Who’s actively looking for experienced tankermen? I see on the website Canal Barge Line is, can anyone tell me about them, they seem ok from what I’ve read? Looking for pay rates also…please pm me if you don’t want to post it for all to see. Thanks! Any info on Blessey, Golding, Magnolia marine, FMT, or higman would be appreciated.
P.s… done the Kirby thing, all set with them.
Bouchard is is hiring, and usually always is. If you can walk on eggshells and do your job better than anyone else, you can survive at Bouchard. Close to the top of the pay scale for tankerman, and nice equipment to work on. They also throw you 50 extra bones a day for your travel. Also, they have a few more new tug/barges being built. Good luck!!!
I’ll pass on Bouchard, but thanks. To many horror stories from ex employees. Still looking for inland info.
Can i ask why you would wanna work 2-1 for almost 1/2 the money per day ? My uncle did 26yrs @ Bouchard and was only fired 3-4x which i think is unheard of but they do have some nice equipment.
I don’t hear about the firing like I used to.
Maybe he gets too seasick?
Nope, I don’t get seasick. I just like the river better. Got real tired, real fast of barge “captains”. Out of the 5 barge “captains” I was around, only one wasn’t a complete retard. You can work even time on the river as well. Oh, and by the time I drove to NYC, or #$#@! Philadelphia, it ate up the difference in pay. I actually had more money in my pocket working on the river…just saying.
I had to ask because last i knew the guys in the river, or on a fuel flat where around 250-300ish a day, thats as of March/14’ when I left the GOM. The pay for a tank-ab was 477 a day where i was. Youve just gotta stay there long enough to become the “retarted barge emperor/captain/deckhand washout”. The “2nd mate” or “waterboy” gig is the job to have, a 200 ton license, marginal cargo responsibly, pump water and watch the other 2 apes. 
all jokes aside there are good tankerman, just about 100 shitheads for every skilled one.
Ask the average tankerman, and i hate to pick on the southern ones but ive seen it with my own eyes, to read a hand tape, use a strapping table to figure a 2-3-4 product load, maybe load NET with a huge temp diff, typical scenarios faced every day, and it becomes just like a deer in the headlights.
Yeah, typical pay on the river seems to be around 280-310. I was getting 350 at the company I was working for out of Phili, and 385 in NYC…so you can guess who I worked for… I totally agree, the skills needed doing the tankerman job up north need to be quite sharp. I had no problem learning those skills and doing the job… but dealing with the morons on the barges I was on was unbelievable. Now, there are idiots everywhere, and I have pretty thick skin, but everyone has their limits as to the level of BS they want to accept daily. One barge “captain”, we’ll call him Kevin (not his real name), CONSTANTLY referred to himself as “Captain Kevin” ,LOL. Sooo, maybe I just had a different experience there than most, but I actually saw a higher level of professionalism by uneducated deckhands on the rivers, than the “barge captains” I was stuck with on the east coast. The last guy I was stuck with, started screaming at me that I had loaded the barge wrong, and I showed him HE was wrong and had the valves set incorrectly when he left the barge for me to load… he sat at the computer,about to cry, beating his fist on the settee saying he wanted it to be my face…I told him we could go on deck and he could give it a whirl if he felt up to it, but he wasn’t going to talk to me that way no matter what. He declined that offer, and later apologized for his error in valve settings and behavior. So, back to the origional question… anyone hiring tankermen on the river?