Tugster

Revised:  December 2023

Thanks for reading my blog, whose goal is to help landfolk see my home waters — the port of New York — from the water perspective. The “sixth boro” is my invented term for the waters in and around the port. Part of my motivation is that mainstream media are “terracentric,” overlooking sixth boro news to a large degree.  I strive to be the opposite:  maricentric.  If you like what you see on this blog, tell me about it.  My blog was featured in a February 18, 2011 profile by Alexis Mainland in The New York Times. Read it here.  I also have an Instagram account;  find it here.

In fact, if you see a vessel you think is unique in some way and have a camera, send me an email [   parrotlect ( at ) gmail (dot) com  ]    and maybe a foto and I may put it up, credit to you. I have no commercial intent, but I like the idea of collaboration and am easy to get along with. In fact, I have a whole series called “other peoples photos.”

Although the blog focuses on New York harbor and places accessible from it, my native “adopted” waters are on the Pow Wow in New Hampshire, flowing out of Country Pond, on whose bank I lived a few happy isolated years, years ago now. The Pow Wow meanders about 30 miles to cover less than 5 miles as a heron could fly. Foto below from 2004 shows my preferred helm style up there, best way to see muskrats, beavers, water snakes, pickerel. Moose and bear are there too although I never saw any from the vessel. A favorite “eating-out” up there was paddling along the blueberry bushes for a snack.

OK, it’s time to add a stand-up canoeing photo from 2020, below, gliding down the Delaware toward Matamoras PA.

In spring 2015, I received my Merchant Mariner Credential for Master “of self-propelled vessels  . . . less than 100 gross tons upon inland waters” and was looking to work on this, although the job has to be a great fit.    I also have the STCW BST.  But I chose to follow a different path and worked contractually with Blount Small Ships Adventures as onboard lecturer from 2016 until 2019, as it seemed to build on skills I’d developed over decades.  Some trips are recorded as Go West and  Gallatin’s Ditches.   The most recent series based on a Blount trip is here . .  CB, short for Chicago bound.

Unfortunately, Covid-19 had a devastating impact on everything, so Blount canceled their 2020 season, and subsequently put their small ships up for sale.  As of this revision, however, I’ve been back on the Lakes working for AQV as lakelorian, basically the same job I did with Blount.  That position explains the nomenclature for recent posts:  LL refers to work as lakelorian, and LL2 means my second hitch in that role.  In July 2023, I begin hitch 3 . . . LL3.

Since 2013, my work–articles and photos–has also appeared in the magazine called Professional Mariner.  To read them, look along the drop-down menu for “publications,” and you’ll find most if not all my articles… several dozen now.

I did the photos for this article about Capt. Log, now retired and scrapped, and wrote the story here about a new use for an older tugboat Cornell.  I continue to write/photograph for the magazine when the spirit moves me.

In 2011 Gary Kane and I began work on a documentary about the ship graveyard near Rossville in the Arthur Kill.  I’ve written about the final product here and did a post about the Art of Brooklyn Film Festival here.  You can read a review from Wired magazine here, and order a copy by contacting me.

Gary Kane at DonJon Metal Recycling Facility, August 2011

Summer 2008 I completed an Masters of Fine Arts degree in writing at Vermont College of Fine Arts, a marker that has me plotting alternate courses.  If you look on the left side of  tugster page, you’ll see a yellowish icon of an oil refinery and reference to “Babylonian Captivity,” that is a free book you can read there, a non-fiction account of the August through December 1990 experience I had as a hostage in Iraq.  Scroll through this article for evidence.

Personal stuff: I’m Aquarius, of course, of a dragon year. My favorite book as a kid was Paddle to the Sea by Holling C. Holling.  As a kid, I lived near Lake Ontario, where I learned to swim (Sodus)  and the Erie Canal, where I first fished (Lyons).  If you’ve read that book, you’ll love this story from October 2020.

Some favorite authors are Herman Melville and Farley Mowat.

Eisenhower Lock, about 1965

If you want some other good reads, try Carsten Jensen’s We the Drowned and Alvaro Mutis’ The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll.  From the first long career, I’m now retired;

time is ripe for what one friend calls the renaissance.

Companion animal/familiar: feathered, green, ancient. Formerly the familiar of one Long John Silver, of which he spoke fondly. Never revealed whereabouts of many buried treasures. Didn’t respond to any name although I called him by Nigel, the name used by the man I inherited him from. When my neighbors looked after Nigel, I learned they renamed him Charlie.

Unfortunately last fall, Charley breathed his last after at least 45 years of flying and all-around loud criticism of everything.

 

 Happy reading the blog.