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It still says Eastern Star Dawn, but now it’s Toula!
She’s going to look great all buff and green.
Barry Silverton finally
has a lion on its stack! All those birds? It’s water teeming with the bunker, the bunker that recently drew a humpback into the Upper Bay.
Pelham, launched in 1960, is always a pleasant sight. She has a list of previous names almost as long as my seasonal wish list this year.
Here she took a wake on the bow.
James William used the waters off the salt pile
as a turning basin.
And finally, after a long hiatus down south, CMT Pike has returned. When i caught her, she was being pursued
by this container ship.
All photos, WVD.
Unrelated but of interest, below . . .
yes, Grain de Sail is a 72′ schooner coming into the sixth boro with a 50-ton cargo hold, some of it refrigerated, bringing in French wine. She’ll set up a market in the Brooklyn Navy Yard for about a week. Contact info and an e-shop can be found here, although you’ll have to use a machine translate if you’re not up to functionality in French.
Grain de Sail is involved in triangular trade, French wine to here and the Caribbean, and then Caribbean chocolate and other products to France . . . . Something similar in sail freight domestically has been done by Ceres and more recently by Apollonia. The most recent international sailing cargo into the sixth boro that I know of was Black Seal, a three-masted schooner.
Hell Gate has to be one of the most storied waterways in the sixth boro. How could I have mostly ignored it so long?!!
The other day I caught Vinik No. 6 and Liz Vinik westbound through that section of the East River. In the background, that’s the Bronx.
An indicator of current is the fact that NYPD boat here is barely making headway. Current in a tidal strait like the so-called East River is constantly and dramatically changing. That’s Manhattan in the background.
Nicholas Vinik also passed through the other day, returning from a job. That NYC DEP GUP headquarters in the background. The Hell Gate RR Bridge seems in need of some paint. Referencing this part of Hell Gate, captbbrucato describes it from a captain’s perspective here.
A recent development is the transit of NYC Ferry service through the Gate to the Bronx on the Soundview run.
Wye River heads eastbound to retrieve a barge, meeting
Cape Canaveral and DBL 101 on the way.
Along the shoreline here, that’s Astoria Queens to the left, and Manhattan along the entire distant background. Most iconic is the spire of the Empire State Building.
State Trooper . . . I’m assuming that’s a government boat.
That’s it for now. I hope to return to Hell Gate soon. All photos, WVD.
It’s the end of another month, and maybe because everything’s been so bleak of late, let’s just admire and enjoy the complexity of the sixth boro.
Diverse people work here on diverse missions.
Places like NY Harbor School and M.A. S. T. as well as SUNY Maritime College and King’s Point MMA are here.
On foggy days a narrow navigation channel gives the illusion of being as expansive as the ocean.
Keeping it as ideal a place as possible is the mission of many people and much infrastructure, seen and unseen.
Professionals pass through the sixth boro without ever technically entering the space, both a boon and a bane to all involved,
and their safe passage is ensured by the named and the nameless.
Work and recreation can happen in the same space because of
professionalism. If you have a lot of time, you can binge watch these videos by a pro who works the sixth boro and beyond. Now, when I hear his voice on VHF, it’s familiar. There are books as well.
The universal language of gesture is powerdful.
The sixth boro has at least as much specialized equipment as the other five boros combined; another way to put it, the specialized equipment of the sixth boro enable the other boros to perform.
And if the land boros have spirit, don’t imagine the sixth boro lacks anything.
Photos and sentiments, WVD.
If you’re new on this blog, for the past 27 months I’ve been posting photos from exactly 10 years before. These then are photos I took in June 2010. What’s been interesting about this for me is that this shows how much harbor activities have changed in 10 years.
Tarpon, the 1974 tug that once worked for Morania and below carries the Penn Maritime livery, is now a Kirby boat. Tarpon, which may be “laid up” or inactive, pushes Potomac toward the Gate.
North River waits over by GMD shipyard with Sea Hawk, and now also a Kirby vessel. Sea Hawk is a slightly younger twin, at least in externals and some internals, of Lincoln Sea.
Irish Sea, third in a row, was K-Sea but now is also a Kirby boat.
Huron Service went from Candies to Hornbeck to now Genesis Energy, and works as Genesis Victory.
Ocean King is the oldest in this post . . . built in 1950. She’s in Boston, but I don’t know how active she is.
Petersburg dates from 1954, and currently serves as a live aboard. Here’s she’s Block Island bound, passing what is now Brooklyn Bridge Park.
Kristin Poling was built in 1934 and worked the Great Lakes and the Eastern Seaboard via the Erie Canal.
To digress, William Lafferty took this photo on 15 May 1966 at Thorold, Ontario, in the Welland Canal, same boat 44 years later.
And finally, she who travels jobs up and down the East Coast, the 1970 Miss Gill. She’s currently working in the Charleston area.
All photos, WVD, who never thought a decade ago while taking these photos that I’d revisit them while in the midst of a pandemic. June 2010 was a great month for photos, so I’ll do a retro a and b.
