Each week the New Yorker runs one new cartoon lacking a caption.  People send in their cleverness, and the winner is announced a few weeks later along with that week’s new caption contest.  But when Joel Milton sent this foto yesterday, it seemed to me a perfect image to launch a tugster caption contest.  The prize . . . recognition of your wit among your peers?  A free one-year subscription to tugster?

So, have at it.  Some background  (or dry ground in this case):  this “slip” is located between Queens and Manhattan in the East river.  The island is officially Belmont Island, but some–like me–prefer to call it U Thant Island, named for the United Nations Secretary General, who used to see it right across the stream from the UN buildings. Ironically, the speedster seems to have parked right under an arch shown in foto #2 of this very old tugster post.  Also, doubleclick on the foto to enlarge it, and you’ll see the arch is very popular place for cormorants, known for their voracious appetites, intake,  and therefore output . . . .

Caption??

The Peace Boat was in the sixth boro in June last year.  Yesterday thanks to Mage, who sent me in the direction of  Maritime Matters, I learned that earlier this month, off Yemen, the Peace Boat

outran and escaped from pirates!  Bravo.  That almost calls for a renaming of the vessel.  Any ideas?

The rest of this post is devoted to enigmas.  Like . . . anyone know this monument aka denkmal?  Answer follows.

This drooling clamshell could engulf my car.  Guess the location?

This weather foto–I’ll call the weather stunning if not the foto–makes predictions easy.  Vessel is Escort, moving coal into the Hackensack river.

At the point I took this foto, I had figured out the talent, but initially I rubbed my eyes and panicked about the cruel effects of aging.

And this last foto . . . it’s a family foto and I’m looking to identify the year and make of car.  The man on the left is my great-grandfather, not a citizen of this country, but the foto was taken somewhere in the Dakotas in the 1930s.  Please, make and model?

All fotos except the first and last by Will Van Dorp.  Thanks to Joel for foto and Mage for lead.

The denkmal .  .  is a propeller of Intrepid, the carrier, CV-11.   Which reminds me:  the fleet arrives on Wednesday this week.  And the dredging was happening (seems always to be happening) in the Manhattan Passenger Terminal, where dredging is always happening.