Ice and Unusual Sail

A reprise of the approaches to ice:  some vessels (Is Morton towing Esopus light?) and loads need to fracture it, whereas

these skim over it, harnessing the wind as was done in the past and will again happen in the future . . . not to suggest there has ever existed a hiatus between the two.

A gaff-rig trails a lateen-rig.

And here two gaff-riggers compete, Galatea pursuing Puff.  A few names:  backbone is supported by the perpendicular runner plank, which itself supports the port and starboard runners.  On Galatea, I estimated the backbone to be 30′–35′ with approximately 15′ runner plank.  Someone correct me?

I was quite taken by Vixen with its lateen rig.  It reminded me of the rig I’ve not used for years on the canoe, which I wrote about here two years ago.    This shot also clearly shows the jump skeg, near the stern just below the cockpit and forward of the stern runner.    The purpose of the jump skeg is –in the case the boat glides over some open water and then back onto ice, the substantial wood there would “jump” the stern back onto the ice, preventing the stern runner from catching on the edge of the ice.

Like most boats, iceboats have name boards.

Vixen alone.  With people, of course, two of whom look unmistakeably like frogma and bowsprite.  See frogma’s gliding at –dunno . .  at least 100 kts here, AND her second post about the experience here.  Check both, as the first has great video and the second has dozens of fotos.  We’ll soon see what bowsprite and Jeff come up with.

Vixen juxtaposed with 999.  Note:  over 200 years of wooden boat are posed here, many more years than the years of people admiring the rich wood and sail colors.

All fotos by Will Van Dorp.  More on some gear tomorrow.

Approaches to Ice

And the options are:  crush it, or

glide over it.  The latter is preferred by the Hudson River Ice Yachting Club on Tivoli Bay in Red Hook, New York, at least for today.  Click on the Hudson Ice Yachting link (and scroll down a bit) for a great juxtaposition with DonJon’s Atlantic Salvor.  Double click on a foto to enlarge it.

These boats are old:  Galatea, dating from the 1880s.

Might frogma be thinking to trade her kayak for an ice yacht?  Here are three gaff-rigged boats, the nearest with the jib lowered.

This lateen rigged boat . . . Vixen, is over a century old.

Another shot of Vixen in the foreground, and other iceboats, gaff with jib, jibless, and marconi, or bermuda.

Also over the one-century mark is 999, sailing east of the Hudson from

the Catskills.

Timeless, these boats.

All fotos taken this weekend by Will Van Dorp.  More iceboats soon.

Suspension

Good golly . . . what hangs there?  Find a color clue  in the lower left corner as to ownership of the crane, …

Why . . . it’s Miss Holly aka these days as Paul Andrew. If you click the Paul Andrew link, check Sarah Ann. And if you own a crane like this, who needs a dry dock to lift a vessel into the high and dry?

Paul Andrew (ex-Miss Holly) built in 1968, 63′ x 23′ x 8 draft and 2400 hp.  Anyone

have fotos of

Miss Holly hanging around?

Sorry, but I couldn’t resist.  Nor could I resist listening to Little Richard Miss Holly . . . er something.

Top three fotos (taken in March 2008) taken by Mr Bill Benson of Hydrographic Surveys.  Thanks much, Bill.  The last two, by Will Van Dorp.

Unrelated:  A peak moment in 2009 for me was seeing Onrust lowered from a crane into the Mohawk for its very first float event.

ACL 2

Here’s the first in a possible series.  These RORO have unusual lines, and

they’ve carried unusual cargoes like … a viking ship and an antique car from the Orient Express.  Juxtaposed with the cables of the Verrazano, the tail gate here has lines reminiscent of an electric guitar body,  well, a guitar body with rusty steel plate pressed down on the pickups; and more strings than a harp.  Imagine the sound of one many-fingered hand plucking.

For a ship, there seems an absence of curved lines on this 26-year-old vessel.

All fotos by Will Van Dorp.

