Blogging can be like fishing. I might intend to catch blues but a frisky striper would delight me too. On the water I fotograf what I see on a given day, but I also read the blogs listed to the left. As I drank coffee this morning, my inspiration time, I stumbled across this foto. Aha! I thought, I’ll postpone my latest Alice ramble–she approaches, as Ahab would say of the whale– a day and I can mine my library without resorting to “…the line locker” title.
I’ve wanted to use this foto since I took it a month ago to convey that container ships have no politics. Business is business, and containers from two countries that have no diplomatic relations can coexist cheek by jowl on a trans-oceanic voyage just fine. Yes, I mean the blue one and the orange one second level up.
Notice the blue writing on the white house above: it says Miss Leslie, proving that dock workers, like tugsters, seafarers and dairy farmers anthropomorphize the machines and sentient beings of their labor. Cool. Hey, I’d be eager to work with Miss Leslie any day. Know any other profession that does this?
“National mood” prohibits much fotografing inside a port, but on the right extreme of this shot is a straddler, a machine with vertically oriented frame, a motor and fingers that carry a specific container to a crane for loading aboard ship just in time. Below is a closeup of a straddler. The operator sits in the glass cabin (as shown in Scale) top middle but with his back to the port side. They speed around the container field holding containers like squirrels moving nuts to a winter cache. Their diesel engines, though, add to the particulate-dense air already in the port environs… eeek, cough, hack!
Finally, check here and here for the tanker White Sea aground off the Narrows hauling fuel not into but out of the port, half a million barrels of it. As of this posting, White Sea remains aground.
All photos by Will Van Dorp.
tugster: a waterblog 
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July 13, 2007 at 7:48 pm
suburbanlife
I can clearly understand the fascination with containers, their loading machines. These great photos show that containers are rather like large Lego, and the stripped down construction of the straddlers remind me of the marvelous Tonka trucks my son played with in the early 70s. Yes, trade transcends politics!
I’m going to show these to my painter friend Lookingforbeauty, as she has on many occasions painted the structures on our waterfront. She will find your blog as fascinating as I do!
July 14, 2007 at 8:24 am
Michael
the photo you link to is alarming. I hear periodically about containers floating around in the sea, but I’ve got to think they pose a serious navigational hazard, particularly for smaller craft but really for anyone, if huge rectangles of steel are floating “just below the surface” of the open ocean. Yikes!