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Behold ex-LST-510, USS Buncombe County, preparing for a routine landing over in Connecticut.
Bowsprite drew it, so it drew me . . . I had to go see again, even though some years ago I’d ridden her. If you look at her peers launched at JeffBoat in late 1943 and early 1944, you’ll agree she’s a survivor.
She follows the route that could have been a bridge from Long Island to Rhode Island!
I believe this lighthouse, passed here by MV John H, is still for sale . . .
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Click here to see frogman’s encounter with Plum Gut between Orient Point Light and
Meanwhile . . . here’s 495 . . . the water way.
All photos by Will Van Dorp.
Click here for more info on the Cross Sound Ferry, mentioned here on tugster a few months back in connection with a certain 2003 Rockefeller Center Christmas Tree.
Finally . .. unrelated but very important, vote here as often as you can given all your devices and browsers to get funding for USS Slater, about to come downriver for repairs.
Care for a shot of Melville? ““Take almost any path you please, and ten to one it carries you down in a dale, and leaves you there by a pool in the stream. There is magic in it. Let the most absent-minded of men be plunged in his deepest reveries–stand that man on his legs, set his feet a-going, and he will infallibly lead you to water, if water there be in all that region. Should you ever be athirst in the great American desert, try this experiment, if your caravan happen to be supplied with a metaphysical professor. Yes, as every one knows, meditation and water are wedded for ever.”
Paraphrase that a bit, take liberties, and you might come up with: “When you gallivant, chances are you’ll end up in the water.” If Melville were around the sixth boro these days, he might add something about the likelihood of seeing folks with digital cameras and–if among those gallivants there’s a bowsprite–inks/charcoal pencils too.
The whale lives
here, 100 miles plus east of the sixth boro’s easternmost reaches and if you go
up these stairs marked by a rendering of the orange ferry John F. Kennedy, you’ll
see this . . . 38 pieces of bowsprit’s art on display.
The exhibit called “Working Girls of New York Harbor” is up now til the end of May.
And if you feel a thirst that water fails to quench, the exhibit is located one floor above stainless steel vats filled with thousands of gallons of fermenting, living brews.
Here’s the front of the exhibit postcard, with evidence that bowsprite has turned her gaze and inked what she saw in increasingly distant waters.
Oh . . and the opening’s tonight in Greenport. Gotta run. More Greenport soon.
All photos here by Will Van Dorp.
What attracted my attention was the gull, shrieking with anger. Click here (and follow) to see all the previous posts I’ve done about this once-proud ferry.
“How could you allow this prolonged death?” said the gull.
And as much evidence as you may have that I’m fascinated by ruins, I’m with the gull on this one.
It’s painful to watch this agony, especially as the sequence of links following from the first one above shows how spectacular this one once was.
Get it over already.
I’ve taken the following photos from the following books, which I own. If you’re interested in the sixth boro past, you should own them too.
Thomas R. Flagg . . . New York Harbor Railroads, vol 2
Here was the interior before it was converted to a restaurant.
And the engine room.
Raymond J. Baxter and Arthur G. Adams . . . Railroad Ferries of the Hudson
The two books I cite are certainly a worthwhile purchase for anyone who looks at today’s sixth boro watersides and imagines the past.
Here was the first in this series, from quite a while back. The next two photos below were taken late last week by Brian DeForest.
Miss New York, Blount built in 1993 leaves the Statue quite dramatically.
Ferry Lt. Samuel S. Coursen, Mathis built 1956, was named for this West Point grad.
That’s Explorer of the Seas in the background.
Water Taxi and NYC Audubon operate this winter cruise to watch the water mammal between the boat and my lens.
Seals in the harbor are the real people movers.
And finally, let’s move from those mammals to one painted on the ferry Major General William H. Hart, Staten-Island built 1926 . . . now rebranded as SS Meow Man.
On pages 450-1 of Peter& Norma Stanford’s A Dream of Tall Ships–which I reviewed here– there’s a description of this vessel’s hand-over from the USCG to South Street Seaport, where for a period of time it served as a marine trades training school, partly funded by Brooke Astor. Here was a post where I used a slightly different version of this Hart photos.
Thanks to Brian for use of the first two photos. All others by Will Van Dorp.
You might be wondering about the connection between the vessel below and my previous post . . . here about the delivery of the 1997 Rockefeller Center tree.
It turns out that in 2003 the vessel below –North Star– formerly offshore supply vessel known as Rio Hanna (1968) and Pelto Seahorse
carried these Rockettes and a very happy crewman
along with the 2003 Rockefeller Center Christmas tree from New London to a pier near Intrepid, where the ramps were positioned and the truck rolled off on its way east to deliver the tree. Read all about it here in the New London Day of November 12, 2003. The fifty-year-old 79′ Norway spruce came from yard of Frances Katkauskas in Manchester, CT.
Here the crew pose for a foto near the Circle Line pier after delivering the tree.
Many thanks to Guy Torsilieri for providing the lead and to Richard Sise of Cross Sound Ferry for providing these photos. These fotos were taken the year I moved to NYC but three years before I started this blog.
