Cowboying Out

Of course, that’s why Price likes the work. The anything-can-happen nature of her days has kept her aboard boats since she graduated from State University of New York’s Maritime Academy in 2007. A longtime tugboat captain, she guided cargo ships and cargo vessels into one of the nation’s biggest ports, playing a vital role in the supply chain that brings iPhones, bananas, coffee beans, and Christmas lights to American consumers.  

The excitement at work isn’t enough for Price. Even at home in Seabrook, Texas, about 30 miles southeast of Houston, she craves new projects, new challenges. She’s obtained pilotage licenses for five major ports and is certified as an EMT and a Texas firefighter on a rescue craft. (She’s also a lieutenant of the firefighting boat.) She’s even a licensed notary, ordained minister, and pest control technician. (Turns out venomous spiders love ships.) She became interested in paramedic training, so she decided to study that as well. 

Her devotion to the maritime world led the U.S. secretary of homeland security to place her on committees addressing sexual harassment and assault in the maritime trade industry. 

At home, she’s on call as a volunteer for her small town’s fire department. After staying up late to fight a flaming weekend cruiser, she’ll still rise at 4 a.m. to make it to a swimming workout and then a CrossFit session.  

“It drives me crazy. It’s literally insane,” says her close friend, neighbor, and former shipmate Travis Golightly, who’s now a second mate on a cargo tanker that travels the world. “If you ... tell her she can’t do something, you can bet yourself she’s going to find a way.”  

On top of this, Price is a skilled mountain climber who tries a new peak challenge every year. “I guess I’m an adrenaline junkie,” Price says of her various professional and personal pursuits. Thinking about how her mountain climbing and firefighting fits into her maritime work, she notes that she runs steady as a calm sea. “I don’t have any fear. People ask me what I’m most afraid of. People say ‘spiders, snakes.’ I’m not afraid. Nothing scares me.”

Price’s love affair with water began with swimming. Her mother noticed that she took to the pool right away at age 5. A backstroker and IMer, Price swam into her first year of high school. On a school trip to New York City, she fell in love with the city and its waterways. 

During her first year at the Maritime Academy, her adviser suggested she go through the program’s licensing program. Soon Price was studying ship handling, basic firefighting, celestial navigation, and boat operations on top of classes for her bachelor’s degree. She’d never been on a ship until she spent 60 days as a deck cadet on one churning across the Atlantic. “I’ll do anything related to water,” she says.  

After she graduated in 2007, Price went looking for ports and Masters clubs. Although she’s registered with Houston Cougar Masters, she swims with South Shore Sails Masters while in Texas and with Melbourne Masters while in Florida. Her career isn’t far from her personal life. For Halloween, Price dressed as a rocket ship and tossed candy from the town’s firetruck in a neighborhood filled with families of astronauts.  

G&H Towing Co. in nearby Galveston, Texas, hired her to be first mate, the first female officer in the company’s history, in an industry that was just 2% female. There, Price escorted massive tankers and cargo ships into the Texas ports of Galveston/Texas City, Freeport, and Houston. She was the first woman promoted by the company to captain. 

In that line of work, the tug acts like a guide dog, accompanying and directing giant container vessels that rise from the water like multistory apartment blocks. Wind and physics pose a constant challenge.  

Container vessels are slim, sometimes more than 1,000 feet long and built for speed. The vessels that enter a port traveling at 8 knots per hour are capable of traveling at 20. Her job, in part, was to slow them to guide them into and out of the docks, a job, Price notes dryly, that isn’t always “tugboat friendly.”  

Major ports want the containers to enter and unload as quickly as possible. To enter Houston, some must make a 90-degree turn off the main channel. As a ship moves up the narrow waterway, a tug must not get pushed or swamped by the wake or sucked in toward the stern. It’s somewhat like the way swimmers try to avoid a competitor’s wake but draft off their lanemates’ feet during a workout.  

On top of calculating a ship’s position and speed, there are the surprises that can’t be planned for. A craft can lose its engine mid-turn. A sudden rain shower can arrive, soak the captain, and leave her with zero visibility. Fog can shroud the area in minutes. That’s when Price relies on her intimate knowledge of the channel’s geography and quirks. 

