What Düsseldorf Showed Me

Thanks to Les Sonnenmark and Peter Lellow for helping me “see” what I was just looking at.  Last week I got some fotos of Düsseldorf Express leaving the sixth boro via the KVK.  See anything different?

Watch the vessel . . . .

There . . . the aftmost starboard container.  What is so special about it?

Here’s a foto Peter sent me . . . a container ship in port hooked up to shore power.  Cold ironing . . . I’d heard about it but never known what it looked like.  I don’t know if the service already exists in Port Elizabeth . ..  but this vessel is equipped.

Click here and here for more info on the system to reduce ship emissions in port.

I took the first three fotos.  Thanks much to Les and Peter for directing and educating my eyes.

Whatzit 18

Lots of images you can try to identify today, but I’ll hold any further info until tomorrow.

First . . .  this vessel will be visible and will be an interesting subject of photographs from many points along the Hudson next month,  February.  Clue:  Note the hull  color.

Unrelated to the top foto . . . any guesses about this and

and this from the same vessel and

this from the same fleet?   Both vessels are occasional visitors in the sixth boro.

And finally . . . from a secret salt, a foto easy to identify.  My question in whether there’s any news about this incident.

You’ll have some answers tomorrow.

Finally . . . here are some of my favorite ice pics on the Hudson taken a few years back by Paul Strubeck.

And here’s hat’s off to my Canadian cousins . . . if case you missed this late addition to yesterday’s post.

Balder’s Belly

The link here may show the first glimpse I had of Balder.  Let me share my getting better acquainted, but first . . . the foto below I took 13 months ago.  Note the different colors of salt, reflecting

different provenances, as explained in Ian Frazier’s New Yorker article below.  Buy a copy to get the rest of the story.

Without this vessel, all of us who drive the roads or walks the sidewalks and streets within the metropolis surrounding the sixth boro would be at greater risk of slipping and crashing.  Framed that way, Balder could not be better named.   Here’s what Kimberly Turecamo looks like from Balder‘s bridge.

On the far side of the channel, that’s Dace.

Here’s what has come forth from Balder‘s belly, a bit of the Atacama Desert on the KVK.   Huge tractors load the trucks that come to a highway department near you today.

This 246′ arm, reaching nearly to Richmond Terrace, offloads at the relatively slow rate of 8oo tons per hour.

And here’s the hold just emptied, one hold of five.  Notice the ladders and the tracks at the base of the hold.

Click here to see the unloading machinery in action.

Navel, perhaps?

Here’s what gets even the last pound making up the nearly 50,000-ton payload onto the salt dock.

All fotos by Will Van Dorp.  Thanks to Brian DeForest of Atlantic Salt and the Balder crew for the tour.

Salt 8b

I could have called this a “scale” post, but I wanted to keep the thread.  The next two fotos were taken over a hundred years ago;  I used them back in 1989 in a now out-of-print book called Incomplete Journeys.  It was about shipwrecks in or near the mouth of the Merrimack River in Massachusetts.  The fotos show not salt but sand being loaded onto a schooner.  The vessel would be run onto the “sand pile” bank at high tide, loaded, and then floated off the next high tide.

These ships were called sand droghers there, although that usage doesn’t seem very widespread.   But I digress.

Let’s return to Port Newark, United Challenger, and salt.

61,000 tons of salt arrived on this ship.

Two men in cranes emptied the ship in about five days.

That involved an additional eight men driving trucks to the mountain.

Time lapse photography might be fun.

Notice the spiral staircase into the hold.  Also, this hatch is midships;  the bridge is quite a distance away.

Double click to enlarge (most fotos) this foto and just to the left of the Newark Bay Bridge, you’ll see WTC1.

This is taken from just forward of the first hatch, counting from the bow.

This is the bridge view.

This parting shot is from the starboard bridge wing.

Safe driving on icy roads.

All fotos (except the first two, of course)  by Will Van Dorp.   Many thanks to Brian DeForest of Atlantic Salt.

Salt 7a

It’s appropriate that this was Salt 6.  You’ll understand as you go through this post and the next one.

Just like it’s appropriate that this Cat is prowling.

Wonder what’s the relationship between this dark shape arriving and safe driving and even on safe walking on streets in the lit-up Manhattan in the distance?

Balder is in port with almost 50,000 tons of crystals from the deserts of Chile aka road . . .

. . .  salt.

She drifts in silently and crews make her fast.

Can you imagine doing this in a February or any other cold month sixth boro?

Well  . . . it happens

again and again, ship after ship, with utmost concern for safety.

Balder (2002) features a self-unloading system.

Once all lines are secured along with customs check and other paperwork,  partial crew change .  . .

While some of the city sleeps, Balder’s arm stretches forth and the Cats get to work.

All fotos by Will Van Dorp, who is very appreciative for Atlantic Salt terminal manager Brian DeForest’s permission to  be in the yard.

 

Ceres Sighted!

Whatzit?!!  in the background with the classy leeboards.  In the foreground, of course, it’s the world-infamous tug44, and in its own lair near the hideaway of Fred, in the north country approximately 200 miles north of the sixth boro.

It’s the sailing freighter Ceres, a moving cornucopia of all things edible, sixth boro bound

with auxiliary power for the Canals, where sailing is not an option.

Here Ceres exits Lock C-7.

At the tiller, it looks like Steve Schwartz, whose inimitable idea of a figurehead appears in foto 8 here affixed to sloop Woody Guthrie.

Much appreciation to Fred Wehner for all fotos here.   Fair winds to Ceres.

