You are currently browsing the monthly archive for July 2011.
Today marks the end of the four-day historic ship festival and the official opening of Pier 25. Friday and Saturday I worked on Pegasus. Click on that link and you can find details of her history, starting from her inception as Standard Oil No. 16, including a time when she sported the flying horse on her stack. 1907 was a recurring number in the history-oriented tour: the date of Pegasus launch in Baltimore and the date of the opening of the Kenneth M. Murchison-designed Hoboken terminal of the Erie Lackawanna Railroad.
Drydock tug Hoboken dates from 1963, but
Yankee ferry, the only surviving Ellis Island ferry, entered service in 1907. Click here for much more about the Philadelphia-built Yankee.
Here’s a view of Union Dry Dock & Repair company . . . from Pegasus.
Also giving tours on the water was the historic John J. Harvey. Type Harvey into the search window on this blog and you’ll see more fotos I’ve taken over the past five years.
Folks including me took fotos of Harvey from Pegasus, just as folks on Harvey zoomed in on us. In the cowboy hat, it’s Mitch . . . of Newtown Pentacle.
Over 150 folks enjoyed a FREE!@#@! Hudson River ride on Pegasus Saturday. Lucky them!! I’m just saying . . . this is a rare treat, and you could make it less rare by joining in this way or that. FYI . . . the engine burns about 35 gallons per hour, if I recall correctly.
If you’re in or around the sixth boro tomorrow, you may see this scene above. I took that foto about a month ago.
All fotos by Will Van Dorp, who yesterday befriended MV Algolake. a bonafide facebooking, literate ore carrier! Be the first among your FB friends to befriend an ore carrier; for me it’s therapeutic, helping me forget the bulk carrier Alice that has made distance between us!!
Viking and the nose
Captain D (whom I saw first about two years ago) and Miss Gill
Quantico Creek (I almost made the launch) and Bohemia (also from about two years ago)
Kristin Poling and Crystal Cutler
Miss Gill . . . aka “mace gale”
Bohemia (I crossed the river there two weeks ago on Rte 213) and Viking
Kimberly Poling, who had a different paint scheme here two and four years ago. I like the new colors more than the previous.
Dace Reinauer (and its previous profiles and livery)
All fotos in the past two weeks by Will Van Dorp.
If you need to feel chilled, look in on Issuma, lover of cold sailing.
But first, some odds ‘n ends. It looks like this is the same inflatable that appeared in the squall fotos here a few days back . . . Also, it appears that the destination for the cattle transported by Shorthorn Express is Bandirma, Turkey, a hundred of so miles southwest of Istanbul. Further, in the wee hours into this Sunday, Angus Express may arrive in the sixth boro, although I’m not sure sunrise will still find her here. Can a Jersey Express be far behind, not that Jersey would suggest similar bovinity. And given this list, over 900 cattle variety names are waiting for adoption by this fleet.
VHF mention of Grey Shark “bound for sea” thrilled me yesterday; I’d caught glimpses of her several times, the earliest about four years ago here. And I’d seen vehicles lined up on various quais waiting to load her, but I’d never seen her loaded before.
She’s (ex-Fast Navigator) not that old, but
she certainly needs some paint, especially
forward.
Her visible cargo is
an assortment of cars and trucks all bound–I believe–for Saint-Marc,
All fotos by Will Van Dorp, who found these stories interesting in the NYTimes this morning: Hudson River sewage, Bronx River baptism, and Herkimer “dig-yer-own” diamonds.
On July 25, I gave a presentation to New York Ship Lore and Model Club along with Rick Spilman, Carolina Salguero, Jonathan Atkin, and Ed Fanuzzi. Here is my slide show. Enjoy!
Click the “full screen” button to view a larger format and manually control slide-advance speed.
I previously posted on Blue Marlin in “Like Groundhog Day 1–6.” I plan to leave this post on the left sidebar of the blog for a while. And keep your eyes open: Blue Marlin should return to the sixth boro within a week for Load #2.
