spectr17
07-05-2003, 03:02 PM
New company is willing to be troubled
By Tim Renken, St. Louis Post-Dispatch
6/27/2003
Brad Peters' 32-foot inboard cruiser was hopelessly high and almost dry on the rocks of a barely-submerged dike just outside of Dardenne Slough on the Mississippi River's Alton Pool. On the other end of the heavy rope was the towboat of the Trouble On The Water Inc. salvage company.
Pat Riley was at the helm.
The rope got as taut as a bowstring. The twin 200-horse outboards roared and strained. Teeth clenched, especially the teeth of Justin Powell, 26, of St. Peters, who in the dark the evening before had crashed the $56,000 boat onto those rocks. And the aptly-named "River Dazed" isn't even his boat. He was just trying it out for a possible half-share purchase. The 32-foot inboard belongs to a friend, Peters, also of St. Peters, who was out of town and blissfully unaware of all this.
Riley's teeth were clenched, too. The St. Charles County sheriff's deputy moonlights as the president of a two-man salvage/tow operation, the only one within 300 miles of Alton Lake.
Riley, in a wet suit, had wedged rubber air bags under the cruiser. With employee Dave Nockles' operating the compressor, the bags had been inflated to lift the boat as much as possible.
A first effort to free the 32-foot Baja Cruiser ended with the snapping of a tow strap. The cruiser didn't budge but merely flopped over on the other side of its V-bottom. So Riley stuck another bag under it.
Another rope was attached and the straining began. Fighting the cruiser's 11,000 pounds, the jagged rocks, a 4-knot current and the wind, the towboat fairly roared. Finally the cruiser partially righted itself, lurched a foot, and broke free as the onlookers cheered, especially Powell sitting on the cruiser's deck.
For Riley and Nockels it was a victory, but pretty much just another day's work. As the only towing and salvage operators in one of the Midwest's busiest boating centers, they do this kind of thing all the time.
Often there's more at stake than a cruiser. Lives were at stake a few weekends ago when Riley was towing one disabled boat and got a call from a houseboat drifting helplessly in the channel above Grafton, Ill.
"I actually heard from two callers that this houseboat was out there and there was a towboat coming down," said Riley, a burly former DEA Task Force agent who developed a love of boating in the salt water around his native New York.
"By the time I got there, the tow was about two miles away. The people on the houseboat didn't know it, but they were about five minutes from being run over. Even if the tow pilot had seen them, he couldn't have stopped or maneuvered around them going downstream in that narrow channel."
With a big storm approaching on June 10, Nockels saved a man in a similar situation. The guy's jet-ski had quit in the channel at Mile 208.5.
"The storm was already hitting St. Louis County when Pat called and asked if I wanted to get wet," said Nockels, who lives on the river. "I was able to find him pretty quick. Fortunately, I could get both of us up on plane and we were able to get back to the harbor pretty fast with the wind coming up and lightning all around."
Riley said that Alton Pool, which is 40 miles long and has 15,000 recreational boats, desperately needed a towing/salvage service when he started his two-boat operation three years ago.
"On the typical summer weekend, most of those boats will be out on the lake, along with the commercial traffic," he said. "At the same time there will probably be one patrol boat from the Missouri Water Patrol on the lake and that's all. The Illinois DNR doesn't have a boat on the pool regularly and there is no Coast Guard boat here.
"And the Water Patrol can't do towing and it sure can't do salvage," he said. "Before we came along, towing was done by Good Samaritans, just one boater helping another. And what with the insurance companies worrying about liability, that system has gotten pretty iffy."
The harbors on Alton Lake, the state water patrols and police agencies now call on Trouble On The Water, Riley said. Weekends are frantic. And the operation's reputation has been spreading. They do contract work for national firms such as Sea Tow and BoatUS. They have gone as far east as Carlyle Lake and as far north as Hardin, Ill., to do salvage.
Riley wants to expand.
"There's a real need for this on Kentucky Lake and nearby Barkley Lake and the Ohio River," he said. "I'd like to develop something like Sea Tow or BoatUS, offering memberships to boaters as a kind of insurance.
