A working man’s boat

Alex Coolman

A gleaming white hull, a teak deck with a lustrous finish, rippling sails

made out of some preposterously expensive fabric. In the nautical world,

these are the elements that are often thought necessary for a “beautiful”

boat.

But Chuck South’s boat looks a little different. It appears more like a

corroded collision between Tom Sawyer’s raft, an industrial crane and a

Mack truck. The strange contraption sports a chugging silver smokestack,

a variety of greasy winches, miscellaneous barrels full of heavy chain

and a couple acetylene and oxygen tanks for an underwater cutting torch.

The whole thing is ochre and brown with oxidation and grime. If there

were boats in “Blade Runner,” they might have looked like this.

It is beautiful? Some people probably don’t think so, but South loves it

to death. If you understand the function of all the machinery on the

boat, he suggested, it’s hard not to find it pretty.

South runs the South Mooring Co., one of a handful of businesses in

Newport Beach dedicated to maintaining the moorings that some boat owners

use to tie up their vessels. The company does other kinds of work around

the harbor, such as driving pilings into the muddy bottom and helping to

anchor dredging equipment in place.

For all these types of tasks, South’s ugly beaut is perfectly adapted.

The towers that rise up from its platform in an A-frame can be used for a

variety of tasks, from dragging up the engine bodies and propellers that

are often used as mooring anchors to hammering pilings with heavy

weights. Hydraulic rods called “spuds” on the sides of the boat can be

sunk to the bay bottom, anchoring the boat in place.

“The idea is to give us a stable, stationary work platform when the boat

is lifting objects that weigh several tons,” South said.

Not every job requires all of the tools on the boat, but South likes

having his options open. For certain kinds of work, the platform expands

like something from a box of Legos, with extra equipment doubling its

size. At other times, the boat can go to work in a more stripped-down

form.

“It’s sort of like a fishing boat,” South explained. “You keep adapting

it for different jobs. With a hydraulic drill on the front, you can do

core sampling.”

Negotiating all the variables, from a piloting standpoint, is difficult.

Where the pleasure cruiser mainly has to contend with a steering wheel

and a throttle, South has to worry about delicate shifts in weight, the

variable consistency of the harbor bottom and the challenge of dealing

with objects sunk in several feet of murky water.

“There’s a couple of guys on the harbor that do this work, but there’s

not that many of them,” South said. “It takes a lot of time to learn.”