If anyone has other pics to share, I’d love to put them up here. And 2014 . . . sounds like another tree-by-water delivery is overdue.
I was 11 and waiting for the school bus to take me home from school.
Will Van Dorp took this foto this afternoon.
Just to clarify if this this your first time reading this series, “JR” abbreviates “January river,” which you may know in Portuguese as “Rio de Janeiro.” Here that’s pronounced as “hee oh.”
Make sense of this foto? More info at the end of the post.
NYC’s sixth boro moves lots of folks between the boros of Staten and Island and Manhattan. All day and night via FREE ferries. Here it’s two dollars and change between Rio and Niteroi. To speed up dock time, some of the loading/unloading happens simultaneously. Don’t try to swim in the wrong side of the flow.
The ferry above is Inga II. You can figure this part out. Here’s more info.
Being here, I’ve become aware of the slant I bring to this “water blog.” I focus on water as a place to work or a means to get to or do/create work. Hence . . . fishing boat and MSC Cadiz.
The work of this small Brazilian tanker would probably be done by ATB in North America. It was in Rio three days ago and way south of Santos already.
Fishing boats of different sizes pass in front of Ilhas Cagarras.
Here’s a classy motor yacht over at Flamenco Beach, MV Tamarind, 1958.
Here’s a former Dutch pilot boat Wega. I assumed it was active out of Rio, but it appears to be languishing here, after being seized, a 1968 beauty that may come to a bad end. Now that suggests a back story I’d like to know.
Back to that first foto, it’s the bar where “Girl from Ipanema” was penned more than half century ago. This mural is at least 20 feet high. Countless are the times this music has played in my head! Where was that girl walking to? Her job?
All fotos by Will Van Dorp.
No, this isn’t the January River. I leave for there today, but this . . . !! These next four fotos come from the perspicacious bowsprite, taken yesterday afternoon. The tug in the foreground is Sea Wolf is 1982. In the background is –of course–Ellis Island, 1900. In between with the yellow stack is
Yankee, 1907. Her long history includes a stint as Machigonne moving passengers across the sixth boro from Ellis Island to other boros and to NJ. The tow began at the far right of this foto.
More tugster on Yankee when I return, but before then, I’m sure there’ll be other info.
Six plus years ago, a friend Mike caught these fotos of Sea Wolf‘s sister–Sea Lion–moving an unusual vessel named Abora III out of the Morris Canal to sea. The reed craft made it more than halfway across the Atlantic.
All fotos by bowsprite. Advance notice came thanks to Rod Smith, who once worked as deckhand on Yankee and who will have his own account of this move . . . to Brooklyn. Here (2007) and here (2011) are my previous posts with Yankee fotos from New Jersey. Click here to get some backstory–and video of Sea Wolf departing with ferry– from a supporter who wanted to keep them on the watery edge of Hoboken.
Now, I pack and head south myself. Vou escrever mais em breve.
You may once have ridden this vessel. Thirty months ago you could have made a bid on it. Eighteen months ago it was topheavy and listing. Two weeks ago Paul Strubeck caught this foto. Might you call it a major haircut.
Around the same time, Paul caught this vessel in Verplanck. That looks like Cornell to the left also. I don’t know what Cormorant‘s future will be.
I caught Planetsolar on my way outatown, but bowsprite studied the first solar-powered circumnavigator up close and impersonal and shares these fotos.
Inside these caps are props. Click here and here to see the props.
Enjoy these views starting with this view looking forward along the portside and moving counterclockwise around the boat.
Click here for a compilation of clips taken over two years on Turanor PlanetSolar. And if you have 40 minutes to watch this video from the Caribbean to the Indian Ocean, you could like it. I especially liked the Singapore dry dock section beginning around 31 minutes in. And from yesterday’s NYTimes, here’s a story about the boat’s current research mission.
Many thanks to Paul and bowsprite for these fotos.
Speaking of bowsprite . . . if you’re local and free on Saturday, come down to Pier 25 where she has organized the craft market called Radio Lilac, named for the 1933 lighthouse tender there.
Ten months ago I did this post of the 1905 ferry Binghamton. Twenty months ago I did this one, this and this with many interior shots at that time. The foto below dates from October 2011 just after Irene.
Here was Binghamton this morning, a work of disintegrative art, refusing to buckle in spite of Sandy.
North end October 2011 and
today, June 2013.
South end 2011 and
peeled back 2013.
Closer up as seen from the right bank 20 months ago and
now.
See a Flickr foto of a NJ historical marker no longer memorializing the wreck, click here. In its place, someone has had the good sense to inscribe the walls of the guardhouse with the 94-year-old words of a gallivanting Edna St Vincent Millay.
How will she fare in the next 10 months?
For a beautifully illustrated report on the life of the ferry prepared by Bill Lee, click here.
All fotos by Will Van Dorp.
Unrelated but cool story here about a 61-year-old immigrant to US circumnavigating in a 24′ sailboat!!
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