More Cargoes 13

Petroleum products make up a large percentage of barge cargoes in the sixth boro, but other loads exist, like supplies/services here

pushed by Shawn Miller

bottom sculpting remnants (how’s that for a euphemism?)  moved elsewhere  as towed here by Atlantic Coast,

a four-wheeler moved by this unidentified “be-spudded vessel,”   (Anyone identify it?)

paper for recycling down at Visy aka Pratt Industries escorted by the venerable James Turecamo,

metal for recycling moved by the “recycled” tug Herbert P Brake , and

finally, the most important liquid of all . . . potable water, carefully shepherded by Nathan E. Stewart.

Got other barge cargoes?  Send them along.

All fotos by Will Van Dorp.

Second Lives 8

The last one was seven, so … for number eight, I bring back this version of a foto from two years ago.  June K was the essential orange in the sixth boro;  nothing was more orange than June K, but

it’s 2010, not 2008, and it seems the answer is Punxsutawney Phil and Staten Island Chuck might say more than yes or no, and  ”Yes a leopard can change its spots.”  And it’s year of the tiger and the tiger might

just strip off its stripes.

A blue June K!   And that’s in transition  to Sarah Ann.    I know it’s frivolous, but I liked the orange on this product of Amelia, Louisiana.

While I adjust to that, check out these fotos of  Hackensack (inland from Petersburg) in March 2009 and

in the same location–although imprisoned in ice–in January 2010.

Change is good.  viva transformation . . . although I’m still going to have a hard time feeling the same about a blue June K.

Blue June K fotos … many thanks to Jed.  All others by Will Van Dorp.

Rust and Fire

Here and here were earlier Feeney posts.  This devolution is as painful to watch as a crime.  Or is it?  Can it be a prompt to memory, a trigger for younger folk to ask its history of those who remember?  Wasted scrap?  An eyesore?  A reminder that ours was not the first generation working  and living here?  What do you think?  Meanwhile watch the regress.

Summer 09 bore rust and graffitti but

a measure of charring as seen in January 2010 as seen from the bank and

from the KVK, and

each time I pass I expect to see no trace.  Here,  here, and  here are more Feeney images.  Vessel will not make its 120th anniversary … in 2012.

I imagine that different people see it differently.  Since I never saw this boat in any better condition, it doesn’t pain me as much as it would someone who did.  Instead, I feel a shifting mix of regret and healthy curiosity.  As Rebecca Solnit says, “ruins stand as reminders.  Memory is always incomplete … but the ruins themselves … are our links to what came before, our guide to situating ourselves in a landscape of time.  To erase the ruins is to erase the visible public triggers of memory;  a city without ruins and traces of age is like a mind without memories.”  I guess that’s why seabart comments as he does, and why I enjoy wandering in both junkyards and museums:  they have a lot in common.  Against my wall is both a new paddle and a piece of an old broken one;  although they both started life as paddles, each has a different function now, but I benefit from both, just differently.

Last foto by Allen Baker;  others, Will Van Dorp.

Winter Blues

Update:  For evidence of serious (ha!!) impromptu conferencing among some waterbloggers on Friday night, check out Peconic Puffin here.

Cold winds and spray trigger a hibernation reflex in me . . .  especially when the day is gray and

ice encases everything like the manifold here on Maersk Bristol.

But there is a beauty, too, particularly

on sunny days like the one when Pacific Fighter headed south not from below Albany through the crystalline Hudson.

More shades of blue:  Meagan Ann

Emma Miller,

Department of Sanitation scow 170 . . . here schlepped by the versatile James Turecamo,

and finally this all-blue unit called

Kenny G.  By the way, does anyone have identification on Kenny G?  I find nothing in my usual indexes.  Come summer, we might miss the blues.  Or blueblues.

Credits:  renowed ship/tugboat photographer Jed for the first three, a bird blogger (Richard Guthrie)  from the Albany Times-Union for  Pacific Fighter, and the rest by Will Van Dorp.  More Kenny G–the sax player–although there’s a lot of water with it.)   here.  Actually, while on the blues, here’s a fun,  bittersweet (blue-gray-crazy)  love song with water references from (?) late 1960s, shared by someone with a birthday today.

