You are currently browsing the tag archive for the ‘gallivant’ tag.
“The road” begins with the first step out of the house, and here . . . before leaving Brooklyn . . . I saw it and knew exactly what it was . . . Michael J McAllister towing a hefty load of containers between the sixth boro and Norfolk.
And I knew the tug because Birk Thomas had just sent me this one–taken Saturday?–of Michael J. Thanks much, Birk.
Farther down the road but still in NYC, I followed this truck, which introduced me to these metal sculptures of Fritz Cass.
A few hours out . . . I had a glimpse of this truck . . . clearly delivering catfish, although . . . Great Dane!
Great Dane FISH. Maybe they deliver dogfish as well.
And before we got to Harrisburg, this beautiful (late 40s??) Plymouth suggests we’ve . . . turned a corner in time maybe.
And now . . . from Tennessee, where it might the 30s . . .
Here are tugster-takes on car-carrying ferries off North Carolina, on Champlain, and in the tropics.
And this is likely a Forks ferry entering the Upper Bay in the fog a few years back, almost invisible. Long Island has a plethora of ferry companies.
It seems from Shelter Island north you take a ferry of one company, like Menantic here or Manhasset or another, which I conclude is built way south, and
from Shelter Island south you take a ferry like Sunrise built farther north. I need to get back to the Forks of Long Island to find out more.
Since Islander seems a fairly generic name for ferries, I’ve yet to find any specifics of this one, on the hard in Greenport.
All fotos by Will Van Dorp, who has failed to find a complete listing of Forks ferries on the internet.
By the way, I itching to gallivant soon . . . inland to Nola, then up the Mississippi to Vicksburg to . . . St Louis and then zigzag back to the east coast, provided that storms stay elsewhere.
I took this foto in August 2010, here with my back to Anthony’s Nose. Any guesses about the vintage of this chubby people mover?
Here’s a foto I took yesterday in Greenport of
this Morehead, NC veteran of WW1!!!
At the same locstion, I took this foto. Anyone know what manufacturer this beauty is, frontal and
stern view.
And from inside the post-Sandy rebuilt Scrimshaw restaurant, I’d love to know what vessel
this figurehead once graced.
All fotos by Will Van Dorp.
I lived near Cape Ann for most of the last 15 years of the 20th century, and have to get back now and then.
Few places in the US are as connected to the water as Cape Ann, whether it be churches in Gloucester,
small business icons in Rockport,
or National Endowments for the Arts winners for the oldest profession (really) in Essex.
I was in Gloucester too short this time to meet up with recent friends there, but old friends welcomed me back, like Mount Agamenticus here looming behind the Isles of Shoals and the Boon Island Light, visible but not pictured . . .
as did Thatcher Island.
All fotos this weekend by Will Van Dorp.
I’d seen McFarland before . . . once at the dock stern out and another time anchored in the middle of the night on Delaware Bay, lit up like a parking lot. I’m so thrilled that I’ll run a series of her . . . .starting with the USACE dredge passing Pac Alnath.
A first sighting for me . . . Charles Burton.
Back to McFarland . . . one of four ocean-going hopper dredges operated by the USACE. Can you name the other three?
. . . Nanticoke and Peter F. Gellatly, both pushing Vane barges.
Huge turntable on McFarland.
Chief . . . I believe the 1979 built vesel.
From this USACE publication, I like this statistic: a full load of dredged materials McFarland carries equals the capacity of 310 dump trucks.
Just before sunrise, she steamed by . . . and passed B. Franklin Reinauer in the city of Benjamin Franklin himself.
All fotos by Will Van Dorp.
The other three dredges are Wheeler, Essayons, and Yaquina. For comparison info about the four, click here. For Bert Visser’s directory with fotos of all the large dredgers in the world, click here.
For a post on Delaware River tugs from 2010, click here. What I’d like to see one of these days is the loading of livestock down in Wilmington. Currently, Falconia is at the dock; I saw her from the highway on Friday.
Seeing and riding SS Badger is a goal that’s been acomplished, a pilgrimage made. And I will return to more fotos of Badger soon, but along the road we looked for nirvana, too. Nirvana, Michigan . . . it’s a place name on my road atlas, and unsuccessfully I looked for a post office and a zip code. Alas! But journeys are comprised of what unexpected places you find and take time to savor. Here are some of what can be discovered between Manitowoc (home of Sputnikfest!!) and Port Huron (home of Thomas Edison Depot Museum).
SS Badger runs on coal, transformed by an engineroom crew of 20 into torque on the twin cast steel 166″ diameter propellers.
Tourism . . . largely derived from the vessel on the welcome sign . . . buoys this town of less than 10,000.
