Backing Down

When Laura K. and Margaret appear like this . . . it can only mean one thing .  . .

Laura  turns into the dock at the stern of Glasgow Express, herinafter Glex, and

Margaret, with her hull-paint-besmirched-fenders, goes forward.  Ship-shifting looms.

The blue helmet in the bowels of Glex throws a heaving line to Laura‘s deck and a tow line gets made.

 Notice the froth forward of Laura as Glex gets muscled away from the dock and the incoming tide works the stern into the stream.

By now Glex flexes all that kW to reverse all its 921 feet loa and 41 draft, backing down toward Bergen Point.  See the bubbles. Meanwhile, below,  Margaret works as a massive bow thruster

and Laura a stern thruster

The  value of low house design and folding mast on Margaret is apparent.

Meanwhile, below, Turecamo Girls witnesses and maybe commands the maneuver, as Glex begins a rotation to the east and heads to sea.  Turecamo Girls, as a name,  begs for its own post.

“Backing down” as Glex does it with the Moran tugs assistance, and

“backing down” in other life’s struggles carry different and conflicting associations.  What Glex does here has nothing to do with lost resolve.  Similar divergent meanings accompany “backing out,” which would describe this reverse maneuver on land.  Sometimes these multiple meanings of words and phrases in English lead me to wonder how we understand each other as well as we do.

And back to the Pitch post question, maybe I’ll be back tomorrow with my answer.

All fotos, unless otherwise attributed, by Will Van Dorp.