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Sailors come out of hibernation to catch some breezes.
Container ships head south to shuffle containers elsewhere.
Aggregate work goes on as it does all year round.
Shearwater continues to plumb the bottom terrain.
They all meet up somewhere…
but a better lens than mine catches it.
All photos, WVD, who loves springtime, when all the fish eggs are about to burst.
T minus 23 days, that is, for all of us who remember the early days of NASA . . . 23 days until the NYS Canals open soon after sunrise on May 21. If you have the opportunity, get yourself to one of the portals and see the excitement.
At several intervals before then, I will post countdown photos of NYS Canals boats; all photos of old boats they are, ones that require lots of maintenance, but many folks find them beautiful and desire they be kept in some functioning condition, like old horses put out to clover, not the glue factory. All these photos I took during the 2014 season, when I worked on the canal. I won’t include a lot of text here; besides time constraints, I’ve already included such info in previous posts and years. Also, let me introduce a new archive, an ongoing project by a young, active Great Lakes mariner. See it here, and the root site is here.
June 2014 in Little Falls, day one of my employment, I waited on the wall for the 1901 Urger. That’s a Quarters Barge #14 (QB14) to the right, a lodging afloat for canal workers assigned to projects far from home. I slept in the quarters on Urger.
Seneca escorted a tender across Oneida Lake and has arrived at the east end, Sylvan Beach.
Urger here passes Governor Cleveland in a previously unpublished photo.
Syracuse here near the Oswego portal illustrates
the NYS Canals connection with the Great Lakes. This can be and is a portal to the Gulfs of Mexico and Saint Lawrence, and thence to all the watery parts of the planet.
Derrick Barge (DB) 4 here transfers dredge spoils from a scow to a bank needing bolstering; in the distance you can see the beauty of rural Mohawk Valley.
Tender #6, here near Albion, can no longer be seen unless you’re breathing air from a regulator 80′ down 2.5 miles off Shinnecock, a very distant corner of NYS.
Heading for the western end of the canal in Tonawanda, the aptly named DeWitt Clinton chugs along with purpose between Medina and Middleport.
Pittsford here stands by an ancient scow on another bank near the Rochester suburb of . . . Pittsford.
All photos, WVD, who has many more to share before the canal opens. I’ll avoid replication as best I can.
If you want to see more of the canal now, check out my April 2020 covid project, a virtual tour, here.
Back to the sherbet skies of dawn in the sixth boro dimension . . .
Stena Penguin has to be the best-painted crude oil tanker I’ve seen. Shannon McAllister shows up in the boro now and then also. Ditto, Alex McAllister used to be a constant here, now she’s away in Philly.
Stena Penguin has been here before, although it appears her livery has changed.
For the particulars on Penguin, click here. For an interview with the chief engineer, click here.
They were on their way to Linden, and now she’s on her way to Aruba.
All photos, WVD.
Saving fuel . . . Foxy3 has Rae alongside and they’re passing a wall of a hull, or is that a hull of a wall….
Coral Coast is usually on a cement barge, but not now . . . .
Can you name that tugboat?
Let’s do regression, with Foxy3 and Rae approaching that tanker hull.
Double Skin 36 is what Coral Coast is pushing.
Name the tugboat pushing DBL 82?
Notice Foxy3 and Rae and SKS Mersey they’ve just passed? Progression going on here with Mount St. Elias and
Coral Coast, whereas
the Fox boats are regressing.
All photos, WVD.
Unrelated, and a bit late, but do you remember the “green boat” below, AQS Tor? It was deck cargo lost off a yacht carrier Eemslift Hendrika abandoned off Norway earlier this month. Click on the image to see the disposition. More AQS here.
Quick . . name those two tugs and barge?
Here’s that same barge, and the previously obscured third tug, Pegasus.
Is it possible that this is the first time I post photos of the 2015 Leigh Ann Moran? My blog index tells me it is.
A double assist gets her gently into the IMTT dock, Pegasus and Sarah D.
