A Big Splash on the Waterfront

On Saturday (Feb. 27) in the industrial area of Northwest Portland, Gunderson Marine launched the longest barge they’ve ever built — 490 lengthwise feet of red-and-black steel.

The crowd of several hundred yelled with delight and wonder as the huge oceangoing barge hit the water with a gigantic splash, then rocked back and forth impressively before settling into the Willamette River. Tugboats promptly pushed the barge to a dock where finishing touches will be added before its maiden voyage.

The Hopper Barge EMI 2400 hits the water.

I was a little giddy as husband John and I arrived at Gunderson Saturday afternoon for the event. I grew up in the desert Southwest, in a city where the Rio Grande flowed above-ground only on the few days a year after a big rain. Boats and ships were foreign concepts to me before I began living in Portland.

Video of the Barge Launch:       QuickTime Windows Media

I knew of the city’s past, as one of the ports where Henry J. Kaiser built Liberty Ships during World War II and later as a center for rehabbing vessels. But by the 1980s the shipbuilding activity in Portland dwindled, and I never have had occasion to observe what remains.

How did I end up at a barge launch, you ask? Lately I’ve been studying ways to meld my personal interests in all things Portland, and in the new world of online journalism, with my experience as a print reporter & editor and as a medical/science writer.

(Or at least that’s what I tell myself when I’m trolling through Facebook or Twitter or somewhere else online, reading posts and following web links that sometimes seem designed to keep me in my bathrobe all day long ….)

Anyway, on one of those gray, gray Portland mornings, I stumbled onto a Port of Portland Facebook page about a series of public events intended to familiarize people with the Portland Harbor. (Kudos to the PR person who thought of that one, btw.) Come on down to the barge launching, they said, and we did.

Gunderson, which operates in a long collection of buildings that stretches along NW Front Avenue, northerly from the Fremont Bridge, apparently hasn’t made a “real” ship since the 1970s. But it makes a lot of railroad cars, and barges. (To the builders, there must be a distinction between a “ship” and a “barge” — maybe that one carries passengers and the other cargo?)

The behemoth they launched Saturday, though, was the barge of barges in their portfolio — so huge that they had to assemble the cargo hoppers in halves, then weld them together. Like gigantic Legos, the hoppers and hull pieces were connected together riverside, lifted by two huge stationary cranes that the workers affectionately call Bonnie and Clyde (really!)

Clyde

With the hull finished, the whole thing was perched atop what looked like pieces of railroad track and big hunks of wood, held fast by a webwork of steel cables. To launch, they just had to cut one small piece of cable and all the rest came loose.

I met the guys who operate Bonnie and Clyde Saturday, but can’t tell you their names, or those of the other proud Gunderson employees in hard hats who answered my questions as they kept the crowd inbounds. The reason: As I walked the line between spectator and journalist I teetered in limbo sometimes.

(i.e., I didn’t bring a notebook, and couldn’t type fast enough on my iTouch to record any names before moving along, and forgot to ask their last names anyway–something that never would have happened in the old days of newspaper journalism…. There’s a lesson there somewhere, but I’m not sure what it is.)

Jackie-Uh-Oh

Aside from the conversation, and the opportunity to wear my $3 Jackie-O sunglasses and my DayAtAscot style hat, and the memorable splash of a few hundred tons(?) of metal in the water, the most fun part of the day was chatting with members of the Clan Macleay Pipe Band about their wonderfully weird avocation.

Apparently, they show up at every single barge launch at Gunderson.

Marching into Gunderson

And the Clan has been together long enough that I saw one of them who has six or seven stripes on his sleeve — each one represents 5 years in the band.

Even though bagpipes are my least favorite instrument, there’s something charming about a bunch of men and women willing to put on itchy skirts, funny hats and furry garments redolent of the previous owner’s perspiration, just to play “Amazing Grace” for a bunch of squirmy kids and welder wannabes.

Clan Macleay drummers

As drummer Victoria said, (there! I did get one name!) the Clan probably qualifies as weird because they also play every year at the Naked Bike Ride. And she knew about the upcoming Portland Iditarod Race too.

More on that later. Stay tuned.

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