Best of Two Worlds
"Whitey," as his friends call him, is the senior captain on the Galveston-Bolivar ferry system. Since 1960, when he signed on as a relief deckhand and oiler, Varvil has been riding from Galveston to Bolivar, and from Bolivar to Galveston, day in and day out.
The job can be boring, he admitted recently, as he took the 35-year-old Cone Johnson around Seawolf Park and into the Galveston Channel.
Still, he said, it pays well, and allows him to stay on the water, which he loves, yet come home to his wife, Jean, every night.
Now 57, Varvil has been at sea since age 16. He was too young to enter military service, but in 1944, "afraid the war would be over before I could get in it," he quit 10th grade and entered wartime merchant marine training in Sheepshead Bay, :N.Y. He shipped out 13 weeks later on a Gulf Oil tanker, the Gulf Venezuela.
"On my first trip overseas, I spent my 17th birthday in Swansea, Wales -- Feb. 4, 1945," Varvil said.
He saw. the last months of the war from the deck of a Liberty ship. It was on the way to Europe "with a full cargo of Sherman tanks," when Germany surrendered and his ship was sent back to New York.
"I stayed on (in Europe) and was in Leghorn, Italy on V-J Day," Varvil recalled.
The ship's name? His brow furrowed as he ran down a mental Lloyd's Register of
freighters and tankers on which he had shipped: "Let's see. The Claus Spreckels. No, it was the Jacob Slote Fasset."
Between war's end and I960, Varvil saw the world from a variety of Liberty and Victory ships, Lykes liners, and Amoco tankers. "I sailed into Galveston in 1947." he said. "And in 1948, I made it my home port."
He stopped wandering in 1960, when he married, and signed on with the ferries. "I just wanted to spend one summer with my new wife," he explained.
That summer job has lasted 24 summers now. The trip across Bolivar Roads is almost automatic, Varvil's hands seeming to steer the unwieldy ferryboat across a treacherous incoming tide with a mind of their own as their owner passes the time of day with crew and guests in the cramped pilothouse.
Just now, he is talking about his 38-foot shrimp boat, his pride and joy -- the Varvil Marvel, which he built in 1981.
"She's like a yacht down below,: he says. "I've got everything you can imagine in that boat: TV, AM-FM, radar, VHFs."
He likes to go shrimping with wife Jean ("She's the captain on my shrimp boat!") at daylight. They trawl for shrimp until Varvil leaves for work at 1 p.m. They share the morning's catch with friends, he explains.
All this time, the Cone Johnson tracks unwaveringly for the slender black lighthouse on the Bolivar shore. Varvil looks out the window from time to time, only a brief glance, just to satisfy himself that the hands on the wheel are doing what they have been programmed to do for a quarter-century.
But that little glance takes in more than a casual observer would think.
"What's the tide doin'?" he asks pilot Melton Young, seated on a cabinet behind him. "Those ships are layin' into a flood tide." On the horizon, two cargo ships weathervane on their anchor chains, stemming the swift tide roiling through the Galveston jetties from the open Gulf.
"It's funny how these old boats react," Varvil says. "You have to .get used to it. I know what they're gonna do before they do it."
He grasps the heavy brass handle of the motor control and swings it to "Full Astern." The bow propeller on the double-ended vessel churns the waters ahead into a salty froth as the ferry noses between the metal-sheathed dolphins flanking the landing.
"These three old boats (Cone Johnson, E.H. Thomton and R.S. Sterling, all built in 1950)) are a little tricky," he says. "You gotta watch your P's and Q's."
As a boatload of Galveston-bound cars bumpity-bumps across the loading ramp onto the deck below, Varvil says he does not regret trading a globetrotting career in. the merchant marine for the more mundane world of the Bolivar crossing.
"I had spent half of my life at sea," he says. "I really didn't want to go back.
"All my old friends are first mates and skippers now, and make just about twice the salary I'm makin'" he said. "But look where they're makin' it.
"I work eight hours and sleep at home every night," Varvil says. "It's the only boatin' job that's like a shore job."
But doesn't he get bored, making the same trip every day?
"Yeah, it's boring," he admits. "All I think about is getting back and forth safely. It's automatic. I see everything on the horizon," he says.
"I've been doin' it so long. I'm not gonna let anything creep up on me."
