A Peek at Life Aboard the Old Cement Boat ‘St Marys Challenger’
July 22, 08 by TheFleetIf you're new here, you may want to subscribe to our RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
By Susan Bence | Source: WUWM Milwaukee Public Radio
For months, cement has been delivered to Milwaukee for the now-almost-completed Marquette Interchange freeway project. Most of that cement arrived aboard the St. Mary’s Challenger. It’s the oldest working boat on the Great Lakes.
Even to the untrained eye, this oil-fueled century-old boat is magnificent. It’s one of only two Great Lakes vessels still powered by a steam engine.
I had hoped for a gangplank, but we climb aboard up a tall ladder. We meet Captain George Herdina when we not too gracefully climb aboard.
Herdina’s dream was to work on large Great Lakes vessels and he’s been living that dream for 45 years. The quiet, almost shy, man calls the St. Mary’s his little condo in the water.
Right now Herdina’s little condo is unloading 85 hundred tons of cement powder. They pick it up across the lake in Charlevoix, Michigan.
There’s not a speck of cement dust in the air as the cargo makes its way into the storage silo on shore. Herdina says you just don’t mess with something that works so beautifully.
“If you look down the middle of the deck, all those hatches, there’s cargo holds under all those hatches and then we have a conveyor belt running under the cargo hold, brings it up to the bucket elevator behind us and the bucket elevator brings it up to the air slide that will go over to the dock,” Herdina says.
The St. Mary’s can make about a dozen runs a month, if bad weather doesn’t slow it down.
Herdina heads a crew of 23 men and one woman.
“Like having 24 children, a big large family,” Herdina says.
Most of the crew works four hours on, eight hours off.
“So the people who are on now, they’re off until 8 tonight and so if we’re still at the dock, they can do what they want. Go uptown or whatever, you know,” Herdina says.
There’s one person who doesn’t work that schedule however. That’s the conveyorman. Herdina takes me below deck meet him. I spot a dusty bicycle parked outside the control room.
“Oh he uses that to ride up and down the tunnel when he has maintenance to do on certain things. So he cuts down his time that he’s not in the control room,” Herdina says.
We find 21-year-old Cameron inside the darkened, very hot control room. His job is to load and unload the cement. If you expected to see someone in a uniform, you’ll be surprised by Cameron’s running shorts, t-shirt, topped off with a bandana over his curly-haired head. The tall, outwardly somber converyman stands, focused on the intricate panel. There are perks to compensate for his long, tedious hours.
“Yeah, I have my own room,” Cameron says.
Cameron’s years younger than most of the St. Mary’s crew and he’s only been here about four months. He’s still adjusting.
“Being away from family’s hard. I don’t have too much social life that I care about,” Cameron says.
I ask what attracted him to this work.
“The chance that you could work on a ship with not a lot of overhead or bills. And when you get home you have a nice big chunk of change, you can invest it. Kind of nice,” Cameron says.
As we leave the St. Mary’s, Captain Herdina sounds wistful. He says it’s getting harder to attract people Cameron’s age to work here.
“A lot of people my age in the 60s that are still out here, but there’s not a lot of young people coming into the business. It’s too confining for a lot of people. A lot of people can’t handle this,” Herdina says.
Herdina says he toys with the idea of retiring, of spending more time with his wife and kids, now all grown up.
I ask what he’ll miss when he does retire.
“Just the guys, I imagine. Camaraderie with everybody. It’s….they’re like brothers, right?” Herdina says.
It’s July now and I’ve checked back with Captain George Herdina. The St. Mary’s is just about to deliver another load of cement to Milwaukee, but Herdina tells me, Cameron won’t be at the control panel. He left the crew for good. Herdina’s disappointed. He joined his first crew at age 19 and still can’t imagine a better life.
