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Here was “government boats 44” from almost six years ago. Before you click on the link in the previous sentence, do you recognize the vessel fighting the fire below?
It’s none other than the oldest active fireboat in the world, unless someone can prove that it’s not.
And if you’re not familiar with the boat yet, it’s Edward M. Cotter, built as W. S. Grattan in Elizabethport NJ in 1900 !!!, and –as seen above–still active doing what it was built for as part of the Buffalo Fire Department. For info on its current namesake, click here. More photos here.
Other photos I’ve taken of Cotter over the years can be seen here. Other fireboats posts… here.
Thanks much to Brian R. Wroblewski for use of these photos. More photos of Cotter and BFD on scene can be seen on FB at Buffalo Fire & Rescue On Scene for April 15, 2023. Previous photos from Brian on this blog can be seen here.
Big announcement on tugster tomorrow.
SD 37 was quite some time ago, but what flummoxes me is that I thought I’d done this post, a profile of another Mister Darby model I saw at the September 2022 Tugboat Roundup. It seems, to my embarrassment that I never posted these.
To the models we go. Some model builders from Quebec had come down to Waterford to display their craft. That’s one of the models westbound in the Erie Canal below.
The real tug whose bow we look across above is Joncaire; the model is marked as a Smit tug called Moniqua, but I can find no information about the namesake.
Edgar Bonnet was the most powerful tugboat in the world when IHC launched it in 1953 for the Suez Canal. The tugboat was sunk in the Suez Canal in 1956-57 during what some call the Second Arab-israeli War. When it was raised in March 1957, the Canal was reopened. For someone who can read Polish, here’s the story, and google can translate. Some specs, the original Smit tug was 152′ x 39′. The raising got lots of media attention; even UN SG Dag Hammarskjold was present. In 1958, it was renamed Antar.
All these models were 2′ to 3′ in length.
Mister Darby interested me the most, because it’s none other than the current Atlantic Salvor.
Many thanks to modeler Carl Durocher
and friends for showing off their boats at Waterford. And my apologies for not having posted his photos until now.
I’m jumping back to the second half of the first decade of the 21st century. This day when USCGC Eagle was tying up at the old Pier 17, I had no idea why these two tugboats were so similar, no sense that once they were 1967 twins Exxon Empire State and Exxon Garden State.
I’d no inkling that one day I’d be deckhand on Urger. Stephen Reinauer was also once a 1970 Exxon tug.
There are tugboat races?. Remember, I’m trying to get back into my discoveries. I’d not yet started a blog at this time, and that was more than 5500 posts ago.
Only later did I learn the background to “portraits of hope” on this tug and on all the taxis in NYC landboros.
And they scrap relics? I thought tugboats never died.
All photos, all recollections, WVD, who’s currently on the rails toward Oklahoma.
Seth Tane took this photo on the Columbia in 2000. This was my sense of tugboats back then. I had little sense of their age, power, crews, skills needed for operation, etc. Take a guess on those features of this boat, and I’ll provide you some answers at the end of this post. Note that this tug and barge are at a log dock, a trade unknown in the sixth boro or the NE US.
Here’s a shot I took in 2002 while hanging out on what I called back then the “waterfront” and saw this vessel. Again, I had no idea of those same features as they pertained to this vessel, nor of the logic of this design. Test yourself, and then some info can be found at the end.
I took this photo in 2004. My 15 years in coastal NE had given me an interest in schooners but I’d never sought an opportunity to crew on one, until my move to NYS, first on and then off the live-aboard.
Note the warehouses still standing where Brooklyn Bridge Park is now located. Volunteer crewing on Pioneer and the other boats at South Street Seaport Museum kept me on the Upper Bay for long hours, and I saw lots of new things,
some things whose uniqueness I didn’t even fully appreciate. Anyone know what’s become of that tugboat Rachel Marie? I don’t.
Some things intrigued me,
and other things like this derelict sugar mill and sunken lightship were soon to disappear.
I started to see interesting tugboats in unexpected places.
Little did I expect then the changes that would happen. Know the boat above and below?
All photos, WVD. Answers below.
Craig Foss, 1944, 116′ x 30′. Here are more particulars, but as good as the boat appeared the top photo, she was purchased by unqualified parties, detained, and eventually scrapped. You need to read the story here; some crew were lucky to have survived.
The second photo shows Coral Queen, a motor tanker that carried petroleum from 1920 (!!!) until 2011. That is a long working life. Here are the particulars from Birk’s data base. From Auke Visser’s site, here are more particulars. And finally, from my Barge Canal series last year, here are images of her generations of fleet mates; her design relates to her work as a tanker in the “inter-connected waterways,” the Great Lakes and salt water connected by the Barge Canal.