All fotos here were taken by Scot Surbeck and come thanks to Julian Marsano, who blogs as PioneerSailing. The moral of the story is that extreme weather can move in quickly, as happened two weeks ago when a squall galloped into the sixth boro at 30 mph, bringing in 45+ mph gusts. Manhattan Sailing School J-24s were racing in regular midweek evening regatta under the flag of Manhattan Sailing Club. Gusts hit Great Republic first, the boat with GR on the sail, knocking her flat.
With no warning, safety talks had to translate into immediate action.
Great Republic sank to the bottom of the harbor. No one was hurt.
Read Julian’s reflections here. So even on the Dead Sea, be alert and practiced.
Thanks much to Julian for these pics and this story.
Unrelated entirely, thanks to Matt Soundbounder for this youtube showing F/V Miss China shredded. Here’s a foto of Miss China five years earlier still commercially viable.
I could have called this “other peoples fotos,” but these are also quite unusual. Foto below comes many thanks to John Watson. According to John, it anchored off Bay Ridge for less than 12 hours yesterday to bunker. The last time this blog touched on livestock of the bovine sort was the post Cows in CATS. What I know about the vessel follows at the end of this post.
Foto below comes thanks to Capt. Stig Samuelsson. Take your guesses and locate the info below. I cropped Stig’s foto slightly to obscure a giveaway.
Finally, I put in this foto that I took on Sunday: this is a classy little cabin cruiser out of New Jersey. I posted a foto of it last year as well . .. I have no idea about the name or manufacturer, but my guess is that it was built within a 30ish mile radius of the sixth boro.
Answers: John’s foto shows Shorthorn Express; as of this writing, it’s headed up Delaware Bay, probably to Wilmington. And it’ll load cows for Turkey. Anyone get fotos along the way to Wilmington? Shipspotting offers a dozen fotos, including several showing the vessel–scrapped 20 years ago–that previously bore this name. What’s clear on those fotos is the elaborate ventilation system needed to keep the “shorthorns” happy during the passage.
Stig’s foto shows Harry, a tug built in 1887 as steam tug Stora Korsnäs 1. According to Stig, Stora Korsnäs 1 was typical of tugs used to tow lumber along the coasts of northern Sweden. She currently runs as a museum with a volunteer crew. If you can’t read this, you can at least look at fotos. It’s based halfway between Oslo and Goteborg and right across the water from the northern tip of Denmark. Click here for a youtube of Harry underway.
Sad news: Lady Jane MAY be not long for this world.
Lady Jane is 1963-Belgium built North Sea trawler looking a lot like Wanderbird and Cape Race. Tim Zim (whom I met when he visited the sixth boro a half year ago … see seventh foto here) has been restoring her for seven years, but recently hauled her and learned the hull was more corroded than he had thought. He wants to give up . . . he says in the post. But, I’m wondering if you could get a second opinion. A friend who read Tim’s July 25, 2011 post recalled that LV-118 aka Lightship Overfalls was in worse condition and was brought back. Details in that link about the “restoration miracle.” Please drop Tim an email with encouragement and (even better) technical advice.
Previous pilot boat fotos show vessels of Interport Pilots here, Chesapeake pilots here, Charleston harbor here, Newport here, and New York areas ones here. Below, Sandy Hook Pilots vessel Yankee heads out two months back when Blue Marlin lingered in the harbor; on or about August 4 Blue Marlin will return.
The white speck in front of the Yonkers sugar plant is a Hudson River Pilot, operating out of Station Yonkers. Universal Amsterdam offloads sugar while the nearer vessel, Ocean Titan, prepares to accept a pilot as it heads upriver .
Outside Mayport Naval Station, a pilot steps from the outbound vessel onto the pilot vessel.
St Johns River Bar Pilot heads out to meet an incoming container vessel CSAV Loncomilla.
On the eastern tip of Dodge Island, vessels of Biscayne Bay Pilot wait.
Vessel Biscayne returns to the station between Miami Beach’s South Pointe Park and Fisher Island.
Vessel below was docked on the Key West waterfront; this is all I could find on pilot boats here.
Vessels of Schaefer Pilot Transfer Service–Miss Kitty and Betty S--tie up at the shack under the Rte 213 bridge over the C & D Canal.
Scroll thru to see fotos of the launches in service near the end of this link.
…. which brings us back to the sixth boro.
