Capt. Darrell Pyke, Muddy Water Dredging
At age 19, Darrell Pyke was attending a welding school when an older man named Willie Neville struck up a friendship with him. Neville worked on dredges and told the eager younger man, “We need young guys who want to work.” Three days later, Pyke got the call and has never looked back. “I just fell in love with dredging,” he told The Waterways Journal. “It’s the only job I’ve ever had.” Not only has his whole career been as a dredger, but he has only worked on cutterhead dredges.
Pyke started with Mike Hooks before moving to Encore Dredging, which operates on the Gulf Coast from Texas to Florida and throughout the entire Southeast. He has been with Muddy Water Dredging for two years. Muddy Water is a relatively new company, having been founded in 2021 by Michael Kerns and Matthew Devall. It took Pyke 16 years to make it to the wheelhouse of a dredger. He was 35 when he became a dredge captain. All of his training was in-house and on-the-job.
Dredge crews and captains are a special breed, Pyke told The Waterways Journal.
“Once you start dredging, you stay with it,” he said.
Today, Pyke is at the pinnacle of his profession. He captains the Vaneta Marie, a brand-new, custom-built Marlin Class 24-inch cutter suction dredge christened last April. It was designed and built by DSC Dredge in Louisiana for Muddy Water Dredging and is named after Kerns’ mother.
Outfitted with a total installed horsepower of 9,629 and 6,830 kW of electrical power, the dredge is equipped with a detachable carriage barge and lay-down spuds, allowing it to make wide cuts when needed and to clear low structures in transit. The onboard technology and equipment is all state-of-the-art, with redundancies built in throughout for safety and production.
The Vaneta Marie has a rotating crew of 42 people in total, Pyke said, including deckhands, boatmen, levermen, oilers, engineers and mates. The crews work in 12-hour shifts. A leverman operates the dredge’s control board, controlling the positioning of the dredge and the consistency of the slurry entering a pipeline. The mate adjusts dump scows and performs minor repairs, maintains deck lines and performs general deck maintenance, including cleaning and painting, and directs the deckhands in assisting with those tasks.
Pyke himself has worked all those jobs on his way up the ladder to the wheelhouse. He became a boatman after one year before ascending to mate, leverman and captain.
“It’s the only way to learn the job, from the ground up,” he said. “It’s not something you can go to school for. Then you know everyone else’s job, all the ins and outs.”
Pyke likes the regularity of dredging work. The Vaneta Marie is currently dredging in the Sabine Pass near Port Arthur, Texas, on contract for the Corps of Engineers. “It’s year-round work,” Pyke said. “There are no shutdowns, unless a cable breaks. Everything is a repeated cycle.”
He lives in Lake Charles, La., about an hour away from where he rejoins his dredge. His schedule is 21 days on and 14 days off. It’s a necessity, he said. Dredging is riding a boom cycle, thanks to abundant infrastructure funding from several bills coming through the funding pipeline. Retaining seasoned crews and keeping them happy is a must for dredging companies.
Pyke also praises Muddy Water’s training procedures.
“We do a lot of safety training,” he said. “Green guys—new guys wearing the green hardhat—are looked out for. We do evaluations of each crewmember every 90 days with captains and mates to make sure they are learning and improving where they need to.”
He also praises the cooks aboard the Vaneta Marie. Most dredges are known for being good feeders. It’s a necessity, he said, part of retaining seasoned crews and keeping them happy. Muddy Water is “a great company,” he said, “with great people and a great atmosphere.”
