Grande NY and Morning Peace

Eric McAllister went out the Narrows to

meet her ship out beyond Swinburne.

 

It seems the gulls are excited by whatever chum follows in the wake, chum made from all those shad.

The shine on the hull suggested a fairly new ship, and

in fact, I’d never seen this one before,

Grande New York.

How grand.  She was completed at CSC Jinling Shipyard in late October 2017.  I don’t know if this was her first arrival in New York.  Sister ships are Grande Baltimora, already in service, and Grande Halifax . . . yet to be completed.

Here are previously posted other “Grande” Grimaldi vessels:  G Senegal,  G Marocco, and G Guinea, which came into the sixth boro early Monday and departed yesterday.

And here’s the rest of the title . . . as a way to show the varying weather.

 

All photos by Will Van Dorp.

Sixth Boro Spring Signs 2018

Call it a sea change.  The air warms up although the water is still very cold.

Sea Lion does what it has all winter, but what’s different is the reappearance of non-workboats.  Sea Lion has some history on this blog.

Evening Light moves north in anticipation of summer.

Pleasure boats move into an environment that has been consistently about work throughout the winter.

Mischief passes New Champion and Stephen Dann, which brought in highway ramp sections.  Would these sections be for the Bayonne, the Tappan Zee, or another?

Small party boats

head out to catch what spring fish migrate in. Should there be a Really Never Snuff Express?

Bigger party boats appear as well.

Fast open boats and

slower enclosed cruisers, of all sorts

pass Atlantic Salvor as it returns from another dredge spoils run.

Norwegian Escape has smaller boats

accompany it on its way into the Narrows and the harbor.  If my numbers are correct, Escape has capacity for 5999 souls, including crew, which is more than the population of Taos, Marfa, and well more than the town where I grew up.

I’ve not seen many of these smaller boats since early last fall, and on a warm Sunday, they start to reappear.  Drive safe; work safe.

All photos by Will Van Dorp, whose other posts about small craft can be read here.

 

Zhen Hua 20

After 66 days at sea, Zhen Hua 20 dropped anchor in Gravesend Bay yesterday after a few hours after I departed.  But thanks to Bjoern of New York Media Boat, this phase of the visit has been documented.

Given the ubiquity of containers, there’s a worldwide demand for the cranes;  according to their website, 70% of this style crane worldwide is produced by ZPMC.   As the container ships get larger, a need for cranes with greater boom reach is created.  ZPMC Netherlands has a fleet currently of 22 ships to idle these seemingly impossible loads.   Since 2012, ZPMC has successfully completed “1070 voyages to 180 ports in 80 countries.”

Note the Miller’s Launch crew boat off starboard bow.

Booms must be lowered before the delivery will fit under the Bayonne Bridge on the transit to Port Elizabeth . . .  alter this week.

 

Many thanks to Bjoern for use of these photos.  For more info on New York Media Boat–actually there are several vessels–check them out online or see and “like” them on FB.

Here was a Zhen Hua vessel in port back in 2007–the first I ever saw–from 2008 here, and from 2014 . .  here, here, and here.

Marginally related:  One would not need these cranes at one point in the Comoros;  this practice I’ve read has ended.

 

Seats of Power 5

It seats one to power nothing, but makes a good puzzle here in the PowWow River some years ago.  In dry season, you walked through the gate and sat here to fish or just sit.

Poseidon’s Sea-Bee Pusher power unit has

has no seat, so you make your own with your own, complete with a foot rest.

You notice you can’t drive Urger from a seat; but there is a seat

for the engineer of this bell boat.

If we assumed the engineer’s seat, this handle would be our major control over this 19-ton Atlas-Imperial.   You can see the seat on this youtube clip of the engine running.

Since we’re on the Erie Canal, check out the wheel and controls of Seneca, which is also steered by standing crew.

I know I know . . . this is hard to read, but tug Seneca (1930) had a career with the USN in Boston and Brooklyn before it was purchased for work in the Erie Canal, in 1960.  GE?  yes, it’s diesel electric.

I’ve got lots of helm seats (or lack thereof) from Bart Hakse aka Zee Bart, who delivers vessels around the world with Redwise.  He took the photos below on a naval vessel.  Nation?  Zee Bart also finds time to do a blog called Uglyships.

 

The seatless helm above is from an unidentified vessel of the Vietnamese Navy.  Clearly it’s not a MetalShark.

Below, it’s the helm seats of  MF Hornelen.  

Note the flag on the left shoulder of the jacket.

And another from Zee Bart, FV Alpha.

 

I have many more helm seat photos from Zee Bart, but I’d love to have others to dilute Bart’s.

All the first photos here by Will Van Dorp; the others, thanks to Bart.