All fotos by Will Van Dorp.
Here’s a 20-year-old article about Sandy Hook pilots from the NYTimes.
From today’s Times, here’s an article about a canoe trip on the Salish Sea and one about a veritable NYC monster, a 200-ton cutterhead in … er . . under . . . the town.
Enjoy this wild pilot compilation. And another.
And here’s a whole blog devoted to pilots.
The sixth boro welcomed me back this morning with Eddie R (1971) pulling an unusual tow, Caldwell Marine International‘s barge U 860. Rich technical info on the barge can be found on pp. 6–15 of this link.
Thrusters at all four corners of the barge are connected into the dynamic positioning system.
Eddie R, registered in Southport, ME to Interport Towing and Transportation, is fleetmate to Lucinda Smith.
The “rustoleum brown” structure on the left side of the foto might be the cable “tank.”
Note the two stern thrusters and two of four anchors. On the foto below and the the two that follow, notice
the curved
“overboard chute,” which guides the cable from the tank and into the water.
Later in the morning, I noticed the unit over on the Brooklyn side. Besides “laying cable,” I haven’t figured the details.
All fotos this morning by Will Van Dorp.
Some follow-up on yesterday’s post about Hemingway’s Pilar, built by Wheeler in Brooklyn . . here are addtional Wheeler fotos.
And seeing the “old” small freighters in Miami made me wonder whatever became of MV Golden Venture, which came ashore on Rockaway Beach in June 1993 with almost 300 illegal immigrants from China. Well it was renamed United Caribbeanand then reefed in the Boca Raton Inlet in August 2000. Wanna see it? You have to dive 70′ now.
Some previous posts with lighthouses can be seen here, here and here, but more hide in the archives of this blog.
Question: any guesses what/where this structure is? Answer follows.
Dry Tortugas Light on Loggerhead Key–three miles from Fort Jefferson– first illuminated navigators in 1858, this month 143 years ago.
This National Park Service pdf about Loggerhead Key details its interesting history since the 1819 Adams-Onis Treaty, when La Florida was transformed Spanish to United States territory.
.
The first light in the Dry Tortugas-a place to stock up on turtle meat-was first lit in 1826, but according to the tour guide, that brick light tower was razed in 1877 because its location too often directed approaching vessels over reefs to their doom.
Fort Jefferson-the unfinished coastal fortress also known as the second largest masonry structure on Earth (after the Great Wall of China)–would never have been started if the US government had heeded the 1825 recommendation of US Navy Commodore David Porter (adoptive father of the future Admiral David G. Farragut!!) because of its lack of fresh water and stable bedrock for foundations. Four years later, the US government accepted the recommendation of the next Commodore–John Rodgers–and began construction of the structure that failed in the ways Porter predicted and was obsolete before it approached completion.
By the way, Porter had an intriguing career, including being prisoner of both the Barbary pirates (1803-5) and the British Navy (1814) but also Captain of US naval vessels, court-martialee after his unauthorized invasion of Fajardo, commander-in-chief of the Mexican Navy (1826-29), and US ambassador to the Barbary States and Turkey. Imagine someone trying to do those things in that order today.
In the foto below, notice the different colored bricks.
The iron light tower built into a wall of Fort Jefferson served from 1877 until 1912.
The bricks of different colors reflect the origin of the brick: again . . . according to the tour guide, bricks produced in the South before the Civil War have resisted time well. After 1861, bricks came here from Maine (!) and have fared less well in this climate.
If you imagine you see window air conditioners where guns should be, you are NOT imagining that. National Park Service employees live inside the Fort and have added contemporary creature comforts.
Dry Tortugas is 70 miles west of Key West; only six miles out is Sand Key Light, shimmering astern of Western Union beyond the green buoy.
Key West Light–through various remodelings– has stood here since 1847.
Less than a block away is the house where Hemingway lived in the 1930s.
You might call it a “cat house” today, where the dozens of poly-toed cats have names like Picasso and Dickinson and Truman . . .
A mariner who shall remain nameless claims to have briefly sat in Hemingway’s chair and typed on his keys. Well, be advised . . . that’s just not possible any more.