The 1885 Pioneer still seasonally sails with professional and volunteer crews, and the 1893 Lettie G. Howard does the same on Lake Erie mostly.
I’ve no idea what became of Rachel Marie.
Meow Man traces are still around.
The sugar mill area now has an Amazon facility, and the old shipyard is the Red Hook Ikea parking lot, and the sunken ship reefed, the piers scrapped.
Grouper, frozen in ice, is still waiting to be scrapped, but as of March 2, 2023 is still entirely intact. The orange livery has disappeared from the sixth boro; that boat June K is now Donjon blue.
Ultimately, the more I found answers to questions I had, the more I was drawn in to learn more, a fact that keeps me looking and asking. I really never expected to be in the boros and fascinated by the sixth boro as long as I have been. Recently, I had a conversation with a friend from another NYC life and she reported never to have heard of the sixth boro. I guess that’s as shocking as hearing that someone’s not heard of the legendary Meow Man, the saltwater equivalent of Kilroy, or the US version of Maqroll, whose exploits need to be written down. As of the date of these photos, tugster the blog had not yet been launched.
I’m not sure when I’ll post anything next, but it could be tomorrow.
Years ago I did “headwaters 1, 2, and 3.”
Everyone likely in the US knows the Thomas Tusser line saying that April showers do spring May Flowers.” Maybe someone’s already written about January cold spawning February plans, and then when March comes along, well . . . march means MOVE. Maybe someone has a more eloquent, more Tusseresque way of expressing this.
In my case, I bought a USA Rail Pass and activated it yesterday, am doing right now what I did decades ago with a Eurail Pass. Maybe some of you have done one pass or the other as well. For me, this March is mostly rail and then rental car to see places I’ve long wanted to see.
Now as I’m into my 72 lap of the sun, I’m wondering how I got where I am, how I became this person resulting from all the lefts and rights I’ve made at all the forks in the roads and intersections. This is what I’m exploring this month: headwaters posts looking back and rail photos looking and moving forward. Yes, there’ll be as many boats in these posts as I notice and can get photos of. If you don’t fancy personal reflection, sorry.
When I was 18, I was in college as a pre-med student. I loved the idea of being a doctor–others praised me for it too. But what did I or they know about that occupation? In my case, nothing. Long, painstaking bio and chem labs told me clearly that medical science was not my path. So I became an English major, not knowing where it’d lead, but I enjoyed my humanities classmates more than my science ones. Boats? The only ones I’d ever been in were canoes. I still love canoes, and I have done my share of messing around in them. Cameras? Digital was the thing only of sci-fi.
In my last year in college, I sent out two applications: one to the US Navy and one to the US Peace Corps. USN never contacted me, but USPC did, and after many application materials and tasks, invited me to train to go to Zaire. Honestly, I had to look up where that was, since the name change from Democratic Republic of the Congo had only just been made. Over a beer or two, I’ll tell you how myself and fellow trainees got detained for two days in Uganda, our first stop in Africa, and accused of being mercenaries, not an illogical accusation given what was happening in the waning days of colonialism in Southern Africa and the fact that two-thirds of our group was male, under 25, and bearers of new passports, but I digress. I had an Instamatic and one roll of film with me, and I witnessed that Idi Amin had the same camera because I saw him take a photo of our group with one he pulled out of his jacket pocket.
A year ago, I did three long posts on my Congo River experiences in 1973, half a century ago now. You can read all that here. One day in 1974, this hospital ship–Mama Yemo--came up the Lulonga, the Congo River tributary passing the clearing where I worked. Locals came knocking on my door, saying “your sister is here.” This was plausible given that all my sisters were nurses, and in those days, news traveled slowly by letter. It turns out “my sister” was a Canadian nurse, and she invited me on board for a tour of the facilities.
Obviously, no AIS existed back then, nor did the internet or cell service. My eyes, touring the ship, must have seen a much different set of details than would have caught my eye today. For example, the nurse and I lingered in the operating room suites but not the bridge; we toured the pharmacy but not the engine room. As I said, I was a different person back then.
A decade and a half later, in 1989, I had some identity as a professional, but I lived here, the last house–a camp really– on a dead end road in New Hampshire. It was a hideout. No, I was not doing criminal acts or being a fugitive from the law. Everything was above board, I had a full-time job, but a) the woods and the river nearby was idyllic, and b) life was truly idyllic there, either canoeing, kayaking, hiking, and I was feeling in love.