Retro Sixth Boro 2

A few days ago I stumbled into a rabbit hole and enjoyed it down there.  I won’t stay in 2008 for too long, but evolution I found in the ship department intrigued me, change change change. It also made concrete the reality of the scrapyards in  the less-touristed ocean-margins of the globe. Take Orange Star;  she’s scrapped now and another Orange Star delivers our juice.  But what a beauty this juice tanker is,

with lines that would look sweet on a yacht. Laura K has been reassigned to another port.  This  Orange Star was cut up in Alang in October 2010.

Ditto Saudi Tabuk.  She went for scrap in November 2013.  The tug on her bow is Catherine Turecamo, now operating on the Great Lakes as John Marshall.

Sea Venture was scrapped in January 2011.

Hammurabi sold for scrap in spring 2012.   She arrived in Alang as Hummura in the first week of summer 2012.

Some D-class Evergreen vessels have been scrapped, but Ever Diamond is still at work.  Comparing the two classes,  the Ls are 135′ longer and 46′ wider.

Stena Poseidon is now Canadian flagged as the much-drabber Espada Desgagnes, which I spotted on  the St. Lawrence last fall.   Donald C, lightening here, became Mediterranean Sea and is currently laid up.

And let’s end this retrospect with a tug, then Hornbeck’s Brooklyn Service and now just plain Brooklyn.  She’s been around the block a bit, and I’ll put in a link here if you want a circuitous tour. I caught her in Baltimore last spring in her current livery.

All photos by Will Van Dorp, who wonders what the waterscape will look like in 2028, if I’m around to see it.

Seats of Power 4

My trickster truckster hopper is filling and will dump one of these days soon, but this photo fits better in the “seats” category.

But to put this back on the water, here’s the power seat on ex-Catherine Turecamo now John Marshall.  I’d love to see this vessel in her current colors and working in her current environment . . . the tri-state ports along southern Lake Michigan.  I wonder if this is the original 1972 seat.  For the photo, thanks to Mike Fiedler, who also sent along this photo of the helm seat for Lake Express here (scroll).

Here she was in the East River in 2008.

To take on a Peacemaker with a 50-horse Boston Whaler look-alike, your seat must provide a sense of power.

Now this is a well-appointed seat of power, currently a training seat for other seats of power.  It’s Pentagoet (1980), platform for tug and barge skills acquisition at Maine Maritime.

Can you identify this seat of power?  The exterior colors could be a giveaway.

The “sticks” move the rudders on Grand Erie, flagship of the Canal Corp, former Mississippi River system Corps of Engineers pusher tug.

Any ideas of this?  I’ll call it the mystery seat until the end of this post.

Here’s a clue:  those are my shoes and below the seat is a glass floor.

Here is the locus of power award Fournier Tractor (1984), which currently works mostly in Penobscot Bay.  I took these other photos of the Maine boats here almost five years ago.

And the last seat of power comes from George Schneider.  Orange is the color of Edison Chouest.  George writes:  “It was 2011, and I was sent out on the ROV support ship MAX CHOUEST while they did an ROV survey of the wreckage of the DEEPWATER HORIZON.  The MAX, of course, is dynamically positioned, and so the operator needs to have all the DP displays nearby, plus controls to tell the system how to maneuver the vessel.  But being a workboat, it needs to be able to operate forward (in transit) or aft (when doing industrial work).  So the controls move with the operator, and the “Cyber Chair” slides fore and aft within the bridge as well as swiveling.  The whole concept was completely overwhelming to me.”

Thanks to Mike and George.  All other photos by Will Van Dorp, who’s planning at least one more “seats of power” post, so if you have photos of a bridge/helm/wheelhouse seat, please send it along.

Oh, the mystery seat . . . was in a dockside gantry crane operator cabin.

 

Sixth Boro Self-Unloader

Preliminary question:  Where in the world is Alice Oldendorff?  Answer follows.

This profile below–not Alice— might make you imagine yourself in the St Lawrence Seaway or the Great Lakes.  But I took this photo on the Lower New York Bay yesterday.  I had not caught a self-unloader of this style in the Lower Bay since 2007!

A CSL self-unloader does call in the sixth boro occasionally.  Here’s a CSL post I did in 2010, photos in the sixth boro.

She headed into the Narrows loaded down with

aggregates from Aulds Cove in Nova Scotia.  And I’m guessing that’s here, place I hope to visit some day.

Besides stone, self-unloaders locally also offload salt, as here H. A. Sklenar and here Balder.

 

The photo below I took in July 2009, again a self-unloader bringing in aggregates,

a task usually done by fleet mate  Alice Oldendorff, who surely has had enough exposure on this blog.  Don’t get me wrong . . . Alice is also a self-unloader, but she had other cranes as well, as you can see from the photo below, taken in 2009.

Where is Alice?  Well, she’s 300 miles from Pyongyang.  THAT Pyongyang.

