The View from a Drawbridge

I’ve been a bridgetender for 25 years. I’ve operated 9 bridges [6 bascule bridges, 2 swing bridges (one pivot type and one gate type), and 1 vertical lift bridge]. I’ve also worked on waterways with and without currents. I’m fairly certain that that’s a record in general. I know it’s a record for a female bridge operator. I only tell you this to establish that I know whereof I speak.

During my career, I’ve opened my bridges for at least a hundred  thousand vessels, and the vast majority of them have been sailboats. Most captains have been a joy to work with. Some are new to boating and are eager to learn the proper protocols, and I’m always happy to work with them as well.

And then you have a very tiny percentage who fall into three other groups:

• They have no idea that they’re doing anything wrong.
• They’re unsure where to find out what they need to know.
• They simply don’t care.

I hope this blog post will assist the first two groups. There’s no helping the third group. For the sake of all of us, may the sailboat gods keep them from putting themselves or anyone else in grave danger.

I have to say that May is my least favorite month for bridgetending, because a lot of people have bought their first sailboat in the previous month or two, and naturally they’re very excited to take it out on the water for the first time. So excited, in fact, that many of them have not bothered to purchase the proper safety equipment or learn the rules of the road, so to speak.

I don’t know how they manage to get away with this, because here in the State of Washington, at least, they’re required to get a Washington State Boater Education Card. That process should teach you the basics. There are online courses, so I suppose you could pay someone else to take it for you. I have no idea, to be honest. That would be foolhardy, though. In fairness, it might just be that some people don’t retain information well. Other people probably just learn the bare minimum to get the card, and don’t take it seriously.

I’m always astounded at how many people are willing to spend a couple hundred grand on a sailboat, and then they don’t bother to take at least a basic sailing course, so they don’t know their port from their starboard, don’t know who gets the right-of-way, or which side of the channel marker they should be on. None of that is my business, but when it comes to their interactions with drawbridges, here’s what I wish I could tell every boater so that they’ll be properly prepared.

Let’s start before you even depart from the dock.

Now, when you are heading out on the water, one assumes you’ve looked at the charts and know whether or not you’ll be passing through a drawbridge. Charts will give you handy information such as the vertical clearance of the bridge under normal, non-flood conditions and the bridge’s actual name. Don’t rely on Google Maps or, even worse, old Rand McNally paper versions your father got from the gas station.

If you determine you’ll be passing under a drawbridge, your next step is to figure out if you may require an opening from that drawbridge. To make that determination, you must first know something very important about your vessel: its air draft. Your air draft is how much of your vessel is above the waterline. Don’t

I am pleading with you. KNOW YOUR AIR DRAFT. Don’t guess. Don’t have delusions of grandeur. Adding a few feet to your mast does not make you more attractive to the ladies. Actually knowing it, however makes you beloved by all bridgetenders regardless of orientation.

To get this information, don’t read the specifications off the shipping manifest and think your vessel is that tall. A heck of a lot of your hull sits below the waterline. Also, don’t think your mast height is your air draft. You still have some deck to account for. No. The way to measure your air draft is to run a line up to the top your mast. Then measure the length that line. Then, measure from the bottom of your mast to the waterline. Add the two numbers together, and you have your air draft. Do you want to keep your vessel in one piece? Then this information is worth having.

The reason it is important for you to know your air draft is that every sailboat who has ever lost a mast because they’ve crashed it into something has said, “I thought I’d fit under.”

I’m pleading with you because it also benefits all of us. The thing that makes me want to tear my hair out every day is that easily half of the sailboats I have opened for over the years did not actually need openings. They just thought they did. That’s lot of wasted time for you, me, and everyone else.

I know. I know. From water level, looking up your mast at the underside of a bridge, it looks scary close. But you can trust the charts (providing it’s not flooding) as to how much clearance the center of the span has during the waterway’s highest level. And you can definitely trust the channel marker on the bridge’s pier protection system because it will tell you what the clearance is at that exact moment in time, which is most likely even more than that listed on the chart.

If the waterway is calm, add two feet to your air draft number, and if that’s less than the bridge’s vertical clearance, you’ll be fine, despite how it may look to you. If the waterway is choppy, add 4 feet. If the waterway is rougher than that, you shouldn’t be out on it in the first place, now should you? And remember, most bridges are curved, so stick to the center of the span for the listed height.

Yes, it’s scary at first, going under a bridge, but you’ll get used to it. And you’ll be saving yourself time, you’ll be reducing wear and tear on the bridge, and preventing gridlock on the roadway and pollution from the idling cars. In addition, the bridge operator won’t be irritated, the cyclists and pedestrians won’t be cursing, and peace will guide our planet. At least for the next few minutes. These are all good things, aren’t they?

