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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.
Call this a continuation of yesterday’s post, but this is a model bow set . . . . Given all the features that could be discussed, focus on these for oldest/newest, smallest/largest, and least/most horsepower. Also, one of these does not fit with the others, although all are tugboats.
Douglas J
Doris Moran
Philadelphia
Again, identify the oldest/newest, smallest/largest, and least/most horsepower.
James William Here she appears to be towing a mooring into Erie Basin Brooklyn.
Millie B and Louis C. These two certainly do not fit in with this post, but . . . I’m posting this photo anyhow. Previously, Millie B has appeared here. Louis C has appeared here. I hope you’re getting ready with your answers.
Rowan M McAllister
Adeline Marie
All photos and any errors, WVD. All info here thanks to Birk Thomas’ invaluable tugboatinformation.
Ready? No cheating.
Just guesses.
Answers?
Oldest is Rowan M, and newest is Philadelphia. 1981 and 2017.
Smallest considering both length and beam is James William, and longest is Doris Moran although Douglas J is the beamiest. Lengths are 77′ and 118′.
Least horses is James William, and most is Douglas J. They range from 2800 hp to 4800 hp.
Besides Millie B, the outlier is James William because she has a push-knee bow–rather than a model bow. Also, she’s the only triple screw here.
Kimberly headed out on a mission, as
did Mary.
They converged alongside Bow Chain,
where crew mustered.
As daylight opened between Bow Chain and the dock,
Kimberly moved to the opposite side
and with guidance
Bow Chain moved slightly forward and toward port and
rotated counterclockwise
with Kimberly helping the bow around while
Mary pushed the stern.
Pilot and crew directed from the bridge wing
and once sailed, Bow Chain began a voyage to the Gulf of Mexico.
All photos, WVD.
A small 14-year-old general cargo vessel named Industrial Emma
was inbound from Salvador Brasil. Any guesses on how long that voyage would take?
She’s a 5800 hp ship coming in with an assist from Miriam Moran, a 3000 hp tug.
Industrial Emma is the product of a Polish shipyard, Remontowa, whose 1960s history I find not surprising but interesting.
Her container capacity is 535 teu.
Travel time from Salvador was 17 days and 3 hours. The Intermarine vessel’s next port of call is Houston.
All photos, WVD.
. . . signing onto the 6200-teu Maersk Detroit and stepping off at the end of a hitch, this post is inspired by a sixth boro mariner on a milk run. Many thanks to Mike Weiss** for most of the photos. It took him 77 days to get from Port Elizabeth back to Port Elizabeth. Day 1 was back in early November.
Yesterday I caught a few photos in the KVK of the vessel on the last few miles of a voyage mostly halfway around the world and back.
Mike, an AB, texted me their ETA into the KVK and
in cold overcast morning I wore my conspicuous vest and waited
to see people on the aft mooring deck.
Welcome home, Mike. This is a timeless way to go so sea: depart from your home and return to it.
The following are some photos Mike took along the way, as in the Strait of Gibraltar just before calling at the port of Algeciras,
Port Said at the aft mooring deck thousands of sea miles ago,
entering the Suez Canal and heading under the Al-Salam Bridge (I think), and
about to exit the Suez following . . . Ever Given [yes, really!!],
getting an assist at Port Qasim,
port of Salalah,
and then homeward across the Atlantic to
port of Houston,
and port of Charleston, with many other sights that only Mike can tell about along the way.
Many thanks to Mike Weiss for sharing these photos and his experiences. If you didn’t click on the ** link in the first paragraph, you’ll be happy to do it here for some of Mike’s sea resume.
Maersk Detroit is part of the US-flagged Maersk fleet.
Ever Given has a big sister now here.
