From the Line Locker 15

This series is used to catch up on items started.

Gregory Farino took this foto from the wheelhouse of a tugboat on the Congo River around 1980.  He does not recall the name, as he was just catching a ride.  My question is this:  would the minimal detail of the stem bitt and shape of the bow surrounding it give the impression that this may be an “American” style tug serving the end of its life on an African river.  The problem with that theory is that most of the Congo River is separated from the sea by waterfalls.  Although I heard stories when I lived there and there are and have been shipyards above the falls going back to the time of Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness,”   I have no hard information that any vessels were taken around the falls by train and reassembled for use here.  Anyone help?

Recognize the vessel below?  The foto was taken by Jan van der Doe.  Today it’s called Samuel de Champlain and appeared in this blog recently here.

Although it was built in Texas in 1976 as Musketeer Fury, it operated for a while as well as an Italian tug called Vortice, shown here post-fire.  Here’s what frequent contributor Jan van der Doe wrote a few weeks ago:  “While plying the waters near Trieste in 1993, she suffered a devastating fire to her upper engine room and deckhouse. The accommodations were completely destroyed and much of the steel deck and superstructure warped from the heat. The vessel was laid up in Italy until McKeil Marine Ltd. purchased  Vortice on spec in the mid-’90s and towed her to Hamilton, Ontario.  The engines were not damaged, probably the reason the tug came to Canada.  I [was] onboard a few times during her lay up in Hamilton.”  Here’s a link and foto suggesting the fire happened on the Atlantic off the Azores.

Excuse my parenthetical insertions, but Capt. Thalassic wrote this of Sachem, featured here recently:   Sachem was built (1902, Pusey & Jones, hull #306.  By the way Cangarda was built in the same yard in 1901 as hull #302) for  J. Roberts Maxwell.  It had elegant lines and significantly a very large main cabin for entertaining.  Power was provided by a Fairbanks 8 cylinder slow speed diesel.  During WW 2 the yacht was passed to the Navy and I believe engaged in submarine patrols and training in the Caribbean.  After the war it was sold to the Circle line and probably had the most elegant lines in a fleet of converted landing craft although I am sure the direct drive diesel was terrifically difficult to maneuver with in NY harbor. Eventually it was retired and sold as junk to an organization known as the Hudson River Maritime Academy which was based in West New York NJ.  The organization was less about maritime or learning than it was about drinking and it went bust.  The owner of the pier sold the vessel to Butch Miller from Cincinnati.  (Butch owned a company founded by his father that had developed those augers which you see on all those utility trucks.)  Butch would drive a van from Ohio to NJ to renovate and get the vessel running.  This proved almost impossible and Butch was convinced that he had to get the vessel closer to home.  He purchased a Murray Tregurtha unit and plopped it on the rear deck.  His first plan was to sail up the New England coast, down the Saint Lawrence.  He sailed out of NY harbor with a complete compliment of road maps and promptly ran aground in the fog.  He was towed back into NY harbor and was put up in Newtown Creek for another year.  Eventually he headed north up the Hudson.  The helm was a lawn chair on the roof and steering was done with a broomstick tied to the controls on the MT unit below.  Amazingly Butch got upstate and through the canal all the way to Buffalo (I often repeat his description of the canal as “floating through a corn field”)  and then through Erie, Huron (where he was detained by Customs for wandering over the border line near Windsor/Detroit).  He went all the way down Michigan to Chicago, through the Chicago River to the Mississippi, down the Mississippi to Cairo and then up the Ohio to the Cincinnati area.  It was truly an adventure of a life time and it is incredible he made it.  As far a I know the vessel sits in a backwater on the Kentucky side of the Ohio near Cincinnati.  It is sad retirement for an elegant vessel but it was an amazing adventure.  It is fun and satisfying to see that every once in a while the eccentrics with old boats do live out a dream. ”  In this Halloween season, it may just be part of the entertainment there . . .  given this story.  The foto is by Seth Tane, showing Sachem in that appears to be waters off Yonkers.

Let’s sign off with this vessel . . .  Bertha.  See the foto on the left margin.  Surely this can’t be lost!!

Thans to Gregory, Jan, and Seth for use of these fotos.  I look forward to any and all followup to these fotos.