This was my constellation of boats at the time; I owned a canoe and the kayak, but not lobster boat Bonnie Lou, for whom I lusted.
Of course, I’m leaving a lot out, but when my job near the NH border ended, I got a job in NYS, where I was appalled by the cost of housing. My solution was to buy an old wooden cabin cruiser, hire someone to do some preliminary work on it, and then live on it for a year in a tidal creek in SW Long Island outside the outer boros. The cabin cruiser–a 1965 Owens sort of like this–was cozy shelter for myself and a new love, ran on two thirsty gasoline engines, and never sank, but it took my a short time to realize that I would never restore it to the degree I imagined . . . to Bristol fashion; I sold the Owens and the dream to someone else, bought a fiberglass boat, and spent more time living on that tidal creek. One thing I learned is that wooden boats are much warmer in a northern winter than metal or fiberglass ones.
I owned a small weatherproof camera at the time, good when I hiked. I have a print of the Owens, as we called it, but I can’t find that 3.5 x 5″ glossy. Digital photography was still fairly new and I thought it’d be a fad. No tugboats ever came through this tidal creek, and if one had, I’d be too busy sanding or painting to pay much attention.
Eventually, I sold the fiberglass boat too, a trawler, and moved onto land.
And we’ll pick up the story in the next Headwaters episode.
Moran is one of the quintessential NYC marine companies, formed before the boros existed as such. The harbor then was THE water boro. Since I’m upstate right now, I was intrigued to find a Moran Street in the canal town of Lyons, not far from a asphalt depot on the canal which used to be served by Moran tugboats. Maybe someone can fill in when Moran adopted the distinctive dark red color.
Since I’ve not yet devoted a non-random tug post to Moran yet, I’ll call these part one.
Above JRT takes the stern of Wonder Polaris, while
Jonathan C has the port side.
Same day, Miriam has the port side of NCC Tabuk.
Marie J meets them on her way to a job.
Having returned to the sixth boro, Laura K here heads to a job.
Laura K stays quite busy.
James D here returns from assisting a container ship into Port Elizabeth.
All photos, WVD, who has at least another part of this post coming soon.
More relevant Lyons photos can be seen here and here.
I’ll get to the blue moon reference in a moment, but first . . .
Need one or more calendars for 2023? I’ve approached the project differently this year: the calendars are ready, you can preview, you can order here, and they’ll come directly to you. That’s good for me because it frees me from tedious packaging and mailing, leaving time to be out taking photos. Watching sixth boro traffic, traveling among traffic, taking photos of traffic, and researching traffic . . . are all preferable to me, as you know. Case in point . . . blue moon, which is actually a sea story with the usual losses and gains, some photos I took yesterday.
Don’t the lines look somewhat Chesapeake…ish, a bit of bugeye in her lines?
Yesterday morning she crossed the Upper Bay, heading south late in November all under sail.
Blue moon and today’s post photos have a tighter connection than blue moon and my 2023 marine calendar. Here’s the connection: the “three-sail bateau” aka ketch here is called Blue Moon. The 69′ aluminum-hulled sailboat was built in the late 1980s as a cargo schooner, transporting tropical hardwoods. Later she was owned by a co-founder of Crocs shoes. Now she’s a Nantucket-based excursion vessel whose owner makes an interesting sea story himself with a maritime Covid love story thrown into the mix. Teased enough? Find the details here. There are even references to King’s Point USMMA, color blindness, and lobstering in the story.
She was not on AIS yesterday morning, so I needed to do a bit of research to identify her, and researching is another time-consuming task I enjoy. In a past life I may have been an intelligence analyst. Puzzling things out certainly beats waiting on line at my local USPS.
Here’s more on the boat. It was designed by Thomas E. Colvin, designer of Rosemary Ruth and Le Papillon and built by Reuel Parker.
All photos yesterday, WVD. Fair winds, Blue Moon.
Repeating myself here: my 2023 calendars are available here. At that link, you can preview all the pages; no sailing vessels are included despite Blue Moon‘s, going south, appearance in this post. The calendars could be going out into the USPS system tomorrow.
If you want something customized, I can do that too.
The first time I used this title, although with a pretentious spelling, was here, more than 12 years ago, a collaboration I immediately liked. This year I’ve posted quite a few, especially in the first three months of 2022, all related to the Barge Canal.
Here’s one I’ve not posted. I wish more text existed on the image, but all I can make out, other than STEAM BOAT COAL is Chas. C. Wing, the steamer tug to the right. Wing came off the ways in Poughkeepsie in 1894; it makes me wonder when the last tugboat was launched from Poughkeepsie. She measured 50 x 15, registered in Albany, and according to MVUS, had a crew of one. That makes me wonder about a number of things. Here she tows at least three dry bulk barges up to lock E-3. This photo was likely taken by George Michon. The Michon Collection (of photos) is in the NYS Museum. Thanks, George, since you were taking photos on the Canal 30 years before I was born.
