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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.
Almost exactly a decade ago I did this post. Today I decided to add to it and broaden the geographic scope. Stick with me to see how broadened this gets.
From the Delaware Memorial Bridge to the entrance of Delaware Bay is about 100 miles. Near the entrance you see big water and big traffic, like a light Ivory Coast above and a working OSG Vision below. OSG Vision is mated to OSG 350, a huge barge used to lighter crude oil tankers 342,000 barrels at a time.
Forty miles upstream from the Delaware Memorial, there’s the Ben Franklin Bridge, here with Pilot towing La Princesa and assisted by Grace and Valentine Moran.
Some Delaware River boats are rarely seen in the sixth boro like Jack Holland.
Almost 150 miles upstream from the Philly-Camden area is Hawk’s Nest Highway, the part of the river once paralleled on the nearer side by the D&H Canal.
Of course I paddled the whole way up there. In fact, this stretch of the Delaware has enough current that a 21st century paddler would not choose to go upstream very far, and a 19th century boat-mule canaler would want to keep navigation separate from the river.
Early summer had its share of young birds,
deer, and trout visible under the canoe.
Some mysterious paddlers shared the waters.
That New York side of the river . . .
if you look close, you can see in places that these are not natural rock formations. Rather, they support the towpath side of the D & H Canal, way up above the river.
Part of Route 97 is also known as Hawk’s Nest Highway.
To digress, the eastern end of the Canal–about a hundred miles to the NE–is in Kingston NY, and a transshipping point was Island Dock, which
has now overgrown. I wonder if there’s ever been a project to clear the trees and undergrowth and contemplate a recreation of this important site. Oil is today’s fuel; coal was definitely king in this other age.
But let’s back to the Delaware. North of Barryville, there’s this bridge. At least, it’s now a bridge, but when
John Roebling built it, it was an aqueduct for D & H coal boats bringing anthracite out of the Coal Region to the sixth boro.
Here’s a preserved portion of the Canal between Hawley and Honesdale PA, just upstream (water has long long) from Lock 31. Honesdale was once the transhipping point between railroad cars and canal boats and deserves another visit and maybe a whole post, which maybe I’ll getto when the museum there opens again.
Pennsylvania has place names like Oil City, Cokeburg, and Coal Port. The coal transported on the D & H came from aptly-named Carbondale, another place that deserves more time. The commodity legacy is seen in these two businesses
and maybe others.
All photos, WVD, at different points over the past 10 years. If anyone has ideas about high points along the river you’d suggest I visit, please let me know. Since my jobs for this summer have fallen through, this might be the year to canoe and hike.
Unrelated, if you haven’t yet read this story about an Argentine in Portugal unable to get home because of cancelled flights and choosing to sail across the Atlantic in a 29′ boat to see his father turn 90, here‘s the link.
Many thanks to Lisa Kolibabek for these photos. Any guesses what’s happening here, besides a green tug approaching a RORO?
See the mariners? Lowering something?
Another ship . . . .
Dropping a line . . .
What’s that bag at the end of the line between the vessels?
Aha! I include these photos out of order. So we’re back to the mariners . . . and the rest of the earlier photo.
and they’re RAISING something related to Philadelphia’s SCI Santa Run. The delivery vessel here is Jupiter, a survivor from 1902.
This gives this photo a whole new interpretation.
Ditto this photo. Crew dropped a line . . .
to receive a package from the tug that includes the “red guy” with the extravagant beard and unusual flotation jacket.
Indeed . . . a great idea. Bravo to SCI of Philadelphia and South Jersey.
Thanks for these photos to Lisa, who reports visiting M/V MORNING LAURA, M/T FREJA HAFNIA, M/T LILLESAND.
She also sends along the Santa Run 2017 report from SCI: “80 ditty bags were delivered to the 80 seafarers at the Packer Avenue, Axeon, and Paulsboro Refining terminals. See our website at sciphiladelphia.org. The top sponsors are Urban Engineers and Mary Ruth Talley. During the month of December we deliver about 2000 ditty bags to all the seafarers of the Pennsylvania and South Jersey side of the Delaware River. They include hats, scarves, work gloves, socks, and basic daily essentials of shaving cream, deodorant, toothpaste, etc. Many of the hats and scarves are knitted throughout the year by volunteers from all over the region. This year, as part of their rebranding campaign, Philaport sponsored over 700 ski caps. The ditty bags always put a smile on the seafarers face. To be thought about when so far from home during the holidays is so appreciated. ”
Here’s the SCI main site with the starting point for their archival photos. I understand that SCI NY used to do a similar run with W. O. Decker. I’d love to see photos . . from the 1990s or earlier. PortSide NewYork used to as well.