Even on overcast days, the sixth boro aka NY harbor offers sights. It’s long been so; here’s much abridged paragraphs 3-5 Chapter 1 of Moby Dick:
[People] stand … fixed in ocean reveries. Some leaning … some seated … some looking over the bulwarks of ships from China… [some] pacing straight for the water… Nothing will content them but the extremest limit of the land… They must get just as nigh the water as they possibly can without falling in. And there they stand… infallibly [move] to water… Why did the poor poet of Tennessee, upon suddenly receiving two handfuls of silver, deliberate whether to buy him a coat, which he sadly needed, or invest his money in a pedestrian trip to Rockaway Beach? Why is almost every robust healthy [youth] with a robust healthy soul… at some time or other crazy to go to sea? Why upon your first voyage as a passenger, did you yourself feel such a mystical vibration, when first told that you and your ship were now out of sight of land? Why did the old Persians hold the sea holy? Why did the Greeks give it a separate deity, brother of Jove? Surely all this is not without meaning…. we ourselves see in all rivers and oceans … the image of the ungraspable phantom of life; and this is the key to it all.”
OK, so that might be over the top, but I find at least as much entertainment along the water as in all the other places in NYC. Maybe that makes me a hermit, but that’s irrelevant. Can you name these boats?
At less than 10 miles an hour, trade comes in, commerce of all sort goes on.
different hour different goods,
different tasks,
different energies
and errands
by different
companies . . .
All photos, WVD.
And in order, Jonathan C Moran, Meaghan Marie, Ellen McAllister, Andrea, Schuylkill, Rowan R McAllister, Thomas D Witte, Susan Miller.
Truth be told, I should have passed this 100 milestone long ago, but I forestalled a number of times by differentiating within the title: for example, besides the August 2007 starting point of random ships 1 but also random ships *1 and really random ships 1 posted inAugust 2016 and March 2019.
Forestalled or not, we are here, and I still enjoy doing this. These photos all date from this month and December . . . like B. Franklin Reinauer here lightering Atlantic Blue.
Atlantic Crown here has a deck barge alongside delivered by Susan Miller, while in the distance you see the Bayonne peninsula and beyond.
The next two photos show Laura K Moran assisting MSC Greenwich as an outbound Seaspan New York
shares the KVK as it heads for sea.
If I’ve learned anything from these years of documenting the traffic the watery boro, it’s the value of light to (duh!) photo graphy. When you have the dawn light illuminating the orange hull of vessels like NCC Tabuk, with red and shadow image of Miriam Moran, and the cold black steel of the barge to the left, what more need I say about the joy of spending time in the cold morning solitude watching and “recording.”
What’s not to enjoy about shivering while taking photos of a CMA CGM with the name of a huge tropical city.
Before completing this post, any ideas about the reference in Tabuk or the age and population size of Surabaya? Answers follow.
One more dawn photo here . . . the enigmatic name Eco Revolution on a tanker escorted into the KVK by a 6000 hp Moran tugboat.
All photos, WVD.
Tabuk, in Saudi Arabia, and Surabaya, on Indonesia’s Java Island, have both been settlements for over a millennium.
As for Surabaya, some of you might know the lyrics of the Kurt Weill song here by Marianne Faithfull, but I prefer this one from Javanese myth.
I caught her at the fuel dock the other day, and knew a bit of back story. Do you recall seeing her before on this blog?
Since she was fueling and I was not waiting around for that process to end, I left. I wish I’d gotten a 360-degree view, because changed paint really changes appearance.
She used to be Marion Moran, as seen in these Bayonne Bridge April 2013 photos
here muscling a HanJin container ship around Bergen Point.
Another new name . . . Marilyn George, stencilled on for now.
As you can see, before that she was Steven Wayne and before that . . .
she was
Patapsco, as seen here in a September 2008 photo.
Welcome Marilyn George and Topaz Coast. All photos, WVD.
Part B of this post is a corrective. The lead photo I used two days ago was NOT the first photo I took in 2023; rather, the one below was: a pristine 1969 or 1970 Buick Electra (?) parked here by another photographer wanting to get golden hour photos of the sunrise over waters near the VZ Bridge. I knew I had to step back from my vantage-point cliff to get a photo of this museum quality piece of automobile history. If you’ve been following Tugster for a while, you know it’s a waterblog that occasionally strays into automotive land machines, although not self-driving kind of “automotive.”
