SOUTH PORTLAND, Maine — Jess Yeomans’ life is all tugboats, all the time.
Yeomans spends three out of every six weeks piloting one around New York City’s busy harbor. She then spends the next three weeks painting vibrant tugboat portraits for captains, crews and aficionados all over the east coast.
Her commissioned tugboat paintings have become so popular, she can hardly keep up with demand and has a months-long waiting list stretching well into next year.
“Being a merchant mariner, it’s not a career; it’s a full lifestyle,” Yeomans said, sitting at her dining room table, surrounded by her work and art supplies on Thursday. “But with three weeks at home, as an artist, is awesome. You have time to really get dialed in.”
Yeomans’ tugboat job and art — plus her life in Maine — almost didn’t happen. It took luck, hard work and one stunning, cosmic sign from the universe to make them materialize.
Often praised for her childhood drawing and painting abilities while growing up on Long Island, New York, she attended art school in the city and then embarked on a freelance career illustrating children’s books.
But Yeomans’ second illustration project out of college was shelved by the publisher, and she needed a job, fast.
Yeomans’ mother knew a woman just about to leave an assistant position in a Brooklyn tugboat company’s office. She suggested her daughter give it a try. Yeomans’ was not enthusiastic about the prospect, at first, but took the job and was soon volunteering to help on the boats.
“I would finish my work in the office and then go because I wanted to be outside,” she said. “I wanted to be on a boat in New York City — who wouldn’t want to do that?”
Yeomans initially worked on a crew boat, which is a smaller vessel that ferries workers and supplies to tugboats and other locations around the harbor.
“The crew boat captain would let me steer every once in a blue moon, and then would start letting me do some tougher jobs, like backing into the current alongside a barge,” Yeomans said. “And he was like, ‘I think you actually have a knack for this.’”
After some grueling training and certifications, Yeomans made the transition from office worker to crew boat captain. She did the job for a full year before a fateful Maine vacation in 2016 changed her life even more.
While visiting some tugboat friends in Camden, she learned about their several-weeks-on and several-weeks-off lifestyle, which allowed them to live in Maine while still working in New York City. The lifestyle intrigued Yeomans, but she wasn’t sure Maine could really be her home.
Then, on her last night in Maine, she camped on Seguin Island, off the coast of Phippsburg, with a friend.
“This is my favorite story to tell,” Yeomans said. “It had been raining a little bit when we got to the island and there was a double rainbow over the lighthouse — and I was just over the moon. I’m like, ‘I’m home. I should have lived here my whole life.’”
Back in New York, Yeomans left the crew boat and began working on tugboats, graduating from deckhand to second mate and now to mate, where her job is to pilot the 90-foot, 3,000-horsepower Fort Schuyler around the bustling harbor.
There are two kinds of tugboats, Yeomans explains. The first guide ships in and out of the harbor, helping them dock and maneuver in the tight space. She works on the second kind, which pushes barges.
“I move barges filled with fuel of various kinds,” she said. “When ships come in, we’re fueling those ships.”
Now, when Yeomans finishes a three-week rotation, she drives home to South Portland and gets back to painting. Then, her commissions for tugboat illustrations skyrocketed last year after she posted a reel on Instagram showing her step-by-step process.
“It’s a small, little fishbowl industry,” Yeomans said. “Everyone was like, ‘Hey, will you paint my boat now?’”
The answer is always yes. Now she is racing to finish a batch before Christmas.
On Thursday, Yeomans hunched over two paintings at once in her second-floor studio. Her expert, detailed tugboat renderings require multiple layers of pale watercolor paint to achieve their deep, luminous look. Thus, Yeomans moved back and forth between the two pictures, applying a thin layer of paint to one while the other dried, and then back again.
Meanwhile, Yeomans is still making Instagram reels featuring her art.
“I’m glad I was one of the first to get one,” wrote one commenter and customer. “I love mine, they are beautiful.”
“This is incredible! Can’t wait for you to do my husband’s tugs!” wrote another.
Yeomans said she’ll eventually get to them all, as soon as she can. In the meantime, she’s enjoying her best tugboat life, working her dream job on the water in the city and making art when she’s at home, in Maine.
“What’s most important to me right now is the fact that fellow merchant mariners are hanging art — of their own boat — in their home, made by another fellow merchant mariner,” Yeomans said. “That, to me, is really special.”
See more of Yeomans’ art on her Instagram page. She will also be selling prints, cards and stickers of all her nautical-themed art under the name Whale and Anchor at the Thompson’s Point maker’s’market in Portland on Sunday, Dec. 1, from 10 a.m. until 3 p.m.