Okay, wait a minute. You haven’t even left the dock yet. Let’s assume you’ve determined that yes, your course will take you past a drawbridge, and yes, you’ll require an opening from said drawbridge. The next step, and believe me, this is a step that you definitely do not want to skip, is to determine if you’ll actually be able to get an opening from that drawbridge when you want one.

If you’re passing through that drawbridge, or any drawbridge for the first time, you should review the 33 CFR Part 117 – Drawbridge Operations Regulations. CFR stands for the Code of Federal Regulations, and Part 117 is basically the Holy Grail of drawbridges. Part A is the general operating requirements for all drawbridges in the US, and Part B contains specific information for individual drawbridges.

In there, if you look up the specific drawbridge you’ll be passing through, you’ll see that bridge’s regular operating hours. Once you know those by heart, you won’t have to check the CFR again, although it doesn’t hurt to peek back every year or so to see if there have been updates. But even with that knowledge, even if you pass through a drawbridge every single day and feel like you know its routine like the back of your hand, you should still check the Local Notice to Mariners at least once a week, and for the purposes of this exercise, right before you leave the dock.

Why check the Local Notice to Mariners? Because, aside from a drawbridge’s regular closure periods, they’ll have temporary deviations from their schedules from time to time. These can be for things such as city marathons, fireworks, scheduled maintenance, street fairs, all sorts of things that were authorized in advance. Those things will show up in the Local Notice to Mariners, often weeks to months in advance, so you can plan accordingly. However, it never fails that during one of these Coast Guard authorized closures, I will get an outraged boater berating me on the radio that they absolutely have to be somewhere.

My thought process, which of course I never voice, is that lack of planning on your part does not constitute an emergency on mine. I’m not going to disrupt an event that hundreds of people are enjoying because you’re feeling inconvenienced. The world does not revolve around you. And it begs the question: If you’re in a hurry, why did you choose a sailboat as your mode of transport? But I digress.

It is also important to monitor channel 16 on your marine radio. That’s the emergency channel where the Coast Guard will announce, among other things, unexpected last minute closures of bridges. Because bridges do malfunction. We have no control over that. And sometimes we get protesters occupying the bridge who refuse to budge. Again, no control. Or there’s a car accident and we’re waiting for tow trucks.

So yes, drawbridges open upon request. Except when they don’t. And that’s a distinct possibility.

And did you notice that word request? Yes. Request. Not demand. The Code of Federal Regulations used to say “open on demand” but they’ve since softened that to request, and I appreciate that greatly, because I’m not a dog. I still get some boaters saying “I demand an opening.”

There’s nothing on earth that makes me want to make a boat paddle in circles for 10 minutes more than someone demanding me to open for them. But then, I’m a courteous person. They, clearly, are not.

But even the rude ones are better than those who float up to the bridge and then stop and do nothing. They just sit there as if we’re mind readers who know their intentions. Yeah, you might want an opening, but you’d be surprised how many people turn out to just sit there so they can take selfies with a bridge and then eventually go away, or are taking advantage of the bridge shadow while they have their lunch, or heaven only knows what else, so we can’t really make assumptions. And there’s nothing worse than opening a bridge, only to have a boat sail off in the opposite direction, causing you to do the closure of shame while everyone on the roadway is honking and cursing at you.

And yes, that did happen to me once or twice (okay, maybe more than twice) in my early days. No more. In my current defense, the CFR does say that each vessel that wants an opening must contact the bridge. But as with any contact, you don’t have to be rude.

Let’s take a moment to discuss the power dynamic of this relationship. I get it. You are, without a doubt, richer than I am. I am working, while you have the luxury of enjoying your sailing vessel on a sunny day. This, however, does not make you superior, or more intelligent, or in this case, more powerful.

When you ask for an opening, I will do everything in my power to accommodate you, because that is a part of my job. But it’s a smaller part than you realize. In fact, it falls way below my primary role, which is ensuring the safety of the traveling public. Yes, you are part of that traveling public. But so are the drivers, pedestrians, cyclists, tourists and residents in the area. And in order to ensure their safety, many factors come into play. In no particular order, I’ll list just a few of them that spring to mind as I write this.