And when the job was done,
Pegasus returned to her base,
Sarah D did the same, and
Leigh Ann appeared to go take on some fuel.
Welcome Leigh Ann, a few years late for me.
All photos, WVD.
Most of you know that dawn is my favorite time. Yesterday dawn–between 0545 and 0645–was quite busy; two of the five vessels that transited the KVK were among the largest–so far–that call in the sixth boro.
Pink sky with gradations, faded purple Brooklyn, huge but silent shapes, and spots of artificial lights.
Birds silhouetted and reflections in the still water make the scene as one point over by central western Brooklyn turns a deeper shade of red.
When the ship blocks the blinding rising sun, its name becomes legible.
Once CS Rose passes my vantage point, all that light illuminates the details. Three tugboats along her starboard, one on stern, and one on the far side, the port side.
Not much later–another smaller container ship has passed–the next hulking shape appears, and the light has already turned gradations of yellow.
When CMA CGM Mexico blocks the rising sun, details become available . . .
By now, 0645, the light suggests the sun has created daylight.
Tugboats on Rose include James D, Mary Turecamo, Kimberly Turecamo, and Kirby. Tugboats on Mexico include Marie J Turecamo, JRT, Kimberly Turecamo, and Miriam.
All photos, WVD.
The first three come thanks to Steve Munoz . . . HMS Bounty heading up the North River in May 1998.
Taken November 2001, it’s Adventure of the Seas heading upriver with an diverse escort. Given the date, this would have been her maiden voyage into the sixth boro of NYC. John D. McKean and what appears to be another fireboat beyond her, a USCG 140′ cutter, and lots of commercial tugboats see her in. Adventure of the Seas is currently in Sint Maarten, along with at least four fleetmates.
From October 1986, David McAllister is on the starboard bow of Borenquin heading into Port Elizabeth.
From John Jedrlinic, it’s Laney Chouest in Tampa. The blue/white vessel at Laney‘s bow is the Aiviq, the AHTS built for ice. You may recall its challenges back in 2012.
and C-Tractor 8 . . . taken in October 2016.
And from last week, Craig Lewis sent along these photos of McAllister Brothers awaiting its fate in Fall River.
Since launch in 1958, how many tons of grub and coffee have crews ingested in this galley of the Brothers . . !?
And finally, last but not least, Skip Mildrum noticed some interesting cargo in Port Elizabeth recently . . .
Might they be new Kawasaki subway cars, four of an order of 535 R211 cars coming to a subway stop near you one of these days? They might not be, given his estimate of car length; R211s are only 60′ loa.
Skip’s estimate of the trailers was at least 120′. Also, the R211s are built in Nebraska . . .
Many thanks to Steve, John, Craig, and Skip for these photos.
At some point, maybe days before April 23, 1921, at McDougall Duluth Shipyard, this vessel, Interwaterways Line Incorporated 101, or ILI 101, had taken shape on the ways.
After it slid down the ways at launch, it was followed by four sisters, all before summer began in 1921. The 101 traveled via the Soo, three Great Lakes, and the Barge Canal to New York with 83,000 bushels of oats (approximately 1300 tons… count the trucks or rail cars) at a rate 60% below the railroad cost.
As you can read below, 101 was the “advance courier of a fleet of new type of ships,” freighters specifically designed to transit the newly opened Barge Canal or Eriemax vessels.
The telegram below details of communication between 101 management and Canal management regarding a “representative familiar with the canal” aboard. I’m wondering if this was a way of saying they needed a pilot, someone with relevant local knowledge.
That initial transit was made eastbound with wooden tugboat Lorraine.
Between 1910 and 1920, the time of the opening of the Barge Canal, the population of Fairport grew by almost 50%. Note the low profile cargo hatches on the vessel at this time.
Later in August 1921, spectators were photographed coming to see her at E-21. The steering pole hints at her Great Lakes roots.
Through the years, a number of modifications, detailed here, were made to the freight ship. She was renamed Richard J. Barnes and later Day Peckinpaugh, her current name. As Barnes, she carried coal along the East Coast and once dodged a torpedo launched from a German submarine.
