Who Knew?

Rain kept me from taking the ferry the morning of the crash.  If I had, I’m not sure I’d have been on the one that left Whitehall at 9, but I could have been.  My wishes for speedy and complete healing to those hurt.  That’s Andrew J. Barberi left and (I believe) Spirit of America right.

Some surprises came out of the incident and this NYTimes article Sunday morning:  Barberi has a Voith-Schneider propulsion system!    I did two posts about a tug named Orion with this “egg-beater” drive here and here back in 2008.   When I hunted deeper, I found that four other ferries have the same propulsion:  Molinari, Newhouse, Noble, and Austen!  Click links for their namesakes;  start with Austen and work back.

Looking still farther, I learned that Barberi was not the original name for the boat.  Aldo Moro was.  Do you remember his fame and fate? What’s not clear is when the switch in names was made.

I’ve wanted to use this quote a long time . .  I guess today works:  “The only real voyage of discovery consists not in seeing new landscapes, but in having new eyes, in seeing the universe with the eyes of another, of hundreds of others, in seeing the hundreds of universes that each of them sees.”  Marcel Proust said that.  I’m working on new eyes every day;  prop wash that I see each time this passenger approaches the ferry dock never suggested Voith-Schneider drives to me.  Who knew?

All fotos by Will Van Dorp.