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I’ve not used this title since May. But Mary K. Adella begs some well-deserved attention.
At this site, Ken Brockway, owner and builder, has thoroughly documented the creation of his vessel. The only thing I didn’t find was the origin of the steamer’s name. Thank for the site, Ken; it could serve as an inspiration for someone looking to take on a project for several years. Small craft maybe, but big accomplishment.
Hestia, written about here and in other posts, glanced over at a kindred spirit whenever Mary K. Adella passed, breathing heavily, as only steamers can. The green work boat got some attention here.
Earlier in September, I caught this foto of William H working over near the Tappan Zee Bridge. For more, click here and scroll about 3/4 through, enjoying all the other survey boats along the way.
Last one, I looked long and hard at the boat name on this white fiberglass stern–HOTel cORAL esSEX–and just didn’t get it. It didn’t work for me; I thought it was the name of a place or a song.
Win a few, lose a few …. oh well. I suppose whoever writes this on a boat doesn’t get it either.
All fotos by Will Van Dorp.
Thirteen months ago I last used this title; it seems summer appropriate. Look carefully at the foto below and the one that follows.
Same or different? Barbara McAllister gives portside assist.
The huge orange Eagle Beaumont is in both fotos, but the 40′ Coast Guard boats . . . look at the numbers on the bow, one ending in 50 and the other 81.
Dolphin III had a group of divers over the side. That’s Sea Raven in the background.
Seeing a cutter suction head emerge from the water might make me afraid to dive, but dredge vessel Florida
only raised it to have some dental
work performed by the crew on the barge attached to Brangus. More Brangus soon, since there seems to be some new equipment mounted to the visor (hard to see) that reminds me of sport at Pamplona.
Hoegh Pusan hangs on the hook as
Laura K heads out to meet an assist.
I can’t recall seeing the crew boat Alert before yesterday, or
Little Giant.
Parting shot of Heron.
I really am back. More sixth boro fotos tomorrow.
All fotos taken Wednesday morning by Will Van Dorp.
FireFighter at the Narrows, Fort Wadsworth side . . . rainbow effect of spray . . . must be doins’ … big stuff going on or about to . . . .
Waiting on the Fort Hamilton (Brooklyn) side, I espy a huge shape some five or six miles off, here between FDNY’s not-yet-in-service 343 and the venerable Driftmaster. Iwo Jima (Mississippi-built) has returned! See fotos I took on board last year here.
The first fleet vessel through the Narrows was PC-4, Monsoon, Louisiana-built, commissioned in 1994, here passing Ellen McAllister. Scroll through this link to see a sampling of fotos of Monsoon‘s adventures.
Next visitor in was WMEC 909, Campbell, the sixth cutter to bear that name, here with helicopter above and USACE vessels all around, from left, Moritz, (I believe that’s the stern of Dobrin … barely visible), Driftmaster, and Gelberman. Campbell’s homeport is Portsmouth, NH. See a previous appearance of Campbell on this blog here… last foto).
Next in, sibling of Monsoon . . . was Squall, commissioned in same year and state.
As Iwo Jima approached the Verrazano Bridge, a gun salute from Fort Hamilton drew
Iwo Jima‘s response. By the way, the bit of land on the lower left side of the foto above is Hendrick’s Reef, on which the Brooklyn pillar of the Verrazano Bridge stands, an island that from 1812 until 1960 housed Fort Lafayette. I wonder which Hendrick that was.
Ellen McAllister followed Iwo Jima in. Is that Catherine Turecamo over on Iwo Jima‘s port side?
Next in was DDG 95, destroyer James E. Williams, named for a sailor who served in both Korea and Vietnam. Read about her namesake here.
Then it was FFG 45, frigate De Wert, named for a sailor who died in Korea in 1951.
And then Bath, Maine-built CG 58, Philippine Sea.
Closer up . . . I can’t identify the Coast Guard 47-footer other than 47315. By the way, see this type vessel’s capabilities as filmed in the mouth of the Merrimack River in all its fury. The Merrimack was my obsession during part of the 80s and all of the 90s.
I didn’t see where Miriam Moran assisted (probably up at the Hudson River passenger terminal) but a while later I caught her headed to home base as Laura K. was out to Red Hook for an assist. Check out the two crew on the afterdeck.
Hmm . . . I wonder what the story is.
All fotos by Will Van Dorp.
By the way, “Government Ships 5″ is the short title; a longer version is “Their crews and all those sixth-boro based supporters.”
Welcome to New York.