Happy end-of-January.

For the Birds 2

The past 24 hours has seemed the right time to reread parts of Arctic Dreams by Barry Lopez. Not that I’ve ever visited the Arctic.  And ice is part of the bargain living at our latitude.

Ice is habitat, among many other things.  We see some, but if it was 20 in the sixth boro this morning, it was at least 10 degrees colder a single latitude farther north, and that means crossings like this, less than 50 miles north of New York City.

We catch a glimmer of the Arctic here in winter, as birds from the North migrate in and travel around in formations like the one beyond Comet.

The goose in the middle came in for a landing, over-extending forward, and needed to use the underside of its neck as a skid plate.

Buffleheads are the first migratory birds I notice each fall.

Gulls–most sorts are here all the time, although occasionally unusual gulls appear.  Stowaways?  Torm Margarethe and Doris Moran await clearance to enter.

Egrets fish, undeterred by having their feet in freezing water, although

a few weeks back in Chincoteague, a sole pony offered rides to a flock of birds.  Tender-footed ones, perhaps?  Really . ..  not a single bird rested on any other pony.  What was the social contract?

Watching these Brant geese swim out  (I thought of them  as surfers headed out beyond the breakers) through the wake of Comet, I recalled Lopez writing about snow geese:  ”what absorbs me in these birds, beyond their beautiful whiteness, their astounding numbers, the great vigor of their lives, is how adroitly each bird joins the larger flock or departs from it.  And how each bird while it is part of the flock seems part of something larger than itself.  Another animal.  Never did I see a single goose move to accommodate one that was taking off, no matter how closely  bunched they seemed to be.  I never saw two birds so much as brush wingtips in the air, though surely they must.  They roll up into a headwind together in a seamless movement that brings thousands of them gently to the ground like falling leaves in but a few seconds.  Their movements are endlessly attractive to the eye because of a tension they create between the extended parabolic lines of their flight  and their abrupt but adroit movements, all of it in three dimensions.”

That “part of something larger than itself” makes itself visible as a flock of starlings moves through a tree with berries, a fruit crop reaped by an insatiable harvesting machine.

Without this cold season, I’d never have time to reread the books I savored before.  Nor would I find new ones.

The top foto comes from Paul Strubeck, crew on Cornell, who took the foto near Kingston.  I’ve seen eagles but never gotten a good foto.  Thanks, Paul. The next foto–kayaker passing eagle–comes from the flickr stream of ninjaracecar.  Thanks for putting these on flickr, ninjaracecar.  All other fotos here are mine, including the one below of my 28-year-old boss.  The green one.   For some really exotic bird fotos, see the ODock.

Sixth Boro Traffic 1

The amazing diversity of traffic on the boro all year round thrills me, like feather-light kayaks gliding past dredgers sucking alluvial ooze from the floor,

one human powered craft yielding to OOCL Verrazano Bridge 4738-teu vessel with almost 60,000 (59764.08…) horsepower,

more kayaks posing with Lucky D and different sullage scooping equipment before

heading north into the habitat of furious ferries, who might change their whole image by slowing down a notch and getting themselves renamed as Tinker Bell and Puck.

On another day, overlaid with haze, more traffic flows:  left to right are Petalouda, Lucky D, Patapsco,  dredge barge GL51, and Sarah Dann.  As to Petalouda, check out the name of the rest of the fleet in the link in the previous sentence.

And on a still hazier day,  Vera K waits as Cosco Boston rounds Bergen Point on its final mile into Port Newark.  That’s the Bayonne Bridge off in the east.

Fotos 2, 3, and 4 many thanks to Vladimir Brezina.  See his comments on “Mixed Use.”  Other fotos by Will Van Dorp.

Unrelated but you will be thrilled to check out these videos of paddlecam and icecam . . . via peconic jeff, 2010 comes to documenting surfing and ice-skating!!