Dockwork Orange 2

No orange is more brilliant on the Upper Bay than that of the Staten Island ferries.   Of course, no creature of the water–live or mechanical–sports the same colors ventral as dorsal.  And thanks to the following fotos from John Watson, let’s go below.

Here’s a thing of beauty as visible from the inside of a floating drydock at Caddell– one end of the double-ender Samuel I. Newhouse.

Note the worker for scale.

What might surprise many people is the absence of props/shafts and the existence of this disc-like recess.

Disassembled, here’s the drive unit that fits into the recess

Each of the circular spaces in this subassembly houses a vertical blade.  For an animation showing movement, click here.

Note the same transition from orange to blue to red and vertical blades here on Noble.

If you’ve wondered how these ferries negotiate into the ferry racks in adverse tidal flow, traveling sideways . . . now you know.

All fotos above except the first one come compliments of John Watson.  Newhouse fotos date from summer ’94;  Noble . . . from summer 2000.

Here’s a parting shot of one of my favorite moments of orange from earlier in 2012.

Dockwork Orange 1

On most vessels, the color orange is reserved for safety gear;  on others, like

Topeka and Torm Freya it’s the main act.

Other variations of orange as dominant color appear in the harbor as well . . .

like the Staten Island ferries.

The color orange has many other associations in the month of October . . . like leaf color and pumpkins.

Note the difference in visibility here between the departing RORO Topeka and the inbound Atlantic Salvor.

Here were Topeka and an identical fleetmate Totugas back in March.

All fotos by Will Van Dorp.  Here’s another Torm Freya post.  More “orange” tomorrow.

Unrelated:  Thanks to EuroFred for passing along this Youtube that involved a RO-FLO (roll on/float off), three speciality vessels, the orange mud of Surinam, and 608 tires in a story that could be called “cutter head Fitzcarraldo,”  and those are two separate links.