What made this stand out was the mostly horizontal member quite high off the water.  So I started snapping.

I’d noticed a few days back that Pelham had headed unusually far east in the Sound, and had run

sometimes tandem with Captain Willie Landers.  So this must be the tow.  

Any guesses?  

Names are always a clue. 

McInnis is a name that has appeared on this blog previously.  Here’s their network;  in that link, click on the map enlarger.  Below that, Van Aalst is another clue, given what they do.  So if you looked up both links in this paragraph, you can identify what this is. 

Put them altogether, and you’ve solved this whatzit puzzle:  it’s a dry bulk ship unloader built for McInnis.

Where it is headed and why . . .  

now I’ve no clue. A decade ago, I saw an antique specialized barge like this on the Maas (or Meuse) River;  the barge was named “graanzuiger no. 19,” which is pretty explicit Dutch for what it was designed to do:  graanzuiger translates literally as “grain sucker.”  This barge Resolute might be called a cementzuiger. A similar vessel called a floating grain elevator incorporating some of the same principles used to be quite common in the sixth boro, back when our watery boro was a major grain transshipment point. 

All photos, WVD.