I took these photos over a two-day period in late July, traveling the entire 130 miles of the Hudson from the Battery to Troy while on the trip from Narragansett Bay to the “source” of the Chicago River. RV Shearwater here surveys the river/bay; that’s Willy Wall on the horizon left, so the Battery is behind us.
The Tappan Zee nears completion: the gap on the left side is all that needs to be bridged. The Left Coast Lifter will then become the “left coast lowerer,” I assume.
Infrastructure materials come out of the ground here in Haverstraw,
Viking passes below Osborn Castle,
summer play happens in the Hudson,
Buchanan 12 pushes more raw materials for infrastructure,
a tribe paddles over to Bannerman’s,
a truck lifts three vessels in imitation of Combi-Dock III,
Vane’s Delaware pushes DoubleSkin 50 upriver,
Spring Sunshine offloads aggregates at Caymans, where
a 400-ton 12-story structure awaits (then) its float down to NJ [more on that soon],
yacht named Summer heads south for Key West,
raw materials that once rolled on roads await the trip back to the blast furnace,
a horde does sun salutations on shore,
the American goddess Columbia trumpets at the top of a needing-to-be-updated soldiers/sailors monument in Troy,
and an oracle wearing a sea creature hat and using an old-school device taps out verbiage suggesting I’m headed for Ithaca and not Chicago, although I’m pleased with that too.
All photos and observations by Will Van Dorp, who is grateful to the oracle.
Somewhat related: Click here for a CNN Travel clip called “Liquid City” and starts out with the sentence “most people think NYC has five boros, but there’s really a sixth one; it’s the largest one and it connects all the others.” I heard it while waiting at the airport in Indianapolis the other day and was stunned. Do you suppose Justin Davidson reads tugster?
For blog posts written by folks going first northbound and then southbound on a LNV tug, click here and here.
tugster: a waterblog 
4 comments
Comments feed for this article
August 9, 2017 at 12:14 pm
Jim Murray
Hi Will, The BINGHAMTON is now just a hull. main deck up is gone! Jim Murray
________________________________
August 9, 2017 at 7:22 pm
Harry T Scholer
Happy to see that the sixth boro is getting due recognition.
August 9, 2017 at 11:00 pm
Jim Murray
Hi Will, The BINGHAMTON is stripped down to the hull. Jim Murray
________________________________
August 19, 2017 at 11:44 pm
George Schneider
That SHEARWATER has quite a history. She was begun by Bell-Halter Marine as part of a contract for several “Dash Boats,” very high speed oilfield crewboats configured as Surface Effects Ships, also called Hovercraft. Her name was intended to be named SPRINT COMMAND. She was completed in 1981, but the class had already proven to be unfeasible for use as intended, and I doubt if she saw any service. The Coast Guard had experimented with a Navy prototype of the Bell-Halter SES and decided to try them for drug interdiction, so in 1982 they purchased three of these distressed vessels from Bell-Halter, and commisisoned them as the SEA HAWK, SHEARWATER, and PETREL. SHEARWATER bore the number WSES 3.
All three were eventually laid up, and in 1994 sold to the Cross Equipment Company of Houma LA. They remained idle at the Cross yard until 2002, when they finally sold them. SHEARWATER stayed home and played nice, while the other two were marketed to interests in the Congo to fight pirates, who reportedly neutralized them almost immediately.