Turn any direction, almost, and you’ll see the importance of the SS Badger and
things Michiganite in this town.
Halfway across this section of the state a billboard brought us to this bakery/coffeeshop, which appeared caught in a timewarp. Here’s the history, and here’s
a portrait of the nine guys who saved this business. And check out the paraphernalia!!
Now I’ve known the boatnerd website for a long time, but I hadn’t gathered this . . . world headquarters set within Great Lakes Maritime Center. The sixth boro needs something like this . . . maybe this will be my retirement project?? It will need a benefactor or many . . . like Dr. James C. Acheson. More on this renaissance of land once used for scrap.
I plan to do a whole post about this place, for now, let me share an artpiece inside that resonated with me. Read the name on the stickie note. I’ve already befriended a lot of nuts along the fringes of the sixth boro. And they’ve enriched my life.
I love the weathervane on the pilot station and
the exotic small boats passing by, like PonTiki and
this Sea Skiff and
this 42′ vessel–same age as Badger–named for this island,Lime Island.
Are the Great Lakes great? Greater than great, but there are too many great places for me to discover before I cease these gallivants. All fotos here by Will Van Dorp.
Sign the “save Badger” petition here. I have. Here’s the other side. Here’s an article about the other Lake ferry . . . the one out of Muskegon.
A salmon-fishing dog in a kayak being paddled by a human and tailed by a Coast Guard RIB . . . that’s intriguing, but the 50 or so folks with me at the end of the jetty were not there to greet the pooch. We were there to see the badger,
this Badger.
Badger entered service about the same year I did and
now she’s threatened, at least in her current state of being a coal-fired steam-powered ferry. For part of the year she shuttles between Ludington, MI and Manitowoc, WI . . . as she has for 60 years, but
like I said, this might be it. That’s reason enough to
take a ride, which I’m about to do. More soon from the 60-miles one-way trip between the two Lake Michigan ports.
All fotos by Will Van Dorp.
A year and a half ago, I wrote about iceboating on what I called “Lake Shangri-la . . .” The foto below appears to be a smooth frozen lake . . . although the white-hatted cowboy standing in the middle of the road might be puzzling.
And those do look like icefishing diehards with
novel ice shanties on wheels.
Drift ice on a frozen high plateau lake?
Close ups of the ice chunks?
Uh . . guy walking on water?
Except it’s almost 100 degrees out . . . and just down the road–I-80–is GSLSP aka
Great Salt Lake State Park, and one selkie who takes briny deep to extremes. Ever wonder why the word Bonneville is used in reference to places out here? Answer follows.
And that outrigger seems to float pretty high in the water.
More on this place–as salty as the stuff in your kitchen–soon. All fotos today by Will Van Dorp.
I wonder if anyone has ever tried sails on craft with runners for a Bonneville time trial . . . And “Bonnevile” was the name given to places here by Grove K. Gilbert for Benjamin Bonneville, French-born explorer of the West. If you read only one link in this post, read his biography here. I enjoyed his Washington Irving/NYC connection.
So I was an especially gullible kid who wished in vain that my parents would let me buy some sea monkeys that I saw advertised in Popular Mechanics. Never happened. Hold that thought.
Below is a foto of the Great Salt Lake. And before I came here, I’d heard that it stunk and held
no life. But how
then was it also a major bird migration path.
Doubleclick on this foto and see all the birds. And yes the water near shore was black with flies and other insects that–unlike gnats–disperse when you approach. All this brings up this
display outside Dave’s Gonzo Kayak rental on Antelope Island. To my amazement, I learned that Great Salt Lake has a fishery and this is an older, obsolete vessel used in the harvesting of brine shimp . . .
aka sea-monkeys!! Click here for a foto of a more up-to-date vessel, the likes of which I’d love to see.
Click here for a feature from High Country News on the fishery, here for the site of the GSL Brine Shrimp Cooperative, and here for some starter economics on the industry.
All fotos by Will Van Dorp.
I gather from this article sent along by Jim McCrea that the death knell has rung for ferry Binghamton. See my posts here, here, and here. Alas, and all while being listed on the NJ and US Register of Historic Places . . . so much for that. Thanks, Jim.
An end comes for everything. Of course, false ends can be confusing. When Binghamton reached the end of its ferry life, she turned night spot. Here’s a 1926 Buick turned locomotive to run mail and passengers up into the mountains.
locomotive to run mail and passengers up into the mountains
along the Utah/Colorado border.
Note the people off to the left. Water, wind, and time scour away softer parts, making strange shapes with the more resistant, and scouring
the rest. That’s the Colorado in the distance looking
to continue its sculpting of the Canyonlands into buttes and mesas.
Click here on more of the surviving galloping geese.
All fotos by Will Van Dorp.
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