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This is another case of thinking to do one post, seeing something, and choosing an entirely different post instead.
It’s also Tony A and I tag-teaming. He saw what appeared to be a new name and face, grabbed some shots,
and emailed them to me. What he didn’t know at the time is that I was seeing this same sunrise
from a different perspective.
I waited for my path and Shiloh Amon‘s to meet, and later that morning, when I’d just about called it a day, this new boat appeared.
Other than the lion on the barge house, Shiloh Amon was a blank white canvas. This fact held most of my attention, but I also noticed her design was more inland waterways than harbor or near-coastal tug.
Note the glass “doors” and squared off “windows”.
A narrow passageway allows passage around the stern, but it’s not much workspace.
A quick check showed this new boat is bigger, more powerful, and newer than the recently arrived Thunder and earlier Lightning, two boats identical to each other.
Shiloh Amon is 80.6′ x 34′ and has 2400 hp, 400 hp more than Thunder and Lightning. I wonder how long it’ll take for this new boat to get her Centerline markings.
Thx for the first two, Tony A. The others, WVD.
Here‘s my Halloween post from 12 years ago. If you’re interested in watching some –if not exactly scary then challenging–videos about sea voyages, how about these:
a 2022 trip on a cargo ship across the Caspian Sea or a 2021 trip across the Black Sea. Knowing the local language is always helpful.
This month I’ve done one retro October 2012 post on the Chesapeake schooner race . . . and am doing this one at the end of the month rather than the beginning, for reasons that will soon be apparent.
On the 31st a decade ago, I made my way down to Front Street Staten Island to see what the big storm had wrought. It was too shocked to take more photos.
John B. Caddell, waiting to make her way to new owners in Africa, had been surged ashore, to her stormy aftermath, and then to her demise.
The Upper Bay had an eerie emptiness that
looked like this on AIS.
Barbara, a friend on Rockaway took this aftermath photo of what had looked like
this only hours before. Note the boardwalk supports above with what they had supported below.
I’d been on the highway getting home hours before Sandy hit. I documented months of aftermath of stormy Sandy in various areas around the sixth boro, but the post that follows up on John B. Caddell a week later can be seen here.
And since this retrospective post has focused on a weather event, October 20, 2012 saw fog as dense as anything we saw last week here. Somewhere in that water vapor is a small-town-sized population aboard Celebrity Summit; click on the latter link for more photos of Summit‘s passage.
All photos, WVD, taken in October 2012.
Here’s a post I struggled with yesterday. The photos are not the best to document what I saw: a convergence of tugboats that all used to wear the same livery but now bearing new names.
Susan Rose used to be Evening Breeze. Although you can see part of the name plate, the stack has not yet received the blue/gray Rose Cay paint.
Next in the anchorage was Adeline Rose, now a Centerline boat but formerly Rubia and before that Denise A. Bouchard. See the scant but be-shadowed orange forward of the engine room vent.
A bit farther south in the anchorage were two more former Bouchard units. Left to right now are The Beatrice and Jeffrey (or Jeffery) S, with barges B. No. 282 and B. No. 280.
Jeffrey S used to be
Rhea I. Bouchard is now The Beatrice. I’m eager to see these two–ex-Rhea and Ellen–light so that I can confirm photographically the name update.
Jordan Rose is now clearly visible with her blue/gray stack, although I’m not sure the stack color matches that on Lynne M. Rose.
Maybe it’s just the quality of post-fog light.
All photos this week, WVD, who never saw all these changes coming or he’d have invested in marine paint.
Some days to decide what to post seems impossible. I find myself looking at recent photos and impulsively choosing then rejecting one after another photo, too restless for inspiration; what usually takes only the time to consume my morning cup of coffee extends way beyond breakfast. Then I saw this photo friend Michele Fitzgerald McMorrow posted on FB and captioned “migration at the hook.”
As length of daylight hours wanes, so many boats head south, like this one with Tampa on its stern.
My perception this fall is that I’m seeing many more multihull boats;
catamarans and trimarans might be gaining on
monohulls in numbers.
Megayachts migrate this time of year also. Can the word migrant be used to describe snowbirds? Of course some of these boats might just be getting delivered to a winter haul out nearby, but others could go thousands of miles south.
On AIS on a random recent day I saw this; magenta is for recreational boats and you see what direction they’re trending past Sandy Hook and
points south.
I’ve never sailed in a multihull . . . . Maybe I should set doing so as a goal.
I couldn’t see registration on this one, but the fact there’s a US flag hanging where it is makes me think it’s a foreign boat, and Canadians often flag a fairly prominent maple leaf flag, so this might be European.
Long distance migratory boats like these need reliable instrumentation and capable sailors, or so we all hope.
Thanks to Michele for use of her photo. All others, WVD, whose previous migration posts had mostly to to do with mermaids.
