I hope you’re enjoying my juggling of alternating author persona:  in this post, I’m back to tugster retrospectives.

Remember this sixth boro boat?  It carried a powerful Norse name.   It was a favorite of mine too. Back when I took the photo in 2008, I thought I’d never see a pushboat with variable height wheelhouse in the boro again.  Little did I know a lot of things.   I didn’t suspect that she’d be modified such that her variability of height was removed.  Isn’t that like removing the wings of Pegasus?  She might appear back in then sixth boro one of these days as Matty T.

I never imagined what fate was in store for Peking!  I hope some day to see her in her restored condition.

I never suspected these two would be sold south, nor did I know the namesake of Patrick Sky beside fleet mate Scotty Sky.   I didn’t even know these little tankers had worked the Great Lakes or that they came from the Blount shipyard or that I’d someday work for Blount.   It’s possible that the little tankers are now gone.

I was astonished by the two submarines that sailed into the sixth boro, this one and a Dutch sub.  So far as I know, none have been in the boro in the past decade now. 

In 2009, I started going to work in Elizabeth NJ early to watch scenes like this along the Arthur Kill.  

I sailed through the Highlands in the crow’s nest of Half Moon, never envisioning it would be sold foreign.  Lookouts were posted in both crow’s nests that day, so as not to take chances past Anthony’s Nose and Dunderberg Mountain.

Who ever expected that an airplane would be fished out of the Hudson, and that that misplaced aircraft felled by misplaced birds would be safely immersed in a frozen river with no loss of life or even serious injury. Is there a historical marker praising Sully’s landing anywhere along the riverbanks?

In September 2009 a veritable Dutch invasion by craft traditional and highest-tech lethality would make its way upriver. 

Let’s hold it up here.  I was just learning about the sixth boro with camera in hand back then, and I’m glad now what I recorded then, because otherwise my memory would have left out a lot.  I wish I’d started photographing years earlier.