For some of Lisa’s Christmas cheer photos from two years ago, click here and scroll. Jupiter is one of the loved vessels of the Philadelphia Ship Preservation Guild.
With Valentine’s Day only a dozen days away, how about a honey boat for your honey . . . and you?
Click on the image below to find details. Newtown Creek, the GUP carrier, really can be yours for a mere $235,000, unless someone takes the bid higher. Click here and here for some of my previously posted photos of NYC GUP carriers. And for the record, they do NOT take the honey out of the harbor to dump out at sea . . . not since 1991 at least. The photo of Newtown Creek above I took in October 2011.
Seriously, although you’d have considerable work and expense transforming the above skiff into a vehicle for romance, you would be starting from a vessel with exquisitely sweet lines. This smaller skiff or many of them then could serve as tenders.
First, check “parrotlect flickrstream” along the left margin here for my favorite 45 fotos from the start of the Great Chesapeake Schooner Race last week. I had posted some of them earlier, but put them up in the moment and without the benefit of my “foto-cleanup” tools.
Here is the real predecessor for this post . . . small specialized East coast designs. And here’s a question . . . guess the loa and beam of this vessel. Answer and fotos follow.
Some small craft are just beautiful . . . sweet
not to emphasize the “just” there. Seriously sweet lines here.
And here. And nearby but in the shadows was a twin called Puffin. And that vintage Johnson Sea horse 18 was attached to the
the prettiest motorboat I’ve ever seen. I don’t think that Johnson comes with the blender attachment seen here!!
This is Silk. Silk is a pushboat. Believe it or not, it’s the prime mover for a 65′ skipjack, and while hauling for oysters, Silk needs to be hanging high and dry. I regret I didn’t get a chance to look at the engine.
Stanley Norman dates from 1902. And that boom looks impossibly long.
And here’s a surprise, maybe. The vessel in the top foto here is a restored 1925 Hooper Island Draketail named Peg Wallace, measuring a belief-defying 37’6″ loa with a beam of only 6’8″!! I’d written of local Chesapeake and southern boats here almost two years ago, but this was my first encounter with a draketail. Scroll down to pete44’s comment here to learn his sense of the origin of the design.
I’d love to see her move through the water.
Draketail . . . named for a duck. Make way!
All fotos by Will Van Dorp.
Sometimes along the road, I see things I don’t understand. The first two fotos here, though, I can identify but just won’t right now. Hazard guesses about this fish?
. . . and the current usage of this vessel? Answers soon.
This is a poor foto shot from the roadway where I couldn’t stop, but it looks like fishing weir tenders removing trapped fish? Click to enlarge.
Here, from a place I could stop is a weir with nets visible. I call them weirs, but maybe other terms are used along the mid-Atlantic coast
Here was my northbound conveyance . . . ferry Twin Capes, which I saw in the sixth boro here (fotos 4 and 5) two years ago. Nah . . . it wasn’t lost or in fugitive mode; it was headed for Caddell Dry Dock.
Now . . . I kid you not, but let me say I saw a ray in Delaware Bay (sounds like the beginning of a song?) but didn’t even try to take a foto. Maybe that’s a ray’s mouth motif on the bow of that pilot boat, which just
retrieved the pilot from Fivelborg, Quebec-bound. You need to see this foto of her on shipspotting!!
Following Fivelborg was this container ship, and I have no idea who she is. Any ideas . . . 10 to 15 miles behind Fivelborg outbound Delaware Bay?
Here’s the Cape May Light with the wreckage of SS Atlantus off Sunset Beach.
If this is a second life for this vessel parked on the shellrock surfaced marina, what was first life?