And then? “There’s radar to rely on and you just hope for the best,” Price says. “You just have to hope that everything goes well.”  

One day off the coast of Houston, Price told Golightly to grab a life vest. “There’s something stuck in the engine,” she said. That wasn’t unusual. With all the rain in the region, tires, logs, and trash wander into propellers, sometimes causing jams. At that moment, though, the tug was tied to a 1,000-foot cargo container ship moving at 1 knot. The life vest was a last-ditch safety precaution in case the boat splintered upon impact.  

When Price asked over the radio that the other ship “drop my line,” her tug was 20 feet away. Even then, Golightly remembers, her voice remained steady.   

It wasn’t just steely calm that led her to join her local firehouse during the COVID-19 pandemic. “I was bored,” she quips dryly. Encouraged by a friend who was a lieutenant in a neighboring town, Price leapt at the new challenge. She got certificates in water rescue, vehicle extraction, and high-angle rescue. The latter is a rope-and-angle technique used to pull a trapped person from a higher floor while a fire rages below. 

“I enjoy giving back to community,” Price says. Also, “I enjoy an adrenaline rush.” 

All the while, she keeps finding new peaks to scale. Price’s insatiable travel bug has taken her to Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Ecuador, Chile, and all over Europe. “My parents were huge travelers,” she says. “I was a sophomore in high school when Mom said, ‘I’m going to go Africa for a month. See you!’” 

Among Price’s most memorable trips was one she took to Ukraine in 2015 to see Chernobyl, the Soviet-era nuclear power plant that melted down and exploded in 1986. When she learned that a new cover would be installed over the site to prevent leaks, Price wanted to see the place before it was further obscured. 

She books group trips but never travels with the same people. That way, she makes new friends from different cultures. She’s still in touch with the Chernobyl group. “You meet a lot of people with a similar mindset,” she says. “You meet people from all over the world and have an experience.”  

Travel is a good rest from the challenges at work. After 15 years at G&H, Price received a call one day from SpaceX. “It got to the point I was really stale (captaining a tugboat),” she says. “There was not much more I could get out of it. I’m striving to excel.”  

The new job, operating a converted off-shore supply vessel, requires most of Price’s maritime skills on every trip: firefighting, basic safety, lifesaving, and nighttime navigation. Although her crew can lasso the fairings, they now rely on setting in place a platform where the rocket parts land. 

She works a 28-day schedule with the next month off. Her goal is to become a harbor pilot in one of America’s ports. The job is prestigious and would allow her to be home more for her two dogs and two cats. She has five pilotages in various ports and is working on a sixth, in Cape Canaveral, Florida. To be selected, candidates must be able to diagram, by hand, the port from memory. 

Her friends say she’s taken a lot of guff from male colleagues to get where she’s landed. Price doesn’t complain and is focused on opening the industry to more women. That means addressing the problems of sexual harassment and assault in the field. In recent years, she accepted appointments to two committees. One is a federal advisory group that helps set federal standards for sexual assault and harassment complaints at sea worldwide. 

She was selected for the work after several women reported that they had been raped or abused by crew members or supervisors while at sea. Some of these women were then trapped for weeks onboard with their attackers until the ships docked. The most high-profile case grew from an initially anonymous complaint posted by then 19-year-old U.S. Merchant Marine Academy student Hope Hicks. The resulting federal prosecution ended recently when the accused sailor relinquished his license. That case encouraged other women to report their having been attacked.  

Price and another appointee suggested that maritime companies install satellite phones onboard ships so victims can report crimes. Other changes would require legislative acts to ensure that all vessels, no matter where they sail from, would investigate crimes at sea, Price says. Many vessels originate in China, where there are no laws governing such crimes at sea, Price says.  

“She pretty much wrote the whole policy,” says Joy Manthey, a Louisiana captain and chaplain who knows Price from a professional women’s conference.  

“Women have been dealing with this for years,” Price says. “Unfortunately, there’s nothing we can do with something that happened 10 years ago. We’re educating more mariners.”  
Manthey and other friends hope Price achieves her goal of becoming a harbor pilot. “The girl is top of class,” Manthey says. “She’s brilliant. She’s good. She’s well-rounded.”