Ashore

on Hell Beach.  I don’t feel comfortable telling the location or identity.  All are safe, but

heart-broken.

It’s not just about the loss of a large steel Colvin pinky schooner.  Rather it’s

about lost dreams, abandoned hopes, and disappointment.  One moment is glorious, and the next days and weeks will be wrenching pain.

All fotos taken today by Will Van Dorp.

Here’s a woefully inadequate “just the facts, mam” from Long Island News.  Here are more sordid details . . .  failure to keep watch seems the likely cause.

Here’s more . . . with a fairly extensive set of pics along with a historical context.

OK . . . here’s the vessel.

Blount Global 2

Not quite two weeks ago I did my first post of Blount-built boats in far flung places.  Read it here;  a list of sixth boro Blount vessels appears at the end.

Now I’m thrilled to put up these fotos, generously sent by Julie Blount, executive vice president of Blount Boats, Inc.  This is the launch of Blount’s cargo vessel  Kasai, 1960, bound for

the huge  inland waterways of the Congo.

Unrelated but what you might see on the inland waterways of central Africa could include MV Liemba, the second oldest operating steam ship in the world.  MV Liemba is the  ex-Graf von Götzen built 1912 in Papenburg, Germany on the Ems River, taken apart, and reassembled on the banks of Lake Tanganyika) . See this fine fine video trailer of MV Liemba underway.

Gratuitous foto of an interesting Blount vessel Sailor, taken on the Delaware River south of Philly last summer, and

one of Twin Tube provisioning Songa Emerald taken in the sixth boro last week.  Fire Island Ferries operates over a half dozen Blount boats.

Back to Blount’s Kasai, I wonder where it is today.  For an interesting set of fotos of Congo River system vessels from the time of Joseph Conrad until the relative present, click here.  The last shot of the skeletal remains of a steam vessel on a riverbank is haunting.

Thanks again to Julie Blount for the two fotos from the Blount archives.  The last two fotos by Will Van Dorp.