Two roads diverged in the New Jersey bayou (and I don’t mean that pejoratively) , and my GPS had no idea where I was or where I should go, and squadrons of tabanus nigrovittatuses aka greenheads knew exactly where their blood food was. Squadrons of squadrons!!
But I braved them to sneak a quick look at 1927 FV Louise Ockers!
All fotos by Will Van Dorp. More on the two unanswered Qs at the beginning soon.
Ironically, Road Fotos 17 were taken where this post ends up. And I had planned NOT to post today, but . . . time affords posting, and posting makes a drive more like a gallivant. Given that I drove to Hampton Roads, it’s interesting to reflect on what scenes are absent from this post. Three hours after locking my house door, I was on New Jersey at the southern tip on NJ, looking
across Delaware Bay, where I narrowly missed a close up
with a Kirbyfied . . . can you guess? . . . .
Greenland Sea. Lots of other vessels anchored just outside the channel, here looking roughly toward the northwest.
Entering Lewes, we met a dozen or so dolphins . . . who all managed to evade
my camera, which seems to be more skilled with stationary objects like this pilot boat.
I’m guessing a fish boat, although I’ve not seen this configuration before. It reminds me of an updated version of a menhaden boat?
The Cape Charles light is a skeleton a quarter mile inland.
The lights at Fort Story in the background, and Trabzon and Red Iris anchored outside Hapmton Roads.
This might be USS Samuel Eliot Morison foreground and USCGC Legare farther away. And then again, the nearer vessel might be something else.
And finally, any guesses what Atlantic Dawn is towing into the mouth the the Chesapeake?
Cutterhead dredge Illinois!! If Illinois makes it all the way to the sixth boro, you know who will have more opportunities to perfect her rendition of the toothy snouted machine.
And the reason for this gallivant–other than gallivanting for its own sake– will be clearer tomorrow.
All fotos by Will Van Dorp today.
@#$#!! . . . as I write this, USAV Winfield Scott is passing the precise location Atlantic Dawn was 90 minutes ago. To see USAV Winfield Scott, check Jed’s most recent post here.
I could have called this “other peoples fotos,” but these are also quite unusual. Foto below comes many thanks to John Watson. According to John, it anchored off Bay Ridge for less than 12 hours yesterday to bunker. The last time this blog touched on livestock of the bovine sort was the post Cows in CATS. What I know about the vessel follows at the end of this post.
Foto below comes thanks to Capt. Stig Samuelsson. Take your guesses and locate the info below. I cropped Stig’s foto slightly to obscure a giveaway.
Finally, I put in this foto that I took on Sunday: this is a classy little cabin cruiser out of New Jersey. I posted a foto of it last year as well . .. I have no idea about the name or manufacturer, but my guess is that it was built within a 30ish mile radius of the sixth boro.
Answers: John’s foto shows Shorthorn Express; as of this writing, it’s headed up Delaware Bay, probably to Wilmington. And it’ll load cows for Turkey. Anyone get fotos along the way to Wilmington? Shipspotting offers a dozen fotos, including several showing the vessel–scrapped 20 years ago–that previously bore this name. What’s clear on those fotos is the elaborate ventilation system needed to keep the “shorthorns” happy during the passage.
Stig’s foto shows Harry, a tug built in 1887 as steam tug Stora Korsnäs 1. According to Stig, Stora Korsnäs 1 was typical of tugs used to tow lumber along the coasts of northern Sweden. She currently runs as a museum with a volunteer crew. If you can’t read this, you can at least look at fotos. It’s based halfway between Oslo and Goteborg and right across the water from the northern tip of Denmark. Click here for a youtube of Harry underway.
Sad news: Lady Jane MAY be not long for this world.
Lady Jane is 1963-Belgium built North Sea trawler looking a lot like Wanderbird and Cape Race. Tim Zim (whom I met when he visited the sixth boro a half year ago … see seventh foto here) has been restoring her for seven years, but recently hauled her and learned the hull was more corroded than he had thought. He wants to give up . . . he says in the post. But, I’m wondering if you could get a second opinion. A friend who read Tim’s July 25, 2011 post recalled that LV-118 aka Lightship Overfalls was in worse condition and was brought back. Details in that link about the “restoration miracle.” Please drop Tim an email with encouragement and (even better) technical advice.
