By Tyler J. Kelley, NY Times, Aug. 20, 2016
A narrow street dead-ends at the Detroit River, where a black-and-white boat bobs in the water, emblazoned with a Postal Service eagle. This is the mail boat J.W. Westcott II, the only floating ZIP code in the United States.
The little boat’s ZIP code, 48222, is reserved for mail addressed to the freighters that ply the Great Lakes. It is administered by the J. W. Westcott Company of Detroit, founded in 1874 when its main job was vessel reporting--telling companies, and the families of sailors, where their ships and loved ones were.
Today, its official motto is “mail by the pail.” It chugs out to passing freighters to deliver parcels to the crews, often by hoisting the mail with a rope and bucket. It’s been a registered post office since 1948.
First-class mail volume is down these days, said the owner, Jim Hogan. Most ships have wireless internet--so, like everyone else, sailors use email. “But our packages, express and priority, are up.”
It’s a small business that delivers everyday staples--food for the crew, a pair of pants ordered online, extra toilet paper for the voyage--to the giant vessels that carry the ore, coal, and grain that keep America running.
Forty or 50 years ago, when ships and ports were less mechanized, a boat’s crew had time to shop on land while their vessel was docked. “The modern sailor is a whole different game,” Mr. Hogan said. “Younger guys are used to ordering things online.” Today, “it’s not as important to get the love letter from home as it is to get something that he’s ordered.”
Over the last several decades, the Westcott Company has found a way to stay afloat and even grow, while the Postal Service has sunk deeper underwater--net losses for the second quarter of 2016 were $2 billion. While the service has laid off hundreds of thousands of people over the last five years, Mr. Hogan, 60, says he has trouble finding qualified workers.
To his relief, his son Jimmy, 32, recently moved back to Detroit to take over the Westcott’s billing and work as night captain. He is the fifth generation of the family to run the mail boat.
The hundred or so freighters that make up the Westcott’s customers each carry millions of dollars’ worth of commodities like coal, iron ore, grain and limestone. With freight this valuable, time costs a lot, so barring a catastrophe, boats stop only to load or unload cargo. Mail--and anything else a ship might need--must be delivered on the fly, while the mail boat and the freighter are moving.
One warm morning in late May, the mail boat chugged out to meet the Rt. Hon. Paul J. Martin, a 739-foot freighter steaming up the Detroit River. The big ship slowed but did not stop, and Capt. Bill Redding pushed the tire-clad bow of the 45-foot J.W. Westcott II snug against the sheer steel side of the Martin, keeping pace with it.
Canada Steamship Lines was painted in white across the red hull, and from above the “S” in “Steamship” a man in a hard hat and red jumpsuit lowered a dirty white bucket on a black rope. Two bags, filled with six cans of Planters mixed nuts and seven boxes of K-Cup coffee, were quickly tied on by the Westcott’s deck hand and hoisted aboard the freighter.
Twenty-four hours earlier, the captain of the Martin had called to order the nuts and coffee, knowing that they would be delivered to his ship when it passed the Westcott office, just southwest of the Ambassador Bridge on the Michigan side of the Detroit River.
Sailing two months on and one month off, “sailors on contemporary merchant ships are basically trapped,” said Mr. Hogan, sitting in front of black-and-white family photos and hockey posters in his office. He recently read that Maersk, the largest container shipping company in the world, was experimenting with using drones to deliver to its ships. But drones are expensive and small, so Mr. Hogan is confident that it will always be cost effective to deliver bulky, low-value cargo like coffee or paper towels by boat.
About one-third of the Westcott’s business comes from its contract with the Postal Service, which calls the boat its only floating ZIP code. The contract was just renewed to 2021 and pays for the Westcott to deliver United States mail to any vessel free of charge. Another third comes from transporting passengers, pilots, crew and contractors at $90 per person. The remaining third is from delivering non-Postal Service packages and other goods. (The mixed nuts and coffee delivery ran $16.) “If we were one entity--just a grocery guy, just a pilot boat--I don’t see that this would have continued,” Mr. Hogan said.
The Westcott will deliver almost anything a mariner wants. It is an authorized nautical chart retailer. It carries books, decorative boat prints and two different Lake Superior puzzles. It also stocks candy, chips and soda. Canadian ships in particular ask for cigarettes and pizza. One even has a custom-made pizza caddy that it lowers on a rope.
Shipping companies send parts and machinery to their boats through the Westcott. “We try never to say no,” said Sam Buchanan, a captain and manager for the company. Sailors receiving deliveries can pay over the phone with a credit card or send down cash in a bucket.
The company’s modest one-story building contains a back-room warehouse, mail room, dispatcher’s office, small lobby and Mr. Hogan’s office. Two walls of the mailroom are lined with cubbies, each labeled with a ship’s name--about 50 American and 50 Canadian--alphabetized from John B. Aird to Whitefish Bay. Every morning a Westcott employee sorts the day’s mail into the ship’s cubbies. Each item is addressed with a ship’s name, Marine Post Office, Detroit, MI 48222.
While looking at charts last June in the Westcott’s dispatch office, Garvie Crane, the chief engineer on the freighter Buffalo, explained that his ship usually stops only at mines to load and steel mills to unload, leaving him with just four or five hours in port.
