Lot of life to live for tug called "Grandma"

It was love at first sight when the stubborn Irish gal met the 93-foot tug.

Andrea McDonald was on the water near Poulsbo, working a night patrol with the Coast Guard Auxiliary.

That's when she saw her: that classic wooden boat with the swooping black hull and round white wheelhouse perched on top.

"She was the most beautiful darn old tugboat I'd ever seen," McDonald said. "I just fell in love with her on the spot."

That was five years ago. Saturday, McDonald proudly motored the tug she's owned and captained for the past year — and which serves as home for herself and five of her children — from Port Orchard to the Seattle waterfront for the annual Maritime Festival.

No, McDonald didn't enter the Excaliber in the festival's famed tugboat races. "Grandma," as McDonald affectionately calls her boat ("because she's 100 years old and she's a smart old girl") wasn't quite ready for racing yet.

But Grandma did take part in the tugboat parade — a fitting way to celebrate her centennial, McDonald figured.

Plus, there was another important thing taking place on board: a reunion marking one of the tug's biggest claims to fame locally. From about 1969 to 1973, the boat was called the Langston Hughes, captained by Paul Bellesen Sr., one of the few black captains then. Bellesen started a program on the tugboat, teaching maritime skills to kids from different races and backgrounds — urban, suburban and rural.

Bellesen died last month, and about a dozen of those former kids reunited on the boat Saturday to remember him and catch up.

"Our looks are different now, but our souls are not," marveled Bill Martorano, 50, of Sunnyvale, Calif., who was a kid from rural Woodinville when he first boarded the Langston Hughes. "History should honor what Paul Bellesen did here. He welded together a group of people who otherwise never would've crossed paths."

"It's my boat"

McDonald's love affair with wooden boats began around 2002, when she found herself divorced, with no car, no job, little money and six kids.

She saw a flyer for the U.S. Coast Guard Auxiliary and decided to join. It was as a volunteer, but the free training in maritime skills led to a job as harbor master, then marina manager.

She took to the wooden boats she saw — they were classic, warm, solid, not like those "modern cold pieces of fiberglass."

For years after she first saw that tug in Poulsbo, she would sail out several times each summer just to look at her.

She pounced when the boat came up for sale about a year ago. But someone else had offered first.

"I guarantee you it's my boat," she insisted to the yacht broker.

Finally — after two more attempts, deals by others that fell through and selling almost everything she owned — the boat was hers.

"I think she chose me that night" more than five years ago, said McDonald, 43, who's also worked as a foot-ferry captain and yacht painter. "You tell an old girl how beautiful she is, they tend to like you and follow you home."

McDonald began looking into her boat's history. She was built in Vancouver, B.C., by Wallace Shipyards and between staid stints pulling barges, there was this wild interlude: In Mexico, she towed salt barges.

But "somewhere in there she was towing more than salt on those barges and got busted," McDonald said, laughing. "Old Grandma was running drugs."

In the past year, McDonald has been tracking down Bellesen's old crew — kids in the program who spent almost every weekend for several years on board, learning how to operate the ship, from wheelhouse to engine room.

Bellesen "became like a second father to me," said Don Wilcox, 52, of Seattle, who came aboard the Langston Hughes as an 11-year-old from the Central Area. "Through him, I could see there were greater possibilities for my life."

"It was a home away from home," said Bellesen's son, Paul Bellesen Jr., 50, of Poulsbo, who's now a captain with Washington State Ferries. "We were just family."

Functioning ship

McDonald, who's been nicknamed "Tugboat Andie" by her foot-ferry passengers, still has a lot of work to do on the old tug.

Between the rain and only herself to paint the boat, it's been slow going.

She plans to continue to live on board with her family, go to Alaska next summer, get some small towing jobs, and maybe, eventually, set up Grandma as a training ship for kids again.

At one point, someone had suggested turning the boat into a bed-and-breakfast. That makes McDonald indignant.

"She's a functioning ship," she said. "She may be 100, but she has a lot more to do in her life."

Janet I. Tu: 206-464-2272 or jtu@seattletimes.com