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.

 

1973 Sea Horse

If you saw the 2015 tugboat race, you may have glimpsed this vessel . . .

She’s the current vessel of Ship 243 of Sea Scouts.  Here’s what her current mate says about her:  “Sea Horse was built in 1973 by Swiftships in Morgan City La.

Designed as  for Vietnam, she was never was deployed.  For some time she was used in the San Francisco Bay area as a training ship for Navy Special Forces.  Then she was used by the CIA for what,  who knows. She was covered in radar absorbing tiles.  There was afire in the engine room and then mothballed before we got her.”

Click here for details of what Sea Scouts do.

 

 

Sea Horse has been hauled out and for regular maintenance, which always costs.  Click here for details about how you can help.  Given how difficult most of us know it is to find a work niche for our lives, Sea Horse is a valuable driver in that search;  I wish there’d been Sea Scouts around where I grew up.   If you do FB, check out Sea Scout Ship 243.  Click here and here for two posts about another community on the water program.

The first two photos are by Will Van Dorp.  The others are all used thanks to Robert Meseck, currently Mate and soon to be Skipper of the unit.

Click here for a previous swiftship post on this blog.

Ice Pick

How about cold pics today, like these first two of Line.   For the story, click here, an article that never got paper published.

What floats in the Hudson here is like what floats in my tea all day.   I recall that the crew I interviewed here told me I should try to see one of these in dry dock to understand how the design of the hull makes these small tugs great for breaking ice.  “It has an ice pick,” one person said.

Well, finally I got to see Swivel high and dry.  Swivel is no longer owned by the USCG.  It may belong to an entity called GIPEC.

Anyhow, this is about WYTL design.  See the ice pick?  The bow rides up on the ice and the perpendicular notch saws through.

 

I’m glad I finally got to see this, and I hope you too are chilled by thinking of icebreakers and the beautiful season shaping us a half year from now.

All photos by Will Van Dorp.

Government Boats 36

Here’s an index to the previous posts in this series.

This post is short and sweet, and you’ll soon notice the theme.

900 total hp of Yamaha above on the FDNY boat and even more Mercury below . . . divided between two US Customs and Border Protection boats.

 

All photos by Will Van Dorp.

Small Craft 10

Here were previous installments.

And below are a set of small craft I’ve seen in the sixth boro and further environs so far this month . . . .

The colors look familiar here, but

This one I have noticed before . . .

Wolf River used to be everywhere in the harbor until it got shipped–literally–to some far distant

dredge projects, like this one on Guanabara Bay in summer 2013.

The KVK is not the regular route of pilot boat Yankee.

Now here is the small craft that could and DID . . .

and got a presidential letter for it. Click here for more Long Island boat building traditions.

Dobrin . . . is a 65′ Swiftships-built survey vessel.

Click here and here for other Swiftships vessels that have appeared on this blog.  Swiftships have also supplied vessels for the reconstruction of the Iraqi coastal navy.

Can anyone identify the manufacturer of NYSB-3.  I’m guessing this is one of several identical vessels in the USACE NY District fleet?

And here’s a clue . . . Vane Brothers currently has a crew boat in the harbor!  Christian was formerly owned by Kirby, K-Sea, and others.

And to end where we started but we a quite different attitude . . . given the tender carried over the stern.  I don’t know this boat.

Let me postscript in another closer-up photo . . .showing a Rhode Island registry . . .

All photos taken very recently by Will Van Dorp.