Time for a few Hemingway quotes? “There is no rule on how to write. Sometimes it comes easily and perfectly; sometimes it’s like drilling rock and then blasting it out with charges.” And “The best way to find out if you can trust somebody is to trust them.”
But check out this title! I’d imagined he’d say something like “There is no way to make good pictures . . . the best way to make them is . . . to make them.”
At least Hemingway had taste in naming his boat . . . which I hope to see some day, not easy to do because Pilar is at Finca Vigia in Cuba. More fotos here. Pilar was once in Brooklyn! Brooklyn’s Wheeler Shipyard (I believe it was in or near the Navy Yard) made out a bill of sale to the writer on April 18, 1934 for a “38-foot twin cabin Playmate cruiser” with “one [75 hp] Chrysler Crown reduction gear engine” and “4-cylinder Lycoming straight drive engine” for trolling for a grand total of $7455. For a thread on a discussion board related to Pilar, click here. Pilar was Hemingway’s q-boat.
My question is this: How did Pilar get from Brooklyn to Key West? Did someone make a delivery by water? Ship? Train? And does anyone know if Valhalla, Pilar’s sistership, has been restored after its accidental sinking in 2007?
So that first building . . . here’s the rest of it as seen from Jacksonville Beach. It’s the 1946-built Art Deco life saving station, not a lighthouse at all. A beauty though.
All fotos by Will Van Dorp.
Beat the heat . .. by imagining change: well, eastriver suggested the sixth boro annex the Conch Republic. Hmmm. Since the sixth boro is an archipelago like the Keys, maybe we could confederate the American archipelagos (besides the two already mentioned, we’d join with the Thimble Islands, the Thousand Islands, the Channel Islands, the Salish Islands, and maybe establish diplomatic relations with all archipelagos smaller than . . . Long Island, giving us many of the Antilles, a smattering of Pacific nations, the Aeolian Islands and Greek Islands. I know I’ve left many out, but it’s already sounding like good company in my heat-addled brain.
Or defocus on the scorching temperatures by looking at fotos below?
First one is a “tugster-sighting” just north of the sixth boro snapped by Joel Milton. Tugster is on the foredeck of Patty Nolan (1931) sans figurefigure as she tows sailing vessel sans-servingsails Lickity-Split some weeks back, here passing the Englewood Cliffs boat basin, I believe.
Next foto from John Watson . . . Eddie R (1971) towing a mystery barge. Any guesses its mission?
Answer comes from Les Sonnenmark, longtime friend of the tugster blog: it’s a cable-laying barge operated by Calwell Marine. Info on the barge can be found in this pdf . . . starting on the unnumbered page 6ff. In fact, this barge may be related to the work of Dolphin III in the sixth boro last summer: click the link to “marine contractor” above the last foto in this post you find here.
Foto by tugster near the Chesapeake City Bridge as 2011-launched Mako ensures Penn No. 81 makes
its way Chesapeake-bound. More info on the pilotboat in the background soon.
Foto by Jed of Vickie M McAllister (2001) docked at McAllister’s Blount Island yard on the St John’s River .
Foto by G. Justin Zizes Jr. of Kathleen Turecamo (1968) and
and Matthew Tibbetts (1969) both high and dry at Caddell Shipyard in Staten Island.
Foto from Lou Rosenberg of Aegean Sea (1962) near Rockaway Inlet. Aegean Sea used to
be called, in order, Francis E. Roehrig, Jersey Coast, and John C. Barker.
This yard tug in Mayport seems to have a protection bar, but in spite of the
the numbers on the stern, I’ve found no info on this type. Fotos by tugster. Orange bow on the right side of foto belongs to C-Tractor 13.
A final shot of Patty Nolan and Lickety Split headed upriver.
Thanks to Joel, John, Les, Jed, Justin, and Lou.
Only tangentially related: For info on YTB-832, previously based in Mayport and now possibly in Greece by way of Italy, click here.
And an even less tenuous tangential connection to these fotos of vessels of La Guardia di Finanza, which sounds like what our government is supposed to do but actually refers to something quite different . . . . What it is can be found here.
More fotos will be forthcoming from the Conch Republic, a possible future residence.
tugster: a waterblog 
Recent Comments