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It’s not often that a Belgian-flagged work boat comes into the sixth boro, especially one that’s named for an archipelago in the corner of the Indian Ocean over near where it was built and first launched almost 20 years ago. That makes this one really exotic.
Behold Nicobar, one of the Belgian-flagged vessels working on the offshore wind farms over to the east of here.
Here are some specs. As of this morning, she’s still in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, right near the NYC Ferry base there.
As she headed in the other morning, her crew beheld the views of the sixth boro shores,
and some local vessels appeared in some cameo roles, as low clouds obscurer the tops of these cliffs.
Shay Holloway took and shared the photo below. I’m always gratified that others are also noticing unusual visitors.
Welcome, Nicobar. Thanks, Shay. All other photos, any errors, WVD.
Another Keppel SingMarine vessel, Smit Kamara, appeared on this blog 15 years ago.
Does 153305 have another name?
In the first half of March, 153305 and Eastern Welder were still dragging the bottom of the boro, hat tip to the late great Joseph Mitchell. Above and below, these photos were taken looking west toward New Jersey from a central location in Upper Bay.
The boro, my invented unit for the harbor greater than just the Upper Bay, is full of surprises, as was reiterated to me on a warm day last week as I sat in the sun, looking NE toward the Manhattan Bridge, and watched things pass . . . like pilot boat Yankee down at Pier 17. The excursion boat in the distance, stern toward us, is The Manhattan.
Westerly was reading the bottom near the west end of the East River and Red Hook; note the crewman working in the winter sun in short sleeves.
Different day, here’s Westerly working, with Governors Island ferry, Lt. Samuel S. Coursen, and heliport in the background.
Curtis Reinauer was on a mission,
leaving a trail across the calm waters.
Identify these boats
In the foreground, it’s Discovery Coast with a Vane barge; middle, it’s Navigator with her barge; in the distance, it’s a quite busy Bayonne Dry Dock and beyond that, the cranes at Port Elizabeth.
All photos, any errors, WVD.
Yesterday I tried out a location near the Brooklyn Bridge on the Brooklyn side, a place I should have been for yesterday’s post. USCGC Legare (WMEC-912) appears on this blog for the first time here, with an intriguing puzzling destination, although I allow for code and/or humor.
It was a beautiful and still technically winter’s day
with unique scenery of the cliffs on either side of the tidal strait. As to winter, truth be told it was the day before the day before last day of winter.
I wondered whether that was a private RIB getting quite near the WMEC, until
I zoomed in.
Speaking on WMECs, click here for a number of other medium endurance cutters that have appeared on this blog. WMEC-912 is named for the attorney general of POTUS #10, nearly 200 years ago.
Here’s the intriguing puzzling destination given on AIS. Several places have that official name around the globe, and then there’s the one in Asgard in Norse myth.
Seeing Valhalla listed as destination reminds me of entries I’ve seen on one of the debris collection boats I know that sometimes lists “here and there” as their destination.
All photos, any errors, WVD.
It’s not often that I see Christine M. McAllister. And this is [I believe] the first time Sea Shuttle has been towed by any tugs besides those of Gateway, now gone. A lot of you will know what Sea Shuttle moves, but I’ll hold off until the end of this
Christine has been around for a while, as is the case of some of the other tugboats that came originally out of the Nolty J. Theriot Offshore fleet.
I should have been on the other side of the East River to get best shots here,
but I got what I could, even with that sun blasting through the Gothic arches of the Brooklyn Bridge.
Christine is large, although not the largest., at 126′ x 38′ and 6000 hp.
Note between the tug and cbarge here is a small hydrographic survey boat, Westerly, which has been busy in the boro of late. More on Westerly soon.
So getting back to Sea Shuttle . . . . she’s a specialty barge operated by Electric Boat, which should be a major clue. Here’s an image that’ll make it clearer. And here in a blogpost from February 2012 is an even clearer clue.
The tow shuttles incomplete sections of submarines under construction between shipyards.
All photos yesterday, any errors, WVD.
The East River has seen unusual cargoes and mysteries and oddities like the ones in links at the start of this sentence. And it actually did once see aircraft carriers as we normally think of them, like USS Leyte as published in this 2015 CNN Business article.