His phone number is 1-866-BOAT TOW.
By Tim Renken, St. Louis Post-Dispatch
6/27/2003
Brad Peters' 32-foot inboard cruiser was hopelessly high and almost dry on the rocks of a barely-submerged dike just outside of Dardenne Slough on the Mississippi River's Alton Pool. On the other end of the heavy rope was the towboat of the Trouble On The Water Inc. salvage company.
Pat Riley was at the helm.
The rope got as taut as a bowstring. The twin 200-horse outboards roared and strained. Teeth clenched, especially the teeth of Justin Powell, 26, of St. Peters, who in the dark the evening before had crashed the $56,000 boat onto those rocks. And the aptly-named "River Dazed" isn't even his boat. He was just trying it out for a possible half-share purchase. The 32-foot inboard belongs to a friend, Peters, also of St. Peters, who was out of town and blissfully unaware of all this.
Riley's teeth were clenched, too. The St. Charles County sheriff's deputy moonlights as the president of a two-man salvage/tow operation, the only one within 300 miles of Alton Lake.
Riley, in a wet suit, had wedged rubber air bags under the cruiser. With employee Dave Nockles' operating the compressor, the bags had been inflated to lift the boat as much as possible.
A first effort to free the 32-foot Baja Cruiser ended with the snapping of a tow strap. The cruiser didn't budge but merely flopped over on the other side of its V-bottom. So Riley stuck another bag under it.
Another rope was attached and the straining began. Fighting the cruiser's 11,000 pounds, the jagged rocks, a 4-knot current and the wind, the towboat fairly roared. Finally the cruiser partially righted itself, lurched a foot, and broke free as the onlookers cheered, especially Powell sitting on the cruiser's deck.
For Riley and Nockels it was a victory, but pretty much just another day's work. As the only towing and salvage operators in one of the Midwest's busiest boating centers, they do this kind of thing all the time.
Often there's more at stake than a cruiser. Lives were at stake a few weekends ago when Riley was towing one disabled boat and got a call from a houseboat drifting helplessly in the channel above Grafton, Ill.
"I actually heard from two callers that this houseboat was out there and there was a towboat coming down," said Riley, a burly former DEA Task Force agent who developed a love of boating in the salt water around his native New York.
"By the time I got there, the tow was about two miles away. The people on the houseboat didn't know it, but they were about five minutes from being run over. Even if the tow pilot had seen them, he couldn't have stopped or maneuvered around them going downstream in that narrow channel."
With a big storm approaching on June 10, Nockels saved a man in a similar situation. The guy's jet-ski had quit in the channel at Mile 208.5.
"The storm was already hitting St. Louis County when Pat called and asked if I wanted to get wet," said Nockels, who lives on the river. "I was able to find him pretty quick. Fortunately, I could get both of us up on plane and we were able to get back to the harbor pretty fast with the wind coming up and lightning all around."
Riley said that Alton Pool, which is 40 miles long and has 15,000 recreational boats, desperately needed a towing/salvage service when he started his two-boat operation three years ago.
"On the typical summer weekend, most of those boats will be out on the lake, along with the commercial traffic," he said. "At the same time there will probably be one patrol boat from the Missouri Water Patrol on the lake and that's all. The Illinois DNR doesn't have a boat on the pool regularly and there is no Coast Guard boat here.
"And the Water Patrol can't do towing and it sure can't do salvage," he said. "Before we came along, towing was done by Good Samaritans, just one boater helping another. And what with the insurance companies worrying about liability, that system has gotten pretty iffy."
The harbors on Alton Lake, the state water patrols and police agencies now call on Trouble On The Water, Riley said. Weekends are frantic. And the operation's reputation has been spreading. They do contract work for national firms such as Sea Tow and BoatUS. They have gone as far east as Carlyle Lake and as far north as Hardin, Ill., to do salvage.
Riley wants to expand.
"There's a real need for this on Kentucky Lake and nearby Barkley Lake and the Ohio River," he said. "I'd like to develop something like Sea Tow or BoatUS, offering memberships to boaters as a kind of insurance.
His phone number is 1-866-BOAT TOW.