Delta Fox has been in the boro around for a while, but I’ve never seen her work. I’m told she’s been sold foreign. The 1980 tug measures 66′ x 24′, built in 1980, and has 1200 hp. That looks like a substantial Little Toot beside her. This photo and the next two were taken by Tony A.
This is the Hudson-Athens Light, in the early 00s of the watch. I’d never put together until now that this light’s twin sister is in the LI Sound: Stepping Stones. The photo shows a whole different meaning to “lighthouse.”
James Turecamo came out of the shipyard not far to the north of this photo: Matton, 1969. She ‘s 92′ x 27’ and brings 2000 hp to the job.
The next photos all come from the erudite George Schneider, And rather than paraphrase, I’ll just verbatim quote his inimitable wit and style: “U S ARMY RET ST 893 was originally the Army ST 893, built by J K Welding in Brooklyn NY in July 1945. At some point (apparently in the 1980’s) she was transferred to Humboldt State College in Eureka CA, still named ST 893 and undocumented. They added additional deckhouse to her for use as an oceanographic research and training vessel. Sold in 1998, she was documented about 2004 with the painfully long name she now bears. Her home port was changed to Kings Bay GA by a Florida owner, but she is now owned by someone in Anacortes WA.” It makes me wonder how and how often she’s transited the Panama Canal.
Next, it’s Gina as told by George: “GINA (1247922), formerly CATAHECASSA (YTB 828). She is owned by Basic Towing of Escanaba MI, but with the death of Papa Kobasic a few years ago, the company is streamlining and it’s unlikely this tug will return to the Lakes, where she was built in 1974.” She’s another Panama Canal transiting tugboat. Other YTBs on this blog, other than the sixth boro’s Ellen McAllister, can be found here.
“TIOGA (1021169) no longer has her red hull and red stacks. One might guess she’s in the process of being sold, but you’ll also note the Crowley logo is freshly marked on her, also with the blue highlights. Is the company we knew half a century ago only as “Red Stack” becoming Blue Stack? “
George shares lots of photos, and I really should pass more on for you all to see.
Next I’ll interject a photo I took a few years back. If you don’t immediately know why I post this photo of a NRofHP plaque, see the next photo.
This photo from Kevin Oldenburg shows Edna A pushing Chancellor, the “landmarked” 1938 tug to the location where she’ll be “dismantled,” a somewhat archaic word that I find preferable to “scrapped.” Preferable words of not, many wanted to see Chancellor live on, and now she will only in photos. Edna A has been featured in some momentous projects the past few years. For some of Kevin’s other work, click here.
Thanks to all of you who send in photos now and then. As blogster-in-chief at tugster tower, I sometimes post when I feel I can do justice to you and your photo.
A bit more reflection this anniversary week . . . I’m reminded we all see everything through our unique eye/brain/personality lenses. That could lead to conflict, but here, other perspectives help motivate me to devote time to this desk every day. And the value of collaboration, that goes without explaining. So thanks. Thanks for the comments as well. Today’s photos come thanks to George, Tony, and Kevin., but other days . . . other people. You know who you are.
Happy Thanksgiving.
Full disclosure first, I met the author, Paul Strubeck, around 15 years ago, and he’s been working on this voluminous tome for almost a decade. We met on a retired diesel railroad tugboat, of course, not either of the ones depicted below. Over the years, Paul has shared photos and information on this blog.
I’ll tell you what I think about this book in a moment, but first, any guesses on the date, location, and info on the two tugboats depicted on this striking cover?
The rear cover has some Dave Boone art. Anything look familiar in that painting?
Soon after Paul and I met, we took this same WHC tour together. I’m certainly not a packrat, but the fact that I still have the program attests to my sense that it was an extraordinary tour, much narration of which was prefaced “you can’t see any trace any more, but …” because rail marine in the sixth boro is mostly a thing of the past. What’s not in the past but an immutable geographical fact is that the sixth boro surrounds an ever more densely-populated archipelago that still needs resupplying today, mostly provided by trucks and frustrated drivers clogging highways today, hence efforts like the recent beer run, to name but one.
Contractors move carfloats today, but at one time rail lines built their own dedicated tugboats, steam and diesel, and the evolution of the latter type is what Paul’s book interprets for us. These tugboats are mostly gone, and he tracks the disposition of each one, but a few still in use have been redesigned so successfully you might never guess their previous lives.