But yesterday this aircraft
traveled westbound
sans her 144,000 hp worth of turbojets and astride Weeks 2222 and Weeks 63,
powered by the twin diesels of 2000 hp instead
I’m posting early today because I hope to present a part B later today, after that Concorde gets lifted onto terra firma over at the Intrepid Museum later this morning. As I understand it, the jet will be making a transit from the Weeks yard and up the North River early midmorning.
If you want to see it underway from the Statue to the Intrepid Museum this morning, don’t be late.
All photos, any errors, WVD, who is grateful to David Schwartz for tipping me off about this East River move yesterday. See the Intrepid Museum livestream on YouTube here.
Related: Space shuttle Enterprise processed to Intrepid in these posts from 2012 here and here.
Also related: Here was an aircraft carrier barge making its way into the New York State Canals in Waterford 12 years ago.
Know that boat making its way through the canyons along the East River?
It took two months and a few days, but here it is, maybe here they are. Is CMT Kronau among the barges that entered the sixth boro back in early January? Of course, the much anticipated Erin Elizabeth arrived that day.
It was good to catch up with the new boat among this iconic
and wooded shoreline.
All photos, any errors, WVD.
The other day I took a quick sweep of the Upper Bay to see who was around at that moment. Back in the boro was Resolute, 1975, a Jakobson build, 93′ x 28′ and 3000 hp. bow pudding! Jakobson gets mentioned a lot on this blog.
Marjorie B. was over at Bayonne Shipyard in the spa. She was built in 1974; her numbers are 112′ x 30′ and 4000 hp.
Buchanan 5 passed by on the East River. 1982. The numbers . . . 72′ x 26′ and 2600 hp. On the other bank, that’s Brooklyn Heights.
Pathfinder was also westbound in the East River moving containerized trash toward the Arthur Kill railheads. Her numbers are 1972. 92′ x 27′ and 2250 hp. I wonder if the waste stream has seen any impact from the food scrap collection program headed up by GrowNYC and its compost creation initiative that I’m a fan of.
As the sun was setting, James Charles made its way toward the east on the same waterway as Pathfinder. James Charles’ numbers are as follows: 1970. 93′ x 29′ and 2000 hp.
I need to spend more time along this side of the boro, especially as the sun sets.
That’s Brooklyn Bridge Park on the far side.
All photos, any errors, WVD.
Many thanks to all of you who reported seeing some odd “cargo” on a barge being towed around the sixth boro. Of course, I had to check it out. The sixth boro is known for some unusual cargoes going at least as far back as some dinosaurs headed for the World’s Fair in 1964. I hope this image helps jog your memory. More recently there was a floating island, reputedly peopled with cannibals, although –ok–I just made that part up. A liveaboard “water pod” barge also once ranged the boro, as did of course John Noble’s barge and still does Lehigh Valley 79, following in the wake of lots of floating theaters, listed in the last paragraph here.
I got some photos yesterday. By then I knew the story and will share it at the end of this post. Thanks for the heads up; I missed have missed this sixth boro tugboat story altogether.
Yesterday in the sixth boro, as was the case in much of northern US yesterday, weather was wild in one way or another. No, no snow fell yet, but temperatures dropped as a gale was screaming,
and that led to some unusual items and a lot of debris floating out there.
But this statue–here juxtaposed with the Williamsburg Bridge— was unusual, and quite ambiguous in some respects.
The tugboats are Joanne Marie and James Charles, and the barge Hughes 651. This is James Charles’ first appearance on the blog as James Charles, although way back in 2008 it appeared here and here in previous liveries.
Here are two close-ups of the statue.
Some details of the story are that a rapper named Kid Cudi has just this week released his last and 9th album called Insano, and statues identical or similar to this have been towed around Long Beach CA and standing on land in Paris FR in connection with this release. I’m not familiar with his music, his personal life, or rap as a genre. All else I could say, including interpretation of the statue posture, would be speculation. I will speculate that that statues, all three of them, may have been made by the workshops I never wrote about but visited last March in New Orleans location called Mardi Gras World.
All images, any errors, WVD.
Now I’ll indulge the speculative side of my brain: maybe The Rolling Stones will engage a barge to transport a sculpted foam statue of the band around the sixth boro next. Maybe several barges could be assembled in a prime location along the water’s edge on May 5, 2024 so that the Five Boro Bike Tour could become the SIX Boro bike tour. Maybe that same assembly of barges could be left in place for another six weeks so that the mermaid parade carni-fest could happen there. One more, maybe around Labor Day 2024, a section of the Floating PLUS Pool can be condoned off for RC model tugboat race, with the RC models being stand-in replicas of actual sixth boro tugboats.
