Every tug has a mother.

Chapter I · 2010

A fateful toot at Mystic

It begins, as these things do, with someone else’s boat. In 2010, at the Mystic WoodenBoat Show, Adam and Taylor were wandering the docks when they rounded a piling and came face to face with a tugboat the size of a garden shed. She was called TooT TooT, she was grinning from ear to (metaphorical) ear, and she had absolutely no business being that charming.

Taylor took one long look, then delivered the five words that would quietly hijack the next decade and a half:

“You can build that next.”

It was meant as a compliment. It landed as a life sentence.

Chapter II · The matriarch

Meet TooT TooT — and Mike

Behind every little tug is a slightly stubborn human, and TooT TooT’s was a builder named Mike. He’d done the thing the rest of us only talk about over coffee: taken a stack of plywood and a set of plans and willed an entire tugboat into the world, complete with a personality far too large for her waterline.

TooT TooT, the way the legend gets told now, was proof of concept for an entire philosophy — that a boat doesn’t need to be big to be a character, and that the smallest hull on the dock is very often the one everybody photographs. She is, for the purposes of this family tree, the matriarch: Generation I, the boat from whom AWOOGA inherited her best traits.

Chapter III · 2010–2022

The twelve-year daydream

Here is the part nobody tells you about boatbuilding: most of it happens in your head, for years, before a single tool comes out. The idea of building a TooT TooT of his own went into Adam’s back pocket in 2010 and quietly refused to leave. It rode along to work. It surfaced at hardware stores. It got sketched on the occasional napkin and argued with at 2 a.m.

Twelve years of that. Twelve years of “someday,” of studying plans, of pricing plywood and then putting the cart back. The daydream finally found its blueprint in a set of Berkeley Engineering CANDU E-Z plans — and in 2022, “someday” ran out of road. The first sheet of plywood was cut.

Chapter III½ · 2022 · TooT TooT today

Field research (or: a perfectly innocent joyride)

Before you can build a tug, you have to study one — ideally up close, ideally while pretending it’s just a nice day out. So in 2022, Mike loaded Taylor and Emerson aboard TooT TooT and took them for a ride. They got the genuine experience: the toot, the breeze, the smug little wake of the smallest boat on the water.

Adam got a different experience. While everyone else relaxed, he stalked the dock with a camera like a man casing a bank, photographing every cleat, rub rail, rivet and suspicious bit of trim “for reference.” The official cover story was family outing. The actual mission was reverse-engineer the matriarch before she gets away. He came home with a passenger’s worth of fun and a builder’s worth of evidence.

Chapter IV · 2022

The first cut — the line continues

A bloodline doesn’t pass through blood here; it passes through plywood. The moment that first panel was scored and snapped, AWOOGA stopped being TooT TooT’s admirer and became her descendant — Generation II, officially under construction in a two-car garage with all the optimism of someone who has not yet met fiberglass.

Chapter V · The inheritance

The tricks handed down

This is where a family tree earns its name. Mike didn’t just inspire AWOOGA from a distance — he stayed in the story, passing down the hard-won tips one builder only gives another. The best of them: redesigning the folding mast as a lever, so a single person can raise and lower it without a second pair of hands. Pure TooT TooT DNA, grafted straight onto the new hull.

Add the things every proper tug must have — a length of bow pudding and a respectable beard at the bow — and a foghorn voice far too big for the boat, and the family resemblance becomes impossible to miss. She doesn’t just look like she’s related to TooT TooT. She behaves like it.

Chapter VI · April 27, 2025

Two generations, one dock

On launch day, the family tree collapsed into a single photograph. AWOOGA rolled down to Clinton Harbor wearing fresh decals and a custom bit of Mystic Knotwork bow pudding — and Mike came to watch. The builder of the boat that started it all, standing on the dock as the boat she started slipped into the water for the first time.

She floated. Of course she floated. Fifteen years, two builders, and one very good dare, all paying off at five relaxed miles per hour.

Chapter VII · To be continued

The line goes on

That’s the thing about a good little tug: she’s contagious. TooT TooT made one person say “you can build that.” AWOOGA is already making people on docks say the same thing, eyes a little too bright, brain already pricing plywood. Somewhere out there is Generation III — an unbuilt, unnamed hull and the stubborn human who hasn’t admitted it yet.

If that human is you, consider this your “you can build that next.” You’re welcome. And we’re sorry.