tug

noun, a small powerful boat for towing larger boats or ships (COD); see also tugboat, salvage tug

“Somebody got down, I don’t know who it was, unhooked the tugs, and then we pulled the coal sleigh back enough to release the horse.”

“The fellow who just left here, they had a big farm, and his grandfather was a tugboat man, and he had two tugs. He brought them over from England.”

“His grandfather, he had a tug, and then he got a small tug. They used to land at our place too, my father said, and pick up grain.”

“A lot of the time where you’d be snowed in. So you’d miss school or the ferry’d be in trouble in the ice. Towards the end we had a little more reliable tug pulling the ferry in.”

“They brought two ferries down from the Sault. They’re coming down Lake Huron with them, and it was foggy as could be. They were towing them behind a tug.”

“[The tug] couldn’t come in all the way because the water wasn’t deep enough, partway between Garden Island and the Village. Tom drove us out, took it in the old car. Sarah sat in the front holding the baby, and I stood in the back and drove right up the gangplank of the tug.”

“Then he got into the tugs, and he broke ice for ferries and stuff like that. And I saw one of his tugs the other day when I was watching television, and it just went by on the screen in Montreal. I recognized it by the looks of it and the name on the side.”

“The Salvage Prince was built, I don’t know where, some place in England. It was a salvage tug, a marine salvage tug. He had two or three tugs and lighter barges and so on. A boat would run aground in The Seaway, and he’d be there to hook on and pull it out.”

“Well one winter the ice was no good, so what they did, they had all this hay pressed up, and my grandfather bought a little barge and a tug and ran it up on the shore at the end, at the concession roads, and farmers’d load the hay on, and he’d ferry it across to The States, and they’d put it on the trains, and it’d go to Pennsylvania.”

“He got in the marine salvage business, and he had one, two, just had bought the third tug, I guess. But anyways, he had two tugs and four or five barges at one time, and he made quite a name for himself in the marine salvage business because there were a lot of boats on the water that ran aground and things like that.”

“This was on the old tug, Donnelly. And the captain got into the drink before we left Kingston. He was a good handler. He’d been all up north and all over the place, but he fell down at the steering wheel, just above Prescott, below the Brockville Narrows. And the tug was going up the river. We’re on the barge going down the river.”

“They had theirs, big steel fishing tug. They pretty near went every day, and anybody was pretty well welcome to ride with them over and back if they wanted to go, but if you’re riding with somebody else, you go when they want and come back when they come.”

“She had phoned down and said, ‘Would you let me know when the tug goes by your house?’ ’Cause she’s been watching for it to come up, eh.”
“It’s a sign of spring.”
“It’s pretty impressive to see a tug smashing through ice to break the channel open.”

“Everything was gone. The horse was gone, the sleigh was, you know, gone, everybody was in the water. Then, it was luck. Fortunately, it was quite close to the tug. And Captain Bates was the captain on that tug, and I always said that he should’ve got a medal, I think. There was a gangplank on the tug about the width of this table, maybe twelve- over fourteen feet long. It was a good substantial railing on it. And he slid that out over the hole. And he gone on the end of it pulling people out.”