Here’s a little more context, showing Pyongyang to the right and Beijing top left, and heavy ship traffic.

Alice made her last stop here a couple months back, then she headed through the Panama Canal to Qingdao for some rehab.  Qingdao is also spelled Tsingtao, like the beer.

She’ll be back come summer.

All photos by Will Van Dorp.

 

Raised Metal

Delta Mule was Grand Eagle before that.  Today it’s better known around the sixth boro as Eastern Dawn.

Sea Ox was the second name of this vessel, after Lief S.  Since Inland Sea it moved on to Brooklyn and now is known as Charlotte V.  If raised letters were changed each time, all that heat would make for enough of a ceremony, a necessary requirement to avoid Poseidon’s penalty. 

Thanks to Lisa Kolibabek, here’s a view of the step by step erasure and replacement, which reminds me of tattoo removal.

Chesapeake needs to come off along with the place of registry before Kristin Poling comes on.

The final result looks shipyard-launch new.

Some tired old vessels might beg for a renaming in steel;  Resolute today is called Ocean King.

This one puzzles me, because I found that the current ARC Patriot used to be Aida.  Why the F and the O, Fidelio?

Here’s another puzzle . . . Iron Salvor has been in Tottenville for a few weeks, but

in raised letters, she was Ocean Raider 17.  Anyone know what she’s doing it the bro?  Was she US built?

Thanks to Lisa for the photos of Chesapeake–Kristin Poling.  All others by Will Van Dorp.

 

 

Join the Canal Society?

It’s a non-profit devoted to the history and functioning of NY’s canals, and there have been over two dozen.  In these years of bicentennial, consider joining.  Nobody asked me to suggest this; but I’m a satisfied member.

Let me share historical photos of the boat I worked on for a season, all photos posted on CSNYS FB in the past month.

You may know, the vessel is Urger, an extraordinary boat who has likely now crossed the line from a work boat and working boat to a museum boat.  Here she is under steam power in Waterford headed for the Hudson, 1940.  At this point, Urger was already 39 years old, a product of Ferrysburg, Michigan, 1901.

Also 1940, this photo gives an idea that the colors have not always been blue/gold.  Note the extension of the superstructure forward of the wheelhouse.

Here she is in April 1941, and

back in Waterford in 1949.  Note how busy the Canal was back then with commercial tug/barge units.  That’s Day-Peckinpaugh over to the right.

Here she is in 1960.  Can anyone identify the location.  I can’t.  Of course, canal banks have changed a lot through the years.

I don’t know any of the photographers above, but I took the rest of these.

She made her last visit to the sixth boro back in 2012

July 14, 2012

Here in early September 2014 just above lock E-2, she’s being passed by Benjamin Elliot (1960).

And finally, by September 2017 she’d been tied up for almost a full year.

To close out, here was my bunk back then.  Whenever I was lying in my bunk, the distance from my nose to those angle iron beam was about 18 inches.  The bed itself was 5’11” in a bunkhouse itself about 5’8.”  I’m 6’2.”

Since this is a big Canal year, again, consider becoming a member.  And for starters, you may want to “like” them on FB.

 

Retro Sixth Boro 1

This morning I was looking for something, I thought happened in spring 2008.  Alas, I had the date wrong, but this research led me to these photos, some of which I may have posted before, all taken between April 10 and 17 2008, i.e., a decade ago exactly.  Back then I’d go into work an hour or so early, and because I had not yet plugged into AIS on my phone–I had a flipper–it was catch as catch could. Revisiting these photos stunned me with how much specific equipment has changed.

Baltic Sea and Coral Sea have gone over to West Africa.  Maybe a gallivant there is in order.  I last left West Africa forty years ago!!.

Maryland is still in the area;  I caught a glimpse of her in Jamaica Bay last week as Liz Vinik, but not close enough for a photo showing anything but a speck.  Check out Birk’s site’s info on Vinik Marine Services.

Nathan E. Stewart came to an ignoble end.

Both K-Sea and Allied have been purchased by Kirby.  Petrel has gone to Philadelphia, where she’s working as Northstar Integrity. Below, she was pushing Sugar Express, up to the plant in Yonkers.

Crude oil tanker Wilana (now Kamari) arriving at dawn on a very calm slack water Arthur Kill was the high point of that week, especially because it was the first tanker I’d watched coming into Linden.  I’ll not forget how silent the process was.

On the starboard bow was Catherine Turecamo, now working in freshwater near the Great Lakes as John Marshall.

On her stern was Laura K Moran, now moved to another Moran base.  And, notice the Bayonne Bridge now longer has the geometry as shown below.

Any time I feel that stuff never changes, guess I should look through my archives.

All photos taken in mid-April 2008 by Will Van Dorp, who wonders if anyone out there read Future Shock by Alvin Toffler.  It was published almost a half century ago but I think he was on to something.