Bowsprite’s rendering of the orange aka ġeolurēad Staten Island ferry John F. Kennedy feels like a sip of warm cider on a cold autumn evening. The Staten Island ferry adopted this color–clever . . . they picked a color that both promoted visibility/safety and nodded to heritage–in 1926. Before that, the color was basic white. So here’s my question: are there large ferries elsewhere that are not mostly white? And this takes me way out on a limb, but can anything be read into the fact that a national eating/drinking establishment uses a similar orange color?
Cross Sound Ferry’s Cape Henlopen is mostly
a color that would blend into snow and fog. That’s Joan Turecamo in the background, off New London.
The same is true also of Susan Anne, here off Plum Island.
Yes, that’s Manhattan in the background. Can you guess this ferry white vessel?
It’s Twin Capes . . . a Delaware River and Bay Authority vessel, on a special mission in the sixth boro. DRBA has its own vessel named Cape Henlopen, a geographic feature located in Delaware.
My other ferry experience this year introduced me to the Washington State Ferry system, with green trim, but otherwise
mostly the color of snow and fog.
Here is a Tugster post on Champlain ferries.
All fotos here by Will Van Dorp.
Please send fotos of non-white ferries . . . or non-sixth boro orange ones or banana yellow or plum . . . . two-tone green?
So it doesn’t take long: Capt. Bill Miller sent this undated foto (late 1940s?) of what could be the green CNJRR ferry Cranford (launched 1905 from Wilmington), which ran in the harbor from Jersey City. Cranford has served as a reef since 1982. A slightly older vessel formerly known as Lakewood (1901) served as the last CNJRR ferry until 1967; then renamed Second Sun it served as education center for the Salem nuclear power plant until 1992, when it had a third life as a fancy Philly waterfront eatery called Elizabeth, which transitioned into a Hooters venue until 2002. Today, the vessel is probably the only Hooters-logoed reef in the universe. How can I nominate ferry Elizabeth for induction into the Hooters Hall o Fame . . .
Related: The Washington State Ferry system uses 22 vessels to move 23 million passengers per year; the Staten Island Ferry uses 10 vessels to move 20 million passengers per year. Hmmm!
Unrelated: a stealth sub losing its stealth on a Scottish mudbank.
See Otherwatersheds 6 here. Many thanks to Jeff Schurr and Capt. John Curdy, who gave me a first-rate tour of 20ish miles of greater Philadelphia waterfront from the Delaware line up to the Delair and Betsy Ross Bridges. According to a studied source: “Of the 360 major American ports, the Delaware River ranks second in total tonnage shipped, and eighth in the dollar value of the cargo. Every year, 2600 ships call into our port, which claims to employ 75,000 people.” And another from RITA, too pithy to summarize, lists the largest trading countries and the predominant products in and out through the port.
More posts and maps on Philly–in all its vibrancy as a port– in the next few days, but for now, a sampling, an overview of old and new, starting with the most threatened ones. Of course, that would be SS United States–which I wrote about here. For info on the raffle, click here. Doubleclick on fotos enlarges.
Equally endangered is Olympia. Click here and here for info on efforts to save this piece of history.
Setubal, Portugal-built Grand Banks dory boat Gazela graces the waterfront. Find more about her history here.
Mischief (ex-Thornton Bros, Cissi, and Cissi Reinauer) in her current colors and habitat. A previous appearance of this vessel is here.
Inactive carriers John F. Kennedy and Forrestal await their fate, as
does destroyer Arthur W. Radford. Soon to be an Atlantic reef ?
Weeds grow from the fendering of B. M. Thomas, launched in Groton, 1926.
Like I said earlier, port of Philly has a vibrancy, illustrated by OSG Vision and
“shortie” (77′ x 34′) tug Reid McAllister.
More Delaware pics up tomorrow, but for now, in the Pyne Point section of Camden, Anne is the skipjack rigged schooner (1965, masts farthest to the right) hiding in the weeds. Now look in the extreme left side of the foto . . . there in the weeds, what
might this be? Anyone identify this mystery tug?
The interactive map below shows Pyne Point Park; the weedy inlet is just to the right of the park label.
Again, many thanks to Jeff and John. All fotos taken yesterday by Will Van Dorp.
tugster: a waterblog 
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