Doing Social 2

Thanks . . . for the social media sourcing of this vessel.  Nick Massa sent along these fotos of the Alpine Ocean Seismic Survey vessel Shearwater, which he took in another part of the sixth boro while I was clinging along the edge of Manhattan.  Nick does a blog called NYCruiseInfo.com, which I think complements tugster well.

And in case you missed Xtian Herrou’s comment, he pointed out that Shearwater had an earlier life as a USCG surface effect ship.  Here’s more on that hull technology.  That reminded me of the term, which came up a few years back during the visit of a Norwegian minesweeper (third foto there) in the sixth boro.  Here’s more info on that vessel.   Here’s a post from last year of French vessels, thanks to Xtian.

What does the track of a survey vessel look like?  Here’s the path Shearwater cut across the Lower Bay yesterday.

So here’s my next group sourcing project.  I took this foto of Angel’s Share  Saturday but had no time to go to North Cove to get close-ups.  I had planned to do that early this morning, bt it appears she’s sailed off during the night.

Angel’s Share is a 130′ Wally sailyacht.

Unfinished group sourcing business . . . did anyone catch Iona McAllister  towing Amavisti into the port early on September 7.

And finally, last but certainly not least . . .  Bob Stopper has some followups to stories I’ve been following on the Erie Canal.  First, details on that sinking on an otherwise quiet stretch of the Erie Canal . . .  here’s more info.  And a story I heard tug44 Fred mention numerous times while I was at the Roundup . . . Julia Holmes rowing the length of the Erie Canal in the 17′ dory she assembled in her Brooklyn apartment!  She’s more than halfway across the Canal already.

Thanks much for reading.  Special thanks to Nick for sending along the closer-ups of Shearwater and illustrating that social media is  . . . social!

 

 

Bertha’s Future

. . . literally hangs in the balance in the next weeks.  This 1925 Tyne River-built flat-bottomed timber tug needs $150,000 pledged, or  . . .        I’ll come back to the  ” . . . or”    To pledge, click on the image of the tug to the left, click on the contribute button, and follow the prompts.

Bertha was one of four of these tugs used to move booms of timber to the mill in the Bay of Islands area of western Newfoundland starting in the mid-1920s.  Click here for fotos of that timber operation; particularly appropriate are fotos # 189, 259, and 263.

Darren Vigilant (below) bought Bertha in 1999, drove her to New York, and if you were  paying  attention to the harbor from that time, you might recall seeing it.    Click here to see fotos from then as well as an illustrated history of the vessel and lists of what has been done and remains.  Currently, she’s in a yard in Staten Island.

I took these fotos last weekend and will

be adding followups in the weeks to come.

But the clock is ticking.  Here is the  ” . . . or else” part.

Time is running out, and Bertha could be scrapped and added to the half million dollar pile of metal chunks.

Shudder the thought.

All fotos by Will Van Dorp, who’d love to see any fotos you might have of Bertha sailing in New York harbor between 1999 and 2003.   Click on the image below to hear Darren make a plea for the boat.

Sixth Boro Hydrofoil 2

Today near Meadow Lake there’s a convergence of dragons . . . similar to but maybe bigger than the one I documented here five years ago.

A half century ago, that lake was the site of the World’s Fair.  And the three images that follow are stills clipped from a short video called Sinclair (as in the oil company today subsumed by Arco) at the World’s Fair, which today we might call an infomercial.   Thanks to all your comments–here and via email–that lead me to conclude that the hydrofoil era in the sixth boro was quite short.   Looking at these fotos, I wonder if any reader here was among the 100,000 passengers transported in the summer of 1964, if any fotos out there could be shared, and

what this “driver” did after hulls receded back into the water for good.   Thirteen boats–maybe unfortunately named–operated in the sixth boro!  Where did they dock?  Who maintained them?

Here’s an intriguing eBay foto, which I’ll not bid on.   Boeing seems to have built a number of hydrofoils–as the Boeing 929.  Of those still operating, most are in Eastern Asia, including these “Seven Islands” boats that once–about a decade ago–tried to establish a run between Florida and the Bahamas.   Seven Islands features an up-to-date crew blog–only in Japanese–that has interesting fotos.  Here and here is info on a hydrofoil operating on the black Sea out of Bulgaria.

Here’s where I’ll leave this until I find out more.

Meanwhile, if I get all my work done today, I may go see the dragons tomorrow.

Other People’s Fotos 23

You may once have ridden this vessel.  Thirty months ago you could have made a bid on it.  Eighteen months ago it was topheavy and listing.  Two weeks ago Paul Strubeck caught this foto.  Might you call it a major haircut.

Around the same time, Paul caught this vessel in Verplanck. That looks like Cornell to the left also.   I don’t know what Cormorant‘s future will be.

I caught Planetsolar on my way outatown, but bowsprite studied the first solar-powered circumnavigator up close and impersonal and shares these fotos.

Inside these caps are props.  Click here and here to see the props.

Enjoy these views starting with this view looking forward along the portside and moving counterclockwise around the boat.

Click here for a compilation of clips taken over two years on Turanor PlanetSolar.  And if you have 40 minutes to watch this video from the Caribbean to the Indian Ocean, you could like it.  I especially liked the  Singapore dry dock section beginning around 31 minutes in.   And from yesterday’s NYTimes, here’s a story about the boat’s current research mission.

Many thanks to Paul and bowsprite for these fotos.

Speaking of bowsprite . . .  if you’re local and free on Saturday, come  down to Pier 25 where she has organized the craft market called Radio Lilac, named for the 1933 lighthouse tender there.