Who brings the salt to season the roads and highways and drivers who want to avoid skidding there?  And if you detect some family resemblance to the vessel on my first ever blog post,

a glance at the name and profile will confirm that Johanna is a sibling of Alice.  Yes, that’s Robbins Reef Lighthouse just forward of the bow.  I’ve written about Harmen, so now meet Johanna. I feel quite ignored by Alice these days, so it’s time to ignore her back and move on.  Of the three, Alice is the smallest and Harmen has the greatest tons/hour offloading capacity.

Harmen offloads 5000 tons per hour!  Johanna conveys it out at 2000 tons her hour.

Clamshell cranes reach into the hold and drop the salt

into hoppers that drain into belts that move the salt toward the main offloading arm.  Yes, that’s the Empire State Building in the lower right.

I wonder if the Oldendorff self-unloaders carry

additional crew to operate the cranes while in port. Anyone know?

While Johanna offloaded, Pati R Moran moved an oil barge eastbound.

The salt piles bulge and shrink with weather fluctuations at Atlantic Salt, last summer the home of the Salt Fest.  I hope it happens again this year.

All fotos here by Will Van Dorp.

Unrelated except by geography, here’s a story I just learned of related to a spill of Congolese uranium on the north shore of Staten Island back more than 50 years ago.  No matter how long ago a half century may seem for us, in uranium half-life terms (millions of years depending on the particular isotope) it’s an instant.     Can anyone help me identify  the name of the ship that delivered the uranium from Matadi to New York.