Stuff happens. Like cars and trucks, ships too sometimes need a tow. Pretty World needed a tow to the repair facility a few years back. Here’s Horizon Crusader towed to the scrap yard. Here’s CV-60 USS Saratoga getting a tow to the same end.
Thorco Hilde found herself at the end of this tow line in the wee hours of Saturday morning.
I caught the tow just as I went for a walk along the water’s edge.
The zoom told me they were surely attached. As of Monday morning, she was in the Brooklyn Navy Yard getting fixed.
The lead tug here is Marjorie B McAllister, featured in many previous posts indexed here. In this role, she reminds me of some of Farley Mowat’s best, his novels about salvage tugs, a role once played by the tug below, now dissolving in the Arthur Kill, as she looked when I took her photo in August 2011. In April 1945, the salvage tug below assisted in towing the torpedoed Atlantic States back to safety in Boston for repair and reuse.
Many thanks to Thomas Steinruck for use of the top photo. All others by Will Van Dorp.
tugster: a waterblog 
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February 20, 2017 at 12:36 pm
Harry T Scholer
Enroute to Tampa in a heavy morning fog, Gulf of Mexico. A tug passed to stbd towing a derelict ship. Totally deserted and the wtd on the bridge wing slamming back and forth. Eerie!
February 20, 2017 at 7:37 pm
tugster
Ghosts on the bridge?
February 20, 2017 at 7:30 pm
Jim Gallant
You brought back some long ago memories for me, Will! I first read Farley Mowat’s book ‘The Grey Seas Under’ when I was in grade school, as I’ve been in love with tugs my whole life. For anybody who reads this blog and HASN’T read this book, it is about the voyages of the salvage tug FOUNDATION FRANKLIN, formerly the World War One era Royal Navy tug HMS Frisky. It still ranks among my all time favorite books, and I highly recommend it to everybody interested enough in tugs and the sea to be following this blog in the first place. Folks, go to the library or order a copy online, you won’t be disappointed, IMHO!
February 20, 2017 at 7:36 pm
tugster
Jim, Thx. And if you want to read a book so funny you fall off your chair, read The Boat Who Wouldn’t Float. Better yet, read it aloud to your best friend; you’ll laugh together and become better friends for it.