Random Nola Tugs 1

I’ll start with the greatest looking tug of all I saw.  It has a name, but I cropped it out and will reveal it as this post goes on.  But isn’t this a beaut?!!  It also has an evocative previous name.  Can you guess her vintage?

I’m in the mood for puzzling today, so what’s this?  I know there’s no tug in this photo, but . . .

now there is.  Check out the scale of those gift boxes!  Here’s the story of the Algiers Christmas bonfires. Scroll through here to photos 4 and 5 for last year’s Algier’s bonfire fuel.

So here’s a closer up of the tug Bunker King passing the tanker Bow Trajectory, heading for Plaquemine.

See the Algiers “gift boxes” over the stern of Cecilia B. Slatten?  See where she fits in her fleet here.   Can anyone explain what if any connections there are between Bisso Towing and Bisso Marine, who recently have had a project in NYC’s sixth boro?

Freedom . . . there’s nothing in the sixth boro with these colors and artwork.

M/V Magnolia . . . as night falls.

Night falls on James Dale Robin and Kimberly Hidalgo.  Less than an hour earlier, prayers had been offered and champagne spilled over these two vessels and another, Dale Artigue.

And nightfall means I should return to the beaut in the first photo . . . here it is with name restored, formerly called Havana Zephyr.  Check out this fabulous line drawing of her by Barry Griffin.

Here’s the whole vessel as I saw it last week.  Such lines!  I’d really love to see a bowsprite rendering of those curves!

Merlin Banta, which my defective eyes first read as ‘merlin santa,” came out of the St. Louis Boats yard in 1946, not long after the yard delivered a fleet of icebreaking tugs to the US Navy and then to the USSR!  If you click on no other links in this post, you have to see these icebreakers . . . last photo in a post I did a year ago here.

All photos by Will Van Dorp.