Every time I get an opening request, I have to ask myself, if I open at this moment:

• Is there the possibility of crushing someone to death?
• Is there a possibility that a person, or a mode of transportation, will fall from the rising span, causing injury or death?
• Is there the possibility that a car will get startled, slam on the brakes and/or crash into someone or something?
• Is there a possibility that something that someone has accidentally or intentionally left on the movable span, such as a rental scooter or a glass bottle or a car battery would fall and hurt someone?
• Would I be delaying an emergency vehicle in the immediate vicinity is who headed my way, thus causing death or destruction?
• Would I be breaking up a funeral procession?
• Would it add to gridlock unnecessarily because I just had an opening 3 minutes ago, thus causing road rage, extra delays and/or various car crashes a mile away?
• Would it be less efficient to the traffic flow of the city than waiting 10 minutes or less?
• Would it cause a potential navigational snarl that could easily be avoided by waiting 10 minutes or less?
• Would it be less efficient than waiting 3 minutes for another vessel to catch up to you so that I can do one opening rather than two, thus causing fewer disruptions to traffic?
• Would it cause an old or disabled person, or someone pushing a baby carriage, to hear the warning signals and possibly panic and injure themselves, when waiting a moment or two would avoid that?
• Would it cause damage to the bridge, thus depriving the community of a functioning bridge for an extended period of time?

Bottom line: You can demand all you want. But I am the one who grants you an opening, based on all the factors mentioned above, and probably many more. You can’t see everything that’s going on from the waterline. The world does not revolve around you. I’m doing transportation triage up here. You may not think of me as a professional, but I am, and like it or not, I’m what you’ve got, so your courtesy and patience is appreciated when you request an opening.

Having said that, we may not even be having a conversation. And in fact, if all goes well, we shouldn’t even have to have one. If you’ve done all your homework above, you’ll have learned  that one of the ways that you can signal bridges is via horn signal. Now, you can get some good, loud air horns from Amazon for less than 20 bucks. And they’re important safety equipment to have. You’d be amazed how often boaters have claimed their air horns have run out of air or they don’t have one, or some other lame excuse that I don’t buy for a second. You spent several hundred grand on a boat and you left the dock without a good way to signal for help? Really? The Coast Guard would be interested in hearing that.

Anyway, most bridges, but not all, prefer to be signaled by horn. A good, loud air horn. Not a kazoo. Not something that sounds like the Road Runner. Not (and I swear to God, this happened to me once) a conch shell. Something we can actually hear.

The CFR discusses the proper horn signals to use to signal a bridge. A long, then a short blast for most bridges. We will then respond with the same if we can open, and will respond with 5 short blasts if we can’t. But also check the CFR for individual bridges that are close together, because in those cases, they have different horn signals for opening requests, to avoid confusion.

Now, there is a sort of a bridge culture from one area to the next. Some bridges greatly prefer to be contacted by radio. Sometimes they are so high up, or there’s so much traffic or machinery noise, or the acoustics are such that  they can’t hear your horn. In any case, unless you’ve been told otherwise by a bridge operator of that particular bridge, I’d try the horn signal first.

If you haven’t gotten a response after two attempts, only then would I try contacting them by radio. The marine radio channels they monitor should be visibly posted. Personally, I discourage radio contact as much as possible, because you have to remember that other people need to use that channel as well. In the summer, when multiple vessels are attempting to contact multiple bridges, and the ferries and the locks are also attempting to communicate on the same channel, it can be quite problematic, and if one person is trying to say, “Abort approach! I’ve got a child on the span and I can’t raise the bridge!” and 5 other people are talking over them, it’s a bit of a disaster. So if you insist on using the radio, make it short and sweet. And don’t claim to be using it only because your horn ran out of air. We’ve heard it all before.

If you’re going to contact us by radio, you really need to know the name of the bridge you’re contacting. That’s another thing that makes it glaringly obvious that the person either hasn’t done their homework or is intoxicated and had better hope the harbor patrol isn’t listening in.

That greenhorn will say, “Hey bridge.”

“Um, there are 6 drawbridges within radio range, captain. Which one are you referring to?”

You’re not the only vessel on the water. You’re not the only vessel using that radio channel. We can’t be sure that the person saying hey bridge is the vessel we see out the window.

I work on University Bridge. People without charts have also called it Lake Union Bridge (the waterway to my west), Portage Bay Bridge (the waterway to my east), Eastlake Avenue Bridge (the road name south of the bridge), Roosevelt Bridge (the road name north of the bridge), Montlake Bridge (the drawbridge to my east), Fremont Bridge (the drawbridge to my west) and Bridge Shop (the office that opens all the bridges on the graveyard shift only, which is located at Fremont Bridge).

Anyway, assuming you know what you’re doing, a typical conversation might go like this:

“University Bridge, University Bridge, University Bridge, this is the sailing Vessel Jane Doe.”

(I love it when they follow protocol and repeat my name three times, because the first time my brain clicks on and thinks, “Whoa, somebody’s on the radio.” The second time it thinks, “Did he just call me?”, and the third time it thinks, “Yep, he’s calling me. I should now listen out for who he is.”)

“Jane Doe, this is University. Go Ahead.”