Full disclosure first, I met the author, Paul Strubeck, around 15 years ago, and he’s been working on this voluminous tome for almost a decade. We met on a retired diesel railroad tugboat, of course, not either of the ones depicted below. Over the years, Paul has shared photos and information on this blog.
I’ll tell you what I think about this book in a moment, but first, any guesses on the date, location, and info on the two tugboats depicted on this striking cover?
The rear cover has some Dave Boone art. Anything look familiar in that painting?
Soon after Paul and I met, we took this same WHC tour together. I’m certainly not a packrat, but the fact that I still have the program attests to my sense that it was an extraordinary tour, much narration of which was prefaced “you can’t see any trace any more, but …” because rail marine in the sixth boro is mostly a thing of the past. What’s not in the past but an immutable geographical fact is that the sixth boro surrounds an ever more densely-populated archipelago that still needs resupplying today, mostly provided by trucks and frustrated drivers clogging highways today, hence efforts like the recent beer run, to name but one.
Contractors move carfloats today, but at one time rail lines built their own dedicated tugboats, steam and diesel, and the evolution of the latter type is what Paul’s book interprets for us. These tugboats are mostly gone, and he tracks the disposition of each one, but a few still in use have been redesigned so successfully you might never guess their previous lives.
As I said earlier, Paul has worked on this book for the better part of a decade. When he wasn’t employed on a tugboat, he got jobs on the railroad, which employs him now fulltime. But when he wasn’t scheduled by some employer, he traveled to places where he researched this book in harbors, photo archives, libraries, and museums. To “unpack” this table of contents a bit, the “Oil-electrics” chapter focuses on the railroads that switched from steam propulsion to diesel: first in 1916 the Pennsylvania RR re-powering steam tug Media with a 4-cylinder Southwark-Harris heavy oil engine; in 1926 NY Central RR built a pair of tugs on Staten Island and named NY Central’s No. 33 and No. 34, and Erie was next.
Then next four chapters elaborate on the naval architects, the decisions they made, and the tugboats they built.
“What’s inside a tug?” includes nomenclature
and specialized information not commonly known to a layperson as well as to a mariner who works on non-railroad tugs.
Documents like this top one from August 1978 demystify the daily/hourly activity of tugboat crew, in this case, the marine engineer. Paul brings his tugboat/locomotive perspective to the page.
The book has 266 color photos and 131 black/white, for a total of 397, of which 342 have never been book/web published; he scanned them from company records, trade literature, negatives, and slides. Each photo has a detailed caption. Further, the book has 4 original maps, 22 blueprints/drawings, and 17 documents/advertisements from vintage marine diesel magazines.
There are 11 appendices, including
17 pages of Appendix K listing all East Coast diesel railroad tugboats and their dimensions, designers and builders, engine specs, multiple names, and [what I find very helpful] their disposition, i.e., still in use, scrapped, reefed, or other. A total of 23 railroad companies are mentioned.
On the last page, you learn a bit about the author. He’s already working on a volume 2, focusing on railroad tugs of the Great Lakes and Inland Waterways.
To me, this book is a delight to read through and a reference for East Coast tugboats. On my bookshelf, it goes next to Thomas R. Flagg’s book New York Harbor Railroads In Color, volumes 1 and 2, published in 2000 and 2002 but with most information cut off in 1976. Paul’s book will be a delight for historians, aficionados of rail and marine technology, modelers, urban planners, and the general public with curiosity about how we get stuff from place of manufacture to place(s) of use.
As anyone who releases a book or other work knows, an author does not want to keep a pile of books like this at home. For info on ordering your copy, click here. This is not a “mainstream” book you’d see while browsing the all-too-few bookstores surviving these days. Rather, it is published by an independent railroad-focused publisher called Garbely Publishing.
To answer the questions about cover “photo,” the front cover shows Erie tugs Elmira and Marion in Hoboken in March 1975. Marion was launched at Jakobson’s in Oyster Bay NY in 1953 and is being prepared for reefing at this very moment in 2022. Anyone know details? Elmira was launched the same year on Staten Island and was scrapped in 1984 after an engine room fire. The Dave Boone painting shows New York Dock Railway tug Brooklyn southbound on the North River. Notice the Colgate clock along the right side. Brooklyn (now Florida) is currently a rebuilt but active boat in the Crescent fleet in Savannah GA. My image of the boat as I saw it in 2014 is below; that day I took another shot of the tugboat which appears on page 190 of Paul’s book.
Previous book reviews I’ve posted here can be found at these links.
This title goes back almost a decade, and this schooner has been doing cargo runs on the Hudson for a while now, but I’d not seen it yet.
Fortunate for me, I finally spotted the boat this past weekend, running
from Brooklyn side Upper Bay to Raritan Bay and the Arthur Kill.
I’ve posted photos of autumn sail here and here and in other posts like here, but this one is moving cargo.
