 16 captains and handles around 1,500 cases total over the summer. In 2015, he said, the company responded to 250 calls lakewide over the Fourth of July weekend.
Some boaters, like Chuck Kvasnicka, 65, of the West Loop, prefer to fend for themselves.
“It’s a consideration, if your boat is stranded, when you should call a tow service or when you should not,” said Kvasnicka, who owns a 38-foot Carver Santego.
A recreational boater for more than 20 years, Kvasnicka said he’s never paid for a towboat membership. Instead, when he and other friends, yacht clubbers and Chicago Sail and Power Squadron members run aground or out of fuel, they help each other out.
“I’ve towed my fair share of people,” Kvasnicka said. “All the fees and licenses and expenses you put out over the whole course of a year — maybe each one of them individually is really a good deal … I have no desire to waste that money.”
Safety courses can cushion boaters from accidents just as well as towing insurance, he said.
But Stama believes towing insurance is a no-brainer.
“Boats are always going to break down, and they’re always going to need assistance,” he said. “I don’t see the demand going away.”
Sea change in industry
Despite this swell in demand, a noticeable shortage of workers under 42 is being felt across the maritime industry — including commercial inland cargo towing, a $70 billion industry, according to the U.S. Department of Transportation.
Recent industry surveys show the maritime labor market is overwhelmingly male, on average 55 years old and approaching retirement.
Since 2007 when the Transportation Department launched efforts to shift cargo from interstates onto expanding marine highways, the worker shortage has only become more pronounced, said Tortora, of the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy.
His students used to spend four rigorous years preparing for a lucrative career serving as deep-sea ship officers. But now that only about 170 U.S. commercial ocean-going ships are left — down from a peak of 1,500 in 1955, Tortora said — many of those young mariners are being recruited to operate the 6,000 and counting inland tugs and barges.
There, too, demand for maritime workers still outpaces the availability of qualified mariners, Tortora said. And the mariner shortage won’t shrink soon, since it takes around a decade for a maritime academy student to graduate, secure a position and garner enough on-deck experience to captain a commercial tugboat.
Because they can carry only six passengers at most and not several thousand pounds of steel or concrete, assist-towboat captains require much less training. The difference between assist and industrial towing, as described by Tortora, is like the difference between becoming a law clerk and passing the bar.
Maritime instructor Russell said few licensed captains in Chicago take the basic course and exams to become assist-towboat operators. More often, they want to further their nautical knowledge or make money as a water taxi, scuba charter or fishing boat captains.
Even once a captain is credentialed and hired, it’s not an easy lifestyle, Lenardson said.
“One thing I can tell you about the maritime industry: It’s not an 8-5 job,” Lenardson said. “It’s before daylight to way after dark — and sometimes it’s straight through 24 hours … that’s one thing that scares young men away.”
He said he’s looking to bring down the average age of his team, whose youngest captain is Lenardson’s 21-year-old son. Stama is the second youngest, and most of the rest are retired law enforcement officers or charter boat captains over 40.
“It’s very hard to find guys who are young and who are competent,” Lenardson said. “When you do find one who’s competent, it’s almost impossible to keep them.”
Whereas commercial towboat captains can make upward of six figures, TowBoatU.S. captains are paid either an hourly wage of $18 to $28 or a weekly commission that tends to fall between $3,000 and $8,000 per week from July to October — without benefits.
Jack Manley, owner of Chicago Marine Towing, said his 160-year-old family business has also failed to attract young captains.
He said most of his captains and deckhands are around his age: 72. Manley’s youngest employee is 56.
“All the experienced guys are old (and) now it’s getting harder and harder to get operators,” Manley said. “We have trouble hiring young guys.”
From Manley’s hyperlocal sliver of the industry to massive commercial tugboat operations, the quality of life for a mariner is a long-standing obstacle to recruitment. The male-dominant field has yet to draw women, and rigorous schedules often keep captains on the water for long stretches of time — which makes it difficult to entice and retain 20-somethings who want to start a family, Tortora said.
“That’s a hard sell. It would take a special type of person,” Tortora said. “That’s going to be the long pole in the tent.”
Twitter @MarionRenault