“There’s a lot of security, and nothing within walking distance,” said Mr. Crane, 60. By the time he gets through security, calls a cab and makes it to the store, he is in danger of missing the boat. “A lot of times, I’ll get on for 60 days and won’t get off because it’s just such a hassle.” The Westcott and a supplier in Cleveland are “really our only two contacts with the outside world,” he said.
U.P.S. and FedEx trucks arrive. Packages addressed to various freighters are stacked inside the door.
One morning a few months ago, Michael VanPaepeghem, 21, a deck hand, was writing the ship’s name on each package in permanent marker for easy identification: Manitowoc, James L. Kuber, Defiance, Great Republic, Mississagi (“That’s my favorite one to do,” he said). He entered each package into the computer, then put a tag saying “bag” or “parcel” in that ship’s slot.
The Westcott makes 15 to 18 deliveries in 24 hours. Dispatchers track the movements of freighters by computer and radio. When a ship is due, whoever is working will go in the mailroom and toss the contents of that boat’s cubby into a heavy-duty nylon mail bag, then find its parcels.
The Westcott’s back room is filled with supplies for the American Steamship Company, which has a special contract with the Westcott to store inventory for its fleet: AA batteries, Comet cleaner, Bounce fabric softener, Maxwell House coffee, disposable coveralls, paper galley caps and 59 other consumables. American Steamship buys the supplies in bulk, and the Westcott stores them free, delivering the supplies as needed to the company’s ships for a fee.
On Memorial Day weekend, Mr. Hogan received a call from the American Mariner, an American Steamship Company freighter, asking for $3,000 worth of provisions to be delivered the next day. The request was beyond what the Westcott regularly stocked, but Mr. Hogan was experimenting with a new grocery service, and word had been spreading among the ship’s stewards.
Mr. Hogan is excited about this possibility for growth, though he is competing with companies like Soo Marine Supply, of Sault Ste. Marie, Mich., which has a strong grocery business and a larger boat and a crane to load palletized orders onto ships. It is not a designated post office, but sailors sometimes hop off while their ships are going through the locks at Sault Ste. Marie and get their mail at the local terrestrial post office.
Mr. Hogan went to Meijer, a Michigan-based Walmart-style store, and another nearby wholesaler. He filled the order, though it cost him his weekend, and it went seamlessly out to the Mariner when it passed by Monday afternoon. The Westcott charged a percentage.
The following Wednesday, Mr. Hogan got a similar call from the Ken Boothe Sr., an articulated tug and barge. He went back to Meijer for Chobani yogurt, fresh doughnuts, tomatoes, fresh cilantro, frozen shrimp and about 15 boxes of other food.
When Jimmy Hogan arrived for the night shift, he found the boxes stacked neatly on a trolley. Just as the sky was lightening, he backed the Westcott away from the dock and into the current, heading upriver. Inside the mail boat, which was built in 1949, a two-inch figure of St. Brendan, the patron saint of mariners, stood above the well-used brass ship’s wheel.
The Boothe slowed to about six miles per hour, and Jimmy turned downriver to meet its starboard side. Under the yellow sodium lights of the Boothe, the groceries and two bags of mail were swiftly handed from one vessel to the other.
Another area of growth for the Westcott is the transportation of pilots like Fred Hoffe, 62. He sat in a comfortable chair in the Westcott’s small lobby checking his phone one morning in June, waiting to be taken aboard the Bermuda-flagged tanker Sichem Challenge, which he would pilot to Sarnia, Ontario. In addition to the captain, any foreign-flag vessel must have an American or Canadian pilot aboard to navigate confined waters, Mr. Hoffe explained.
He popped into the dispatching office and held up a packet of peanuts. “One loon in the jar,” the dispatcher said. Mr. Hoffe put a Canadian dollar coin in a metal coffee can.
Since he was carrying a pilot, Mr. Buchanan, Westcott’s manager, started up the Huron Maid, the company’s orange pilot boat. Mr. Hoffe and his luggage went aboard, and they headed out.
The Sichem Challenge slowed, and Mr. Buchanan squeezed the pilot boat against the port side of the tanker. A rope ladder with wooden steps tumbled down. Mr. Buchanan maintained a slow but constant speed, holding the Maid fast against the tanker. Mr. Hoffe climbed up, the other pilot came down, and the boat peeled away.
Mr. Buchanan pulled the lever to sound the horn: one long blast and two short. The deeper bass of the ship’s horn responded in kind.
When the Westcott pulled up to the Kaye E. Barker a couple of nights later, the freighter was loaded with 25,186 gross tons of iron ore and was riding so low in the water that the mail bag could be handed up from deck to deck. In the bag were an envelope with $5 worth of stamps, a letter addressed to the ship and a Christian Science Monitor magazine.
The stamps were for Alex Weber, 23, a cadet on the ship as part of his schooling at the Great Lakes Maritime Academy in Traverse City, Mich. He will graduate as a third mate in January, and he needed postage to send in his homework assignments.
Lowering the mail pail, Mr. Weber said, was one of the first things he learned to do on the Barker. “Hold it far enough from the boat so that the guy on the mail boat can reach it. When you bring it up, don’t get it caught on anything so the mail falls out. Coil the rope up properly,” he recited.
“Try not to put it through the windshield,” the captain added.
“Or hit the guy on the head,” the boatswain chimed in.
Mr. Weber said good night and left the mess hall, but quickly reappeared. “I remembered one more thing about the mail bucket,” he said. “Don’t drop it.”
