Tour teaches some nautical terminilogy

"Well," said Ray Skelton, "if you want to know what things are called on a Great Lakes vessel, let's take a walk — stem to stern."

The vessel under our scrutiny, and soon under our feet, was the William A. Irvin, constructed in 1938 and at one time the "Queen of the Silver Stackers" of the U.S. Steel Great Lakes Fleet. Today the boat is permanently docked in Duluth as a tourist attraction.

Our tour-guide-for-a-morning, Mr. Skelton, is the director of environmental and governmental affairs for the Duluth Seaway Port Authority. He's also a one-time sonar operator on U.S. Navy submarines, and he had a long career sailing on the Great Lakes. When it comes to identifying "what's that?" on boats, we are in good hands with Mr. Skelton.

As we continued our stem (the foremost part of a vessel's hull) to stern (the aftermost part) walk alongside the Irvin, Mr. Skelton pointed out the grocery basket, a pretty good sized metal box that was hanging over the side of the boat from a line. And this is where things started to get complicated, because a line, to the ignorant soul unschooled in nautical terminology, might appear to be just a rope or a cable. Not that a boat doesn't have a rope; it does — but it's made of wire. At any rate, Mr. Skelton went on to explain that the grocery basket actually was used to take groceries aboard … along with the occasional crew member rendered incapable by spirits of finding his way on board by any other means. This was before Mr. Skelton's time, of course.

Mr. Skelton stopped. "Ah-ha!" he said, pointing upward. "This is the hawsepipe." It was a metal pipe near the boat's bow. "The anchor chain would run through here. This where the term hawsepiper comes from: The anchor chain runs all the way from the bottom to the top through the hawsepipe, and a guy who worked his way up to become an officer was called a hawsepiper. If you were an officer, you were either an academy grad or a hawsepiper." Mr. Skelton, the four-year submarine sonar operator who started a 20-year career on the Lakes as a deckhand and advanced to become a captain, is a hawsepiper.

Still alongside the Irvin, he pointed out that the anchor and chain can be called ground tackle. Dropping the anchor can be called going on the hook, or hitting the parking lot. Anchor chain, our guide said, is measured in shots, 15 fathoms per shot, six feet per fathom. A standard chain issued on the Lakes is five shots.

We went aboard. We walked on the deck. Any surface you walk on is the deck, never a floor, even in the staterooms. We climbed ladders — never stairs. We were careful not to graze the overheads — never ceilings. We avoided running into bulkheads — never walls.

On the main deck, marveling at the deck that stretched the length of a football field from front to back — oops! — from fore to aft, we examined the hatch covers, which cover the holds where the Irvin's typical cargo of 14,000 tons of iron ore was loaded. The hatches are simply too big and heavy for the crew to move manually, so the boat came equipped with a mechanical hatch-cover lift, known to all as the iron deckhand.

We breezed through the pilothouse and marveled at the now-ancient navigational technology there. Mr. Skelton pointed out the charts (they look for all the world like maps) and explained that vessels are still required to have up-to-date charts even in this era of communications via electronics and navigation by satellite.

We climbed down, down, down by a series of ladders and poked our way through a hatch (not a door) and found ourselves in an area undisturbed by tourists. We were in the boiler room, barely cleaned up from the day the coal-burning Irvin steamed into Port for the last time. Right where the engine-room crew would go off duty still stand two wash basins, ready to help sluice away the coal dust from the engine-room crew, the black gang.

Our tour took us aft. We could look through an opening in the deck and see the propeller, or the screw. Mr. Skelton's guest hesitated a moment before asking, "That looks like a rudder to me. What do you call it?"

He thought a moment. "That," he said, "would be the rudder."