1959? Here she is just below lock E2 and the “flight of five” in Waterford. All the other commercial vessels behind them, stretching all the way back to the Hudson River, I’ve read they are stuck there because of an issue with another lock in the flight. In other words, this is a smaller version of the back up a month ago due to Ever Given in the Suez Canal.
Also note in the photo above tug Urger on the opposite side of the channel. Urger is no stranger to this blog and, in my opinion, another critically endangered vessel with a NYS Canal history. I worked as deckhand on Urger for the 2014 season, when she was in her 113th year.
1963. Here she is northbound on the Oswego Canal at Phoenix NY.
1994. Eastbound at Rome NY with her last load of cement, the only type of cargo she carried from 1961 until 1994, she passes the freighhouse, now incorporated into Bellamy Harbor Park. The terminal lies less than a mile ahead, off her portside. At a special widening ahead either before or after discharging cargo, she’d turn around. Compare her special cement hatch/manifold arrangement below with the configuration in the photo taken in Fairport in 1921.
1994. Here’s a video still of her exiting a lock after having discharged her last cargo, heading home, so to speak, to an uncertain future.
2005. After more than a decade being “laid up” in Erie PA and just before she might have been scrapped, she was purchased by an alliance that included the New York State Museum, the Canal Society of New York State, the New York State Canal Corporation, the Erie Canalway National Heritage Corridor Commission, the New York State Office of Parks, Recreation, and Historic Preservation, and New York State Marine Highway Transportation Co., Inc. On this trip to a new role, the 84-year-old freighter was escorted by Benjamin Elliott, as she had been by Lorraine 84 years earlier. I missed this, but from accounts I’ve heard, this was a triumphal return. She’s currently an accessioned artifact of the New York State Museum.
2005. From that same voyage, she exits the downside of lock E17.
2009. During the year of the Hudson-Fulton-Champlain Quadricentennial, she traveled under her own power as far south as the sixth boro of NYC and Plattsburgh on Lake Champlain.
2009. I took this photo of her hold, a vast space that has potential as an exhibit space inside a traveling artifact from NYS canal history, whose history demonstrates the connection the Erie Canal makes between the Great Lakes and salt waters.
2021. She’s still afloat, raised from the bottom of the canal as a result of the routine annual winter lowering of water level. She’s afloat for her one hundredth spring, but needs her potential recognized once again. Stan Rogers wrote a song performed here by Makem and Clancy that captures the attitude needed to rekindle the flame, clarifies the vision, and saves her from the scrappers or the reef. Maybe someone from the New York State Museum can comment on their vision for this last of her type. A sister vessel, ILI 105 lies rusting away in Staten Island.
Some of my previous posts on the vessel can be seen here. Many thanks to all who contributed photos to this post: Paul Strubeck, John Callahan, Craig Williams. Any opinions are my own and any errors mine as well.
One goal I have for this post is to try to unearth more images of this vessel pre-1994. Anyone help?
How about murals from Buffalo to Cape Charles . . . and from December to April.
And many places in between,
physical locales and
head spaces.
Venus of the Chesapeake?
All photos along the road hither and yon by WVD. A big birthday post is coming tomorrow . . .
What’s your favorite mural?
Way back in 2007 I started this series, and I now think I should never have called it “bronze” since it’s more like a golden brown, but no matter, this post is all the same fleet. Name the fleet and the tug?
Talking fleet renewal . . ., Reinauer has a young fleet. Janice Ann is not even a year old . . .
Laurie Ann, here with Grace D alongside, is just over a decade old.
Dean is not quite a decade at work.
Curtis came out the same year as Dean. By the way, I didn’t identify the photo in the top photo yet. Figured it out?
Morgan is the oldie but goldie . . .
Haggerty Girls is about the same age as Dean and Curtis . . . i.e., a young fleet.
All photos, recently, WVD.
And the tugboat in the first photo is . . . Dylan Cooper.
tugster: a waterblog 
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