ABC-1 is unique, a survivor. Launched in Sturgeon Bay in November 1941, she was originally built for the US Army as a vessel to collect mine boxes. Here she returns from a supply run in Port Elizabeth or Newark, as she’s done for as long as I’ve been paying attention. Here, by the way, is the first in this series, one that didn’t even use this title.
I don’t know how long she’s worked in the sixth boro or if the hull and power have been modified since 1941. Maybe someone can speak to this.
NYC DEP has a number of vessels, likely all of them larger than Sea Robin.
This is my first time to notice this boat.
All photos in recent cold days by Will Van Dorp.
It’s the sheer diversity of traffic on the sixth boro that keeps me coming back, although diverse does not mean unpredictable. In summer, mermaids gather, specifically around the very day of the solstice. In winter, fishing boats come . In fall, the fishing boats are of a different sort.
Chele-C was fishing on the west side, and
Phyllis Ann over on the east
with Dutch Girl and
this boat I could not identify.
Eastern Welder has been a fixture in winter fishing as far back as I can remember.
Osprey are well known for their fishing ability, so I should not
have been surprised to also have seen HSV Osprey out extracting from the depths.
All photos by Will Van Dorp.
I did this once before here. This time I was deleting near duplicates to limit the size of my photo library to accommodate the many photos I brought back from the gallivants, and my mind quickly formed today’s post. Enjoy all these from August through October 2009 and marvel at how much the harbor changes. As I went through the archives, this is where I stopped, given the recent developments in Bella Bella BC.
For background on this tug, check here.
Notice also the Bayonne approach to the bridge.
IMO 8983117 was still orange back then.
King Philip, Thomas Dann, and Patriot Service . . .
…
Odin . . . now has a fixed profile.
And these two clean looking machines — Coral Queen and
John B. Caddell — were still with us.
This is a digression to March 2010, but since I’m in a temporally warped thought, let me add this photo of the long-gone Kristin Poling.
Back to 2009, Rosemary looked sweet here in fall scenes.
John Reinauer . . . I wonder what that tug looks like today over in Nigeria.
And Newtown Creek, now the deep Lady Luck of the Depths, sure looked good back then.
And while I’m at it, I’ve finally solved a puzzle that’s bugged me for a few years. Remember this post from three and a half years ago about a group of aging Dutch sailors who wanted to hold a reunion on their vessel but couldn’t find the boat, a former Royal Dutch Navy tug named Wamandai A870? Well, here’s the boat today! Well, maybe . . .
Another boat you can dive on is United Caribbean aka Golden Venture.
Photos and tangents by Will Van Dorp.
This series handles my miscellaneous needs with updates, follow-ups, and oddments.
Let’s start with the mage below. Click on it and you’ll learn how soon a sixth boro GUP vessel transforms into dive attraction named Lady Luck. Thanks to Mike Hatami for passing along this info.
If the image below looks like a boat, it is, or it was before San Francisco grew (or tumbled?) over top of it. For more info on the buried vessels of SF, click on the image. Here’s more.
Below, well that was me about 10 years ago. After I had built a skin-on-frame kayak, I need to paint the porous “skin” with urethane, hence the respirator. If anyone’s interested in buying me a token of appreciation to update this vessel–which I still have–click on the image to see my one-item wish list. And thanks in advance.
More old business . . . the photo below I took from the Manhattan side of the East River about 10 years ago, and
this photo was taken by Robert Silva back in September 2014; of course this was what remained of the John B. Caddell after Hurricane Sandy, the suspense, and the subsequent auction.
By now, that old steel may have seen the hold of a scrapper like Atlantic Pearl . . . and been transformed in the heat
And finally, in response to a recent comment asking about Gateway tugs . . . the rest of the photos/text here I took/wrote in April 2014 and never posted because I was waiting for some additional info.
“What’s under the ‘white house’ here?
Click here to find out. And the tug C. Angelo is resplendent in the brightening daylight.
So this is future defense works passing obsolete defense works.”
C. Angelo in drydock?
All photos except the top three and the one by Robert Silva . . . by Will Van Dorp.
NYC DEP has a diverse set of vessels in its fleet, from sludge tankers to this water quality testing vessel. It even had a skimmer at one point called Cormorant.
HSV (hydrographic survey vessel) Osprey has been around for a quarter century already. I caught it being refurbished here earlier the spring.
Here she is under way a rainy morning a few years back.
Now osprey and cormorant are winged creatures. And I’m posting one hour earlier today so that more of you reading this can still make it to the annual migration of winged and scaly creatures coming ashore on Coney Island, and that’s where I’ll be, documenting my heart out in the name of science, of course. STEM needs you.
All photos by Will Van Dorp.
Here are previous posts with references to wind. Sunday and Monday were windy but commerce went right on.
The weight of these units is manifested by the smooth ride in the harbor chop. Offshore it would be a different matter in the swells.
I wouldn’t call it spindrift, so maybe
it’s just spray?
All photos last weekend by Will Van Dorp.
And here, thanks to Aleksandr Mariy and unrelated but interesting, it’s Black Douglas, in its many forms. And if you like that, you’ll love Roosevelt, especially that photo off Newburgh NY.
And finally, thanks to Isaac Pennock, who caught Dylan Cooper down bound passing Detroit on a run between Green Bay and Montreal.
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