Since starting the blog, I’ve noticed constant change in the sixth boro, shorelines of the five boros and NJ, and a few other places I get to repeatedly.  For example, a year and a half ago Bayonne Dry Dock added their marine travel lift, and anyone looking in that direction gets treated to a rotation of work boats, revealing hull lines and wheels, the usually invisible parts of a boat. 

Saint Emilion (SE) spent about a month on the hard;  in fact, I caught her in the slings about to lift here a few months back.   In the photo above SE shares the yard with NRC Guardian, an oil spill response boat one hopes never to need.  Below the other boat is McCormack Boys. Seeing them juxtaposed like this illustrates the difference in scale between a 73′ tug and a 105′ one.

Beam on the two boats is a less dramatic difference of 38′ v. 26′.

Charleston, 95′ x 34′, has interesting five-bladed props, aka wheels.  For some sense of the variety of props, click here. 

Recently Alex McAllister was out of the water for a period of time, which could be as routine as you own car going up on the lift now and then. 

Note the Kort nozzles (ducted propeller)  that enclose the props on Alex. Nozzles can also be seen above on McCormack Boys.

All photos, WVD, whose previous high-and-dry posts can be seen here. 

I mentioned in yesterday’s post that this is the week tugster launched 16 years ago.  Back then and sometimes since, I sometimes describe this blog as a research project without a defined end point or goal;  observe, photograph, sometimes chat, analyze, repeat  . . . is the method. If analyze means reading, then google or whatever search engine you prefer . . .  is your friend.

That there are patterns is clearer now, even with and maybe because of occasional wrong deductions along the way.   Despite my frequent use of “random” in titles, my “patterns” geek level has climbed such that a newbie to the site might wonder about the minutae, the invented words and acronyms.  Trust me:  I still am (mostly) a sociable, balanced person albeit with the more maricentric perspective I strived for.  

In case you’re wondering, some video sources these days are What the Ship and marktwained, other maricentric and rivacentric sites.  Rivacentric . . . I like that   because seeing life from the perspective of rivers is not the same as seeing it from shoreless seas or  trails, roads and highways.  

I’ve been kicking a rival idea around in my head . . .  using the method described above, I’d love to do something–likely not a blog–about various agriculture/food production sectors now compared with how they were 50 or so years ago, the time when I was growing up with agricultural chores all year long on a family farm.  My brother dairy farms the “old” way on the land where I grew up, and friends work for today’s east coast megafarms.  Then there’s farming with poultry, beef and other meat animals, apples and other fruits, grains and other cash crops, produce, mushrooms,  . . . that’s only land farming and the list of farming types can go on . . .

I think about doing this ag then/now project a lot, but I have time to do only one research project, not both.