Specialized 24

Neither the lines nor the color scheme is typical.   To briefly digress, that load of vehicles on the VZ Bridge is all too typical for this time of day.

Shelia Bordelon has been off the south shore of Long Island for the past month or so. I could have put this post into the exotics category, which it is, but this vessel, her fleet, and this type are exotic because they possess specialized capabilities not frequently called for in our regional waters at this time.

Technically, Shelia Bordelon is an ULIV PSV, the third in the Bordelon fleet. . .  ultra light intervention vessel and a specialized type of platform supply vessel.  Click here for more info on specialized uses of ULIVs.

Click here for more products of the Bordelon Marine shipyard, one of which, Josephine K Miller, is based locally.   I caught photos of her recently, which I’ll post one of these days.

Is the pink splash making more sense now?  Click here for the specific connection between this vessel and breast cancer.

See the person in the protected space below the yellow boxes for scale?

I believe this is Shelia Bordelon‘s second trip into the sixth boro, the first being a few weeks ago while I was a few hundred miles inland.

By now you must be wondering what specialized task brings her to local waters.  So a British tanker —Coimbra— has been on the bottom, along with most of her crew, all victims of a U-boat attack in January 1942,  for over 3/4 of a century, south of Shinnecock, and the ULIV is here to monitor it. 

I’d love to see the underwater video images they’ve gotten.

All photos here by Will Van Dorp.