About a year ago this blog featured “turning 70,” with a vessel that subsequently played an unexpected role in history.

See the crewman on the bridge wing looking up?   What’s he monitoring?

Ten minutes earlier I’d caught Suez Canal Bridge nosing around a bend on E 1st Street in Bayonne.  That’s Caddell Dry Dock and Repair Shipyard over on the far side.

Six weeks ago she actually was at the north end of the Suez Canal,

and now she’s headed for a portal that turns 80 this month, the Bayonne Bridge, dedicated on November 13, 1931. For the next 46 years, vessels passing here like Suez Canal Bridge–escorted by Maurania III and Amy C McAllister–could say

they were passing beneath the longest single arch steel bridge

in the world.

In 1977 the New Gorge Bridge took that distinction from the Bayonne Bridge.  See what the New Gorge Bridge looks like here, and that was in turn eclipsed by the Lupu Bridge.

Some vessels traversing this waterway and squeezing under this arch may in fact know the Lupu Bridge.

Anyone have fotos to share of tugboats on the Huangpu in Shanghai?

Maurania III churns the waters to turn Suez Canal Bridge the 90-plus degrees into Newark Bay at Bergen Point.

By the way, the Lupu Bridge is itself no longer than longest steel arch bridge in the world, a distinction that now belongs to the Chaotienmen Bridge.

All fotos by Will Van Dorp.