I could go on, or maybe you could help speculate, just speculate.
My first sentence in “something different 78” began the same way: “This is not my photo, and I’ll tell you about it, but for now I’ll say it’s represented as having been taken …” . But for 79, I’ll change the rest of it to: from the suspension bridge.
I’ll let you study the images carefully first, and then I’ll add my five cents. Neal Moore shared this stereopticon card with me, so I’m sharing it here. If you want, try to figure out what you can from the two versions of the image here.
Given the time period on the card, said “the suspension bridge” is what today we’d call the Brooklyn Bridge. The Williamsburg Bridge opened in 1903 and the Manhattan in 1909, so I’d say this is a pre-1903 photo.
Along the waterside of this “street of ships” where Wavertree currently serves as a reminder of how things once looked, I see lots of sailing vessels as well as steamers and a fleet of tugboats. The side-wheel steamers have some writing on the paddleboxes. That’s something to follow-up on.
Here and here are some reviews I’ve done of books on the depicted area of the sixth boro.
So, here’s a start for figuring out what we see in these images. On the paddle box of a nearer steamer, I see the words “SYLVAN STR”. That would be this vessel of the Harlem and New York Navigation Company, 1856 until xxx. Read about the “sylvan” steamers –and much more–here. More on one of the captains of the Sylvan boats in the 1880s and 1890s here. A painting of the steamer and others is here. Click on the image below for more context.
If I read this right, the steamer was destroyed by fire in 1903 .. . at age forty. By this time, it was running on the Saint Lawrence and the fire occurred near/in Kingston ON Canada.
On a paddle box of a steamer lower center below I read Adelphi, which at one time ran between NYC and Haverstraw. A bit about one of her pilots here. Would this be the same Adelphi whose boiler exploded in Norwalk in 1878, making this a pre-1878 photo? And that small vessel along the starboard side of the sailing ship near the bottom of the photo, was that a lighter?
I’ll leave this post with a link to another steamer–City of Kingston (NY)– that began its career on the Hudson but ended it in the Pacific Northwest. Enjoy.
Unrelated but follow-up to an April 2013 lost [and felonious] tugboat Wamandai A870; Turquoise Bay may be another lost tugboat.
Here are previous riverbanks posts, although for some inexplicable reason, they are not indexed in order.
Name the riverbank in the image below?
Above and below, that’s Manhattan, as seen from about 30 miles out. It would take another four hours before we passed the 59th Street Bridge. The darker image in the center of the photo below is Vane’s Brooklyn, which we were following.
The sunset colors below in the photo below taken about an hour after the top photo were stunning.
Three hours later we approached the Hell Gate bridges. See Thomas D. Witte hidden in the lights?
Passing the northern tip of Roosevelt Island, the refurbished lighthouse looked like this, compared with
this image of the very same lighthouse I’d taken only eight days earlier. The Nellie Bly “faces” tribute there is worth seeing by day. The main channel passes to the left in the photo below.
Here is said 59th Street Bridge looking at the Graduate Hotel (No, that’s not a 1967 movie reference.) and some buildings of Cornell Tech.
New on this bank of Manhattan are the American Copper Buildings, here
framing a seasonally-lit Empire State Building . . . ESB. That belt joining the two . . . that houses a swimming pool.
The repurposed Havermeyer Sugar building has just added a new but retro sign, alluding to the former enterprise of the building.
Behold the 120-year-old Williamsburg Bridge
and then eventually the 140-year-old Brooklyn Bridge. The 113-year-old Manhattan Bridge is in between the two.
After rounding the “horn,” we headed up the North River for the Hudson, passing other new buildings framing the ESB. This twisting pair is called The Eleventh. The ghostly white tower is the Bank of America Tower, and below it is IAC.
Notice a pattern here in framing the ESB? The “web” of course is The Vessel, a structure whose origins by water I posted about here and here.
Looking toward the Manhattan side of the GW Bridge, that red speck at its base is the “little red lighthouse” at Jeffreys Point made obsolete by the GW itself.
As down broke, we were north of Poughkeepsie, breaking ice and about to turn into the Rondout.
All photos, WVD, who hopes you’ve enjoyed this phantasmagorical sequence of the five boros as seen from the sixth.
tugster: a waterblog 
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