A century ago, a parade of ships featured the Cruiser Olympia, now in very real danger of being reefed.
Staten Island Live has an excellent schedule of events planned the next few days on Staten Island, where most of the fleet vessels are berthed. See the schedule here.
Final note: I plan to cross the Merrimack aka “merry mack” tomorrow headed north for some canoeing. See foto here. The Pow Wow flows into the Merrimack.
Small working craft serve a host of functions, as observed in the fotos below. I witnessed an interesting gesture involving the New Jersey State Police below, which gave me great respect for the trooper at the helm. You’ll have to scroll through to the bottom to learn what happened, though.
OK, so this is probably not a work boat today, but deep down inside its skin it’s still a 1929 Coast Guard self-righting lifeboat, and I’d see its function as raising the spirit of its owner . . . it would surely raise mine if I were galloping about on clear days in it.
But so many other functions are played by small craft in a harbor like the sixth boro that sees almost constant traffic of nearly 1000-footers. Clean-ups,
miscellaneous services,
surveying aka reading the invisible contours of the old river’ thoughts, (In foreground is SSG-577 aka Growler, hardly deterring the approach of an unidentified but intrepid orange survey boat that has appeared on this blog previously.)
rescue and small-boat towing,
and more clean-ups,
and more surveying,
fishing,
assisting in dock construction as platforms and –very important–catcher of dropped tools.
That’s it for now. So, the story of the State Trooper. While I watched NYK Rigel getting backed out to sea on Thursday, I saw this small RIB boat racing northbound on the Arthur Kill, not an unusual sight. Inexplicably (to me) the trooper throttled back. I had seen a speck in the water just at that moment, but it was too small to make out. After a quarter minite or so, the trooper throttled back up and disappeared into Newark Bay. As the speck approached my position, I began to distinguish two Canada geese, swimming quite slowly toward me. Then, there was something between the two. There it was . . . two goose parents with two goslings, the tiniest Canadas I have ever seen. I know that not everyone is thrilled by Canadas or any other goose or duck proliferation, but my hat goes off to the trooper for spotting them and making to effort to not swamp the young’uns. There should be an sixth boro version of Make Way for the Ducklings, in which all manner of shipping from small craft to tankers to tugboats can put the deadlines aside to . . . make way.
I’ll leave it to you to wonder whether I got too much sun yesterday.
All fotos by Will Van Dorp.
Related: Scroll this joan sol’s post here and watch the video on trying to capsize a well-designed and constructed small craft.
A little more watercolor from yesterday . . . the rainbow injects magic into what otherwise might just be distant Brooklyn waterfront, Clipper City, and a Staten Island ferry.
Here’s what creates the conditions for a rainbow.
Color on water, this time reflecting a certain survey boat with unique paint loss patterns.
You will notice an apparent repetitiveness in the next set of fotos of Frying Pan over at Pier 66 Maritime–my favorite place on the Manhattan waterfront, except not
really. The evanescent colored shapes so took me that I just keep shooting as
Harvey‘s propwash made ripples and
swirls and pulsations and
teases, glimpses of LV-115 Frying Pan‘s chartreuse hairy nether parts.
All was fine until I imagined what other situations exist that colors the
waters this living red or
rusty, risky brown .
All fotos by Will Van Dorp.
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.
Where I’m steering here most corresponds to the second post in this series, Coexistence 2. On an ideal day, all traffic gets along, sorts itself out. Big steel and small steel keep clear of one another, again
and again, no matter what the direction or
cargo or time of hitch or
commercial alliance or lack thereof, or
speed for whatever the purpose . . . understandings get articulated, negotiated, and agreed upon.
But then without warning and from out of nowhere, the wild jumps
in. The beast, driven by terror of the predator and the mindless urge to mate, dives in
as members of its species have for millenia. Some have always made it, wild and unfettered. But now the environment has
changed; rules and conditions altered. And intervention happens or
doesn’t.
Many thanks to Bill Bensen for the three fotos of the deer. For the record, Bill took these fotos about three weeks ago although it may be the same buck that jumped in this week. For more of Bill’s fotos of animals of the harbor, click here.
Other fotos by Will Van Dorp. Info on the vessels in the fotos: Foto 1: Bro Albert is a Maersk product tanker with an unidentified McAllister tug in the distance. Foto 2: Marie J. Turecamo and Kimberly Turecamo pirouette parcel tanker Stolt Vanguard out to sea. Foto 3: from near to far, Taft Beach, Captain D, and ATB Pati R. Moran moves the barge Charleston with assist from an unidentified Moran tug. Foto 4: near to far is Davis Sea and Java Sea.