As I said earlier, Paul has worked on this book for the better part of a decade. When he wasn’t employed on a tugboat, he got jobs on the railroad, which employs him now fulltime. But when he wasn’t scheduled by some employer, he traveled to places where he researched this book in harbors, photo archives, libraries, and museums. To “unpack” this table of contents a bit, the “Oil-electrics” chapter focuses on the railroads that switched from steam propulsion to diesel: first in 1916 the Pennsylvania RR re-powering steam tug Media with a 4-cylinder Southwark-Harris heavy oil engine; in 1926 NY Central RR built a pair of tugs on Staten Island and named NY Central’s No. 33 and No. 34, and Erie was next.
Then next four chapters elaborate on the naval architects, the decisions they made, and the tugboats they built.
“What’s inside a tug?” includes nomenclature
and specialized information not commonly known to a layperson as well as to a mariner who works on non-railroad tugs.
Documents like this top one from August 1978 demystify the daily/hourly activity of tugboat crew, in this case, the marine engineer. Paul brings his tugboat/locomotive perspective to the page.
The book has 266 color photos and 131 black/white, for a total of 397, of which 342 have never been book/web published; he scanned them from company records, trade literature, negatives, and slides. Each photo has a detailed caption. Further, the book has 4 original maps, 22 blueprints/drawings, and 17 documents/advertisements from vintage marine diesel magazines.
There are 11 appendices, including
17 pages of Appendix K listing all East Coast diesel railroad tugboats and their dimensions, designers and builders, engine specs, multiple names, and [what I find very helpful] their disposition, i.e., still in use, scrapped, reefed, or other. A total of 23 railroad companies are mentioned.
On the last page, you learn a bit about the author. He’s already working on a volume 2, focusing on railroad tugs of the Great Lakes and Inland Waterways.
To me, this book is a delight to read through and a reference for East Coast tugboats. On my bookshelf, it goes next to Thomas R. Flagg’s book New York Harbor Railroads In Color, volumes 1 and 2, published in 2000 and 2002 but with most information cut off in 1976. Paul’s book will be a delight for historians, aficionados of rail and marine technology, modelers, urban planners, and the general public with curiosity about how we get stuff from place of manufacture to place(s) of use.
As anyone who releases a book or other work knows, an author does not want to keep a pile of books like this at home. For info on ordering your copy, click here. This is not a “mainstream” book you’d see while browsing the all-too-few bookstores surviving these days. Rather, it is published by an independent railroad-focused publisher called Garbely Publishing.
To answer the questions about cover “photo,” the front cover shows Erie tugs Elmira and Marion in Hoboken in March 1975. Marion was launched at Jakobson’s in Oyster Bay NY in 1953 and is being prepared for reefing at this very moment in 2022. Anyone know details? Elmira was launched the same year on Staten Island and was scrapped in 1984 after an engine room fire. The Dave Boone painting shows New York Dock Railway tug Brooklyn southbound on the North River. Notice the Colgate clock along the right side. Brooklyn (now Florida) is currently a rebuilt but active boat in the Crescent fleet in Savannah GA. My image of the boat as I saw it in 2014 is below; that day I took another shot of the tugboat which appears on page 190 of Paul’s book.
Previous book reviews I’ve posted here can be found at these links.
Danmark, a 90-year-old full-rigged ship, is in town again. She first came here in 1939 for the World’s Fair.
South Street waterfront of Manhattan then was a very different place, as of course was the whole city and world.
I’m not sure where she berthed back then. A year later, after her homeland was invaded, she stayed in the US (Jacksonville FL for starters) because she had no homeport to return to. In 1942, she was temporarily commissioned as a USCG vessel.
The brightwork is impeccable, as
is the gilt work.
Rigging like this is dense as a jungle, yet it’s all functional.
And many of the current crew of Danish cadets, four of whom are mostly hidden but busy in the image below,
were busy polishing the brass.
I’d love to see how the figurehead is polished. This figurehead has appeared on this blog once before back in 2007. To see Danmark underway sail-powered, click here. For a guided tour of the ship, click here.
Meanwhile, I recently spotted another sailing vessel, one I’d not seen before, S/V Red Sea. Thanks to Michele McMurrow and Jaap Van Dorp for the identification, although they called it by different names, they were both right. For some backstory on this well-traveled schooner, click here.
She’s arrived in the sixth boro from the Wisconsin side of Lake Michigan.
Some Danmark photos, thanks to Tony A; all others, WVD. Enjoy the last day of summer 2022.
tugster: a waterblog 
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