Given the title, what do you think happened?  By 6 a.m., all six tugboats were assembled, looking almost like the start of a tugboat race.

By 6:30, Maverick was in position.

Good progress was happening with loading, but we struggled to find the best position for ourselves . . .  relative to the sunlight.  Staten Island offered proximity, yet Brooklyn offered the

best light, assuming we would take fotos from land.   We opted for proximity, shooting from the grounds of Alice Austen‘s house, an appropriate enough site given Alice’s role in local history.    For light, though, shooting from Vane Brothers’ Bohemia would have been a radically better position . . . or

that helicopter or that McAllister boat, Girls . . . I believe.    But position is even more important for the cargo, the tugboats being loaded for sea.

When Blue Marlin rose . . . perhaps to test whether the boats had positioned themselves well in the cradles, first Maverick and then

John shifted.  Indeed, this is starting to seem too similar to the movie . . .

By noon today, Blue Marlin had submerged again to right the tugs, and then . . . like the condemned in a twice-stayed execution, the tugs were

repositioned back to the yard to await the next attempt to complete this loading.   Meanwhile, given yesterday’s post, it was a treat to

see this display of Maltese Falcon swooping form Chelsea Piers on the North River, all 289′ loa heeled over as she slalomed between the vessels in the anchorage.  How fast . . . 15 knots?

All fotos by Will Van Dorp, who . . . like Bill Murray in the film, gets another chance to figure  stuff out.  It occurs to me, though, that sailing vessels should lean, whereas the same is NOT true of tugboats.