Dog Daze

I’m putting the link for “dog days” a la wikipedia here, but I want to quote part of what’s there: “[Dog days are] popularly believed to be an evil time “when the seas boiled, wine turned sour, dogs grew mad, and all creatures became languid, causing to man burning fevers, hysterics, and phrensies” – Brady’s Clavis Calendarium, 1813.

Well, the skies and seas frothed today. Here’s to hoping you escaped the daze enough to make sense of the foto below, taken yesterday morning.

It’s from Erie Basin, looking west past the NY Shipyard crane grayed out by that blue-yellow Swedish store, the ruins of the sugar pier, a row of water taxis, a warehouse, and the upper tip of a Manhattan-bound cruise ship approaching the Statue. How about the next one? and the next and the nexts…

It’s shot down a street (I can’t believe I fail to note the street name) in Red Hook as an unidentified cruise vessel leaves the terminal.

Recessed bitts (another more technical term??) in a car carrier hull.

Either wine turned sour or a jelly gone languid. I don’t know the type of jelly here.

Fixins’ for a very tall sour drink?

This one I really can’t identify either. Anyone help? Looks like a research vessel of some sort leaving eastern Staten Island.

Here’s a closer-up showing some gear stowed off port and a derrick. It crawled out the Narrows this morning between lightning and rain.

Photos, WVD.

Tides Rip

Stan Rogers has a song “White Squall” with a line “In a sultry summer calm, there comes a blow from nowhere, and it goes off like a bomb” about a green deckhand who gets washed off a lake freighter. He’d been lying on the hatches heedless of weather change.

I’m amazed by some people’s hubris when they continue to under-estimate “greater powers” like tide and wind after warnings are given,

forcing intervention by professionals who put themselves at risk to deal with possible consequences.

Sixth boro waters (and lots of other things) can be sweet at their mildest

and then quickly deteriorate. The challenges of wind and tide are formidable.

By the way, if you don’t know Stan Rogers, check him out here. Oh, love the name of the pilot boat “shepherding” kayakers here: Phantom.

Photos, WVD.