A while later, with the sun still quite low, I caught Copper Mountain pushing A-70,
likely upriver.
Above and below, it’s Shiloh Amon aka Jillian Irene. Unrelated, has anyone gotten a photo of Marilyn George aka Steven Wayne, ex-Patapsco, currently in the boro just west of Caddells? I’m wondering if Marilyn George might soon be wearing a lion . . . .
Already on the first day of the year, loaded garbage barges move toward the railhead and empties . . . to the marine transfer stations, here with James William in the foreground.
Ava heads out for a just-past dawn job, as
does Jonathan C.
All photos, WVD.
I’m back and just in time for the last day of the year, which –as explained in previous years— in my Dutch tradition is a reflection day, a time to if not assess then at least recall some of the sights of the past 12 months. A photo-driven blog makes that simultaneously easy and hard; easy because there’s a photographic record and not easy because there’s such an extensive photographic record to sift though.
A word about this set of photos: these are some “seconds” that did not make the final cut for my 2023 tugster calendar. The actual calendars are still available if you’ve not ordered one; find the order info here. I’m ordering a bunch myself.
One windy day last January I caught a Pilot No 1–the old New York–doing drills under the VZ Bridge. Just recently I met one of the engineers on that boat, a person with epic stories about the sixth boro.
A warm day in February, I caught JRT Moran assisting QM2 into her Red Hook berth.
March I spent a delightful day on Douglas B. Mackie observing the water side of a Jersey shore beach replenishment project, thanks to the hard-working folks at GLDD.
April . . . I caught Jane McAllister heading out; correct if I’m wrong, but my sense is that soon afterward she made her way down to South America to join the expanding ranks of US-built tugs working on various projects on the south side of the Caribbean.
As a member of the Canal Society of NYS, I had the opportunity to see Urger up close and sun-warmed on the bank of the Oswego in Lysander NY.
A clutch of Centerline tugboats waited for their next assignment at the base just east of the Bayonne Bridge. Note the fully foliated trees beyond them along the KVK.
From the humid heat of western Louisiana and onto the Gulf of Mexico, Legs III–shown
here spudded up just east of SW Pass, afforded a memorable journey on its way up to the sixth boro. Thx, Seth.
Back in the boro, later in August, a Space X rocket recovery boat named Bob–for an astronaut– came through the sixth boro. More on Bob–the astronaut–here.
In September, I finally got to my first ever Gloucester schooner race, thanks to Rick Miles of Artemis, the sailboat and not the rocket.
Icebreaker Polar Circle was in the boro a few days in September as well. Now it’s up in Canada, one hopes doing what icebreakers are intended to do. US naval logistics vessel Cape Wrath is at the dock in Baltimore ready and waiting a logistics assignment.
Ticonderoga certainly and Apache possibly are beyond their time working and waiting. I believe Ticonderoga is at the scrappers in Brownsville.
Passing the UN building on the East River, veteran Mulberry is currently out of the army and working in the private sector. I’ve a request: for some time I’ve seen a tug marked as Scholarie working the waters west of the Cape Cod Canal; a photo suggested it might be called Schoharie. Anyone help out?
And finally, a photo taken just two days ago while passing through the sixth boro during what can hardly be called “cover of darkness” it’s Capt Joseph E. Pearce on its way to a shipyard on the mighty Rondout to pick up some custom fabrication for a Boston enterprise. Many thanks to the Stasinos brothers for the opportunity.
I’d be remiss in ending this post and this year without mentioning lost friends, preserving a memory of their importance to me personally . . . Bonnie of frogma–first ever to comment of this blog so many years ago and a companion in many adventures– and Mageb, whose so frequent comments here I already miss.
I plan to post tomorrow, although I may miss my high noon post time because I hope to post whatever best sunrise 2023 photos I can capture in the morning.
Happy, safe, and prosperous new year to you all. I’m posting early today because I want my readers who live much much farther east than the sixth boro to get these wishes before their new trip around the sun begins. Bonne annee! Gelukkig nieuwjaar!
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