“University, this is Jane Doe, requesting an opening westbound at your earliest convenience.”

“Roger that, Jane Doe. Continue your approach, and I’ll get it started for you.”

A few things about that exchange that you should know. First of all, on marine channels, Roger is the most common term for yes. Affirmative is also acceptable as is Negative. But for the love of Neptune, don’t ever say 10-4. You’re not a truck driver, and everyone within radio distance will be laughing at you.

Also, if a bridgetender says to continue your approach, they’re not kidding. This isn’t their first rodeo. Maintain your speed. They know how long it will take to get their bridge open, and they’ll start their opening to match your speed. If you come to a dead halt when they’ve said continue your approach, it makes the opening much longer, which backs up traffic a lot longer than it has to be. You have to trust that we know what we’re doing. Also, if you’re close and waiting, don’t turn your bow away. Again, that makes the opening longer than it needs to be. Just follow the instructions you’ve been given and everything should flow smoothly.

Likewise, please don’t call us when you’re still 5-10 minutes away. We don’t like to stand at the console staring blankly into space waiting for you to make your appearance. 2 minutes should be more than enough. (With the exception of Main Street Bridge in Jacksonville, which requires two bridgetenders to climb down ladders to street level while the diver remains at the console, and that takes a little more time, and meanwhile, the current of that river is very strong, so extra notice is helpful.)

On a personal note, One thing that drives me absolutely crazy is someone who calls on the phone to ask for an opening. At my current bridge, unfortunately, the phone number is easy to obtain, because if you want to make a graveyard shift opening, you need to make an appointment. In the other two states where I was a bridgetender, they made a point of not publishing our phone number for a very good reason. Not everyone is a good person, and people sometimes used that information to call in threats of a nature that would cause us to have to shut down operations and evacuate for hours on end. Not cool. So whenever that phone rings and it’s not a company number, the hair raises on the back of my neck.

There was one gentleman who would call every time he needed an opening, and his name would pop up on the phone. The first time he did it to me I asked him to signal by horn. He said he didn’t have one. The last three times he called I said, I’m sorry, I must not have heard your horn. I’ll get the opening started for you.” He didn’t take the hint. At that point, I knew he was doing it out of pure laziness.

But the CFR specifications for my bridge allows us to make a vessel wait up to ten minutes to reduce traffic backups. So one day he called when traffic was backed up. I set the timer for 10 minutes. I didn’t answer the phone. I figured I’d open for him, one way or another, within 10 minutes, but I was curious what he would do. He hung up and called again. Still no answer. 5 minutes to go. Finally, Shocker! He produced a horn, gave me the proper signal, and I opened the bridge for him. I smiled and waved as he passed though. He has never called me on the phone again.

Sometimes my job enters the realm of education as well.

The CFR also says you can contact a bridge by flag and light signals, but in all my 25 years of bridgetending, I’ve never known a vessel to signal in that way, and I’m not sure most bridge operators would understand that method of communication, so I wouldn’t recommend it.

But honestly most of the captains I’ve opened for have been great. They’ve moved through quickly and efficiently. If we do communicate by radio, they’ve been respectful and kind. Many even thank me afterward. And the very cream of the crop are never intoxicated, try to avoid going through during peak hours, and if they see other vessels who appear to be approaching for an opening, they try to group up, and yet they still communicate individually, instead of expecting me to read their mind.

Believe me, we remember those captains and appreciate them more than they’ll ever know

One last note. There are fully automated bridges here and there, and I’m not just saying this because I like having job security. Anyone around one of these bridges should proceed with caution, because these things are built by humans, after all, and they can malfunction, or if they’re being operated remotely by a human, there’s a much higher chance that that human might be asleep at the wheel.

Those automated bridges that remain up in the air and only go down when they get the occasional train, car, cyclist or pedestrian crossing them are mainly only a danger to vessels, so I’d pass through them as quickly as possible, if I were a captain. There is a slight possibility of crushing a foolhardy human, but there’s only so much you can do to convince people not to be foolhardy.

The automated bridges that remain in the down position and only go up for vessels, on the other hand, really freak me out. I know, because I watch, on a daily basis, while people with sound cancelling earbuds, absorbed by their cellphones walk right past warning gongs and flashing lights onto a bridge I’m about to open. And defiant cyclists and pedestrians will also intentionally do so. And cars crash through gates. And bridges malfunction and there’s no one there to warn the oncoming vessel. Now, granted, most automated bridges are in remote locations, but people can still be stupid in remote locations.

When I hear the phrase automated bridge, safety-oriented me goes into full Danger Will Robinson mode. Bridgetenders matter. Good captains know this well. And those are the ones I’m proud to work with.

Happy Sailing. Keep the pointy side up!