Related: I included the tug Dolphin above as an attempt to broaden the term, given Bowsprite’s recent treat (treatise?) on inanimate harbor “animal” life.
One day Atlantic Coast moves the scow, and the next it moves what would scoop sixth-boro-bottom into the scow.
Michele Jean does pre- and post-dredging surveying.
An eight-leg stand bucket (?) in autumn light is as beautiful as a spring daffodil about to open, a bud just quivering with excitement.
Fin Kennedy has its niche.
More buckets . . . er quivering petals.
Red Rogers has its niche.
Bowsprite’s favorite is the cutter head, fierce though it be.
See the fine print on the hull midships . . . it’s another survey boat.
and two barges loaded with buckets and cranes over by Atlantic Salt. More on this soon.
Not a very good foto of Seis Surveyor, but I did catch it as an unusual profile about a mile and a half away. Read all about this transient here. Here are her fleet siblings.
All fotos by Will Van Dorp. Note: all these fotos were taken in about a four-hour period over two days in the past week. More dredging than typical in fall?
I wonder if Little Richard would substitute “dredgin’” for “shakin,’” THE anthem of the dredging world then.
If you want to see some of the 92,754 steps in building one of the world’s largest dredgers, click here for Leiv Eiriksson.
Lord Byron’s poem “She walks in Beauty” might eventually be parodied rather updated in this post. If you’ll click on this link, you’ll get the entire poem AND a Botticelli Venus. I admit I had a long discussion with Botticelli about this work while he was creating it: have her turn around, I pleaded. Oh well. I long ago gave up trying to argue with Sandro’s about anything. Meanwhile, seeing how bows got us to Dolly Parton, who knows how an examination of sterns might lead, how it could descend . . . or rise.
The name’s the thing sometimes like here or
here: behold ex-Jaguar.
Sure, it’s fuel barge bow but a survey stern.
Look upon ex-Exxon Empire State. Why is Responder on recycling duty so much?
uh . . . ? Anyone help? [Thanks to Jeff and James: Psara meaning "of fish."]
Check out Doris Moran and Cable Queen. Anyone know the Cable Queen story?
Catch a glimpse of Ruth M. Reinauer, class of 2009.
Drool over John J. Harvey. By the way, to learn more about this legendary fireboat, come hear author Jessica DuLong read at Atlantic Gallery on October 21, or read her book My River Chronicles. I immensely enjoyed it.
Relish the lines on what for 40ish years has been the sixth boro’s very own mostly stay-at-home some of the time flat-bottom, Pioneer.
Marvel at Maryland, as she wonders about this island. Yeah, and wanders about it, too.
Oh . . . posteriors. Send in your favorite.
All fotos by Will Van Dorp.
By the way, Patricia Ann bounced me around quite a bit, I hung on, but I haven’t seen her since.
When tugs race on Sunday, government boats will officiate. Here are a few players.
When Liberty IV splashed into her element in 1989 at the Washburn & Doughty yard in East Boothbay, ME, she began a career that she still occupies: to ferry Park Service employees and supplies from the “mainland” to several stops in the sixth boro archipelago, i.e., Liberty Island and Ellis Island. Besides bearing a heritage relationship with such diverse vessels as Pati T. Moran, Shearwater, and Black Knight, she also carries a unique escutcheon on her stern.
Does anyone have fotos of Liberty I or II or III? Would Liberty I be sail or steam?
John D. McKean, foto taken one sunset a few weeks back, started service in 1954, first splashing into the waters in Camden at John H. Mathis, the same yard that built Mary Whalen!
A Perth Amboy Fire boat zipped eastward in the KVK last month. That’s K-Sea Baltic Sea in the background.
USACE Moritz, in hurry toward Newark Bay last week. Moritz comes from Kvichak Industries, soon
disappeared round the bend at Bergen Point.
Other recent fotos of government boats include this ones entrusted to Union County (New Jersey) Police,
and New Jersey State Police.
Finally, certainly NOT a government boat, but a German ship that has vessels that experiment with alternative propulsion. Foto was taken by bowsprite from her cliff last week. Did anyone catch the name?
Finally, as of Wednesday morning writing, Flinterduin will approach the Narrows near dusk tonight and start offloading tomorrow at dawn. And I have to be at work . . . from dusk today until dawn Friday . . . maybe I can sneak away to do tugster’s bidding.
All fotos here by Will Van Dorp.
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