A powerful small boat designed to pull or push larger ships

Usage examples of tugboat.

A red tugboat marked MCALLISTER BROTHERS was assisting a containership on its way.

Energetic activity had the liburnian edging out into the harbour without benefit of a tugboat.

There was suddenly so much to think about, and as she stared out into the New York mist, suddenly a flotilla of tugboats came into view, there was a shrill whistle blast, and then suddenly there were salutes from every boat in the harbor.

The other two ships and their deadly cargoes were gathering way in their dash for the open sea, the tugboat adding her power to that of the Amy Bigalow to raise the speed of the marine caravan.

He was just there, for once not scampering after his deceased Persian patootie, but stalking along at my heel, all dignity now, sort of convoying me like a tugboat, escorting me—where?

An able-bodied seaman was knocked into the drink and one of the tugboat captains choked on his false teeth.

I liked the odor of bilge water from old tankers, the odor of crude oil in barrels bound for distant places, the odor of oil on the water turned slimy and yellow and gold, the odor of rotting lumber and the refuse of the sea blackened by oil and tar, of decayed fruit, of little Japanese fishing sloops, of banana boats and old rope, of tugboats and scrap iron and the brooding mysterious smell of the sea at low tide.

A freighter flying the Norwegian flag was making its way down the Kill van Kull toward the Bayonne Bridge and Port Newark, pushed along by a squat blue tugboat.

The harbor, accustomed to handling two billion dollars' worth of cargo annually, was busy with container ships, tankers, freighters, trawlers, and tugboats.

The external forces acting on it--the currents, the ocean waves, the salinity of the water and its resultant density, tides, the Coriolis effect, the strains on the tugboat lines, winds, rainfall, vapor pressure, atmospheric pressure, propeller vibration, the heat of the sun--dozens of factors--are even more complex.

You are not a Vanderbilt, whose fortune was made by a vulgar tugboat captain, or a Rockefeller, whose wealth was amassed through unscrupulous speculations in crude petroleum.

Out of the harbor, the foghorns still moaned, but the hissing of steam escaping from the near-by tugboat had stopped.

I've always found it interesting that two weeks after a ship sinks, any ship, be it a tugboat or an ocean liner, there is a rumor that it was carrying $10,000 in cash somewhere in its bowels.

He'd kept radio silence during the race across the South Pacific, a routine ploy among tugboat captains racing toward the same wreck, because the winner received the Lloyds Open Form for salvage and 25 percent of the stricken vessel's value.

She crossed the hall to the bathroom and found the usual fleet of rubber ducks and tugboats.