As of this posting, she’s in the Hudson Highlands section of the river.
Cargo or not, sailing vessels have an elegance, a je ne sais quoi . . . .
Wind is the other alternative fuel.
All photos, any errors, WVD.
Apollonia has caught the attention of the NYTimes here about a year ago, and here recently in a Kingston NY paper. Here’s a joint venture with a microbrewery up the river in Beacon.
Anyone know the story of this lobster tug over at Pier 81 Hudson River? Its current name?
Discovery Coast was standing by a tank barge at Pier 8 Red Hook.
Next pier south, Pier 9, Evening Tide hibernates. I guess it’s not true that all parts of “time and tide wait for no one.”
Continuing in that direction to the south of Erie Basin, a Dann Ocean fleet waits: l to r, Captain Willie Landers, Sarah Dann, and Ruby M.
In the anchorage, Susan Rose awaits her next appointment with the RCM 250.
Fells Point heads to the Narrows to retrieve her bunker barge.
Bruce A. McAllister escorts bulker Thor Fortune into Claremont for a load of scrap.
And finally, Everly Mist is the newest renaming I’ve seen. Ellen S. Bouchard has also been renamed Jeffrey S, but I’ve not caught a photo yet.
All photos, WVD.
aka . . . where we heading?
Down on the Jersey Shore some puzzling instruments float or drift or play … or whatever verb an instrument does. The fact that said instruments are GB-registered (I thought it was the UK?) leads me to suspect this associated with that Ford etc. Unfortunately I was not there, so the only image I have are these from my phone/AIS app. Some blogs readers have reported seeing unusual aircraft in that area as well, which might monitor UAVs like these or USVs like these. Then there are UUVs . . . NOMARS . . . or all these . . . it just goes on to a future unknown.
Here is a CRS report on “plans” released last week. Here is a summer 2019 tugster post on USVs. And from earlier this year, it’s unmanned Sea Hawk.
Another indicator of incoming change is here, a tanker bearing sizeable external tanks. When it was farther out, I didn’t take photos because I couldn’t imagine what I was seeing, very white shapes, I first thought, diffuse floodlights.
But at this, I knew: it must be a dual-fuel vessel, at least the current iteration of it. Back in August I saw a methanol-powered tanker, or so marked. LNG bunkering in the US is very limited at the moment. Here’s what seems to be available in Asia and Europe.
Combusting different fuels must require additional “exhaust” configuration.
Proteus Jessica is a crude oil tanker and brand-new, launched in 2022; she may be the latest newest hull in the boro.
And then there’s this! Apollonia the merchant schooner has been around for a few years, but this was my first time to see her. I’ll do another post on the schooner, but consider this photo for now: new fuel and old fuel. Does anyone have Apollonia upriver photos under sail to share? I’ve not seen any.
All photos, any errors, WVD, who wonders what sixth boro October 2032 will look like.
Some things you can only see from the water, like these exquisite sights recently sent along by Capt. Sunbeams. An illustration for “smoke on the water, fire in the sky” i.e., sailing on the Delaware while pushing
something along to earn a living.
Meanwhile there’s lots to see like a cooling tower, Genesis Victory and her barge,
Ruby Coast and
Knot Refined . . . her very new barge,
an incoming Rhea . . . which makes me wonder if she’s here to do what Miss Rui didn’t,
and then a spectacular sunset.
All this adds up to another maybe routine but certainly spectacular run down Delaware Bay.
All photos thanks to Capt. Sunbeams.
Ford here refers to USS Gerald R. Ford (CVN-78), currently operating on her initial voyage ever, along with foreign naval vessels, somewhere in the western Atlantic. Here, two of those, frigates, made their way northbound across the Upper Bay shortly after daybreak earlier this week.
Identify the flag on the stern?
HNLMS De Zeven Provinciën (F-802) was the first of a four-vessel class; others of the class called in the sixth boro here in 2009 and here in 2019.
Following F-802 was an older M-class frigate, HNMLS Van Amstel (F-831), the last remaining HNMLS of that class. More on that class here.
Might that be one of her own RIBs escorting her in.
I’d missed the first of those vessels coming in, so later I hiked up to the passenger terminal to get this shot.
Can you identify this flag?
It’s Danish frigate HDMS Peter Willemoes (F-362).
Namesakes for these three vessels are as follows: F-802 namesake was the flagship of a Dutch admiral, F-831… a captain, and F-362 … an officer who fell in battle at age 24. An image of De Ruyter’s flagship as rendered by William van de Velde the Younger or Cornelis P. de Mööy can be seen here.
All photos, any errors, WVD.
Unrelated but fascinating: An earlier HNMLS vessel named De Zeven Provinciën was deliberately bombed by the Dutch themselves to put down a mutiny on board in 1933. See the story and related thoughts on mutiny here.
tugster: a waterblog 
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