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aka “thanks to Tony A 34” is the best title for this, and I’m sure you’ll agree.
If you’ve lost track, “exotic” is my term for unusual vessels calling in the sixth boro. Although the series started with a workboat repurposed as a live aboard, in the past few years the term has evolved to categorize mostly vessels coming here in conjunction with special projects, many of which recently have been related to offshore wind farms.
I’m not sure why this boat is in town, and I believe the location is the CME Co. terminal (excuse me if I’m mistaken), but it truly fits the exotic category.
She’s a 300 class member of the Hornbeck Offshore (HOS) Mexico fleet, and not a new boat. A member the the 250 class was in the boro just over a half year ago here.
I’m not sure how the naming convention for HOS works, but say hello to HOS Browning.
Many thanks to Tony A who sent this along by the robotic system some since 1990 have called the World Wide Web.
Thanks to the robots in tugster tower who reconfigured the queue of scheduled posts. WVD is sweating away in the land of alligators, shrimp, sugar, and beaucoup de plus. Tony A is likely sweating away in the sixth boro; thanks to him for this reminder that in the boro which never really stops running, flooding , and ebbing, there truly are a million stories we never notice. And let’s hear it for the robots who . . . I don’t even know if they have sweat glands, or glands of any sort.
I’ve done dense traffic posts, and actually this is one.
The 3-mile strait can get quite busy.
Petroleum and all other goods, manufactured and raw, transit.
Key word here is busy.
Sometimes large vessels seem to be on a collision course, but that’s just trompe-l’œil ….
Yesterday, at one point it was unusually busy. Count the tugs and larger vessels here? I count three ships and at least six identifiable tugboats when I blow this photo up.
There’s plenty of room in that 1000′ waterway.
All photos, WVD.
Here’s another photo shared by Ingrid Staats. If you’ve been to this blog before, you recognize the bridge, but what are Vega and Altair you might wonder. The ferries are aptly named, since they are two characters in a Chinese love story, Vega the weaver girl and Altair the cowherd.
Here they operated within the fleet of the Bergen Point Ferry, both built in 1946 and discontinued in 1961.
The ferries were sold after discontinuation of the service, and both were lost in 1961: Vega off New Jersey and Altair between Mexico and Cuba deep in the Yucatan Channel. These are small boats to be going to Mexico: 61′ x 38′ x 8′, but another of the set, Deneb, made it and appeared in the Mexican registry.
To drive along Richmond Terrace these days, you don’t get the same sense crossing Port Richmond Avenue that you would have had 70 or 80 years ago . . . click on the photo below for a photographic tour of what used to be a crossing into NJ.
I used to have a photo of the sign still hanging near the ferry until quite recently, but when I gallivanted around there a few days ago, it was gone and my photo is as well, victim of one of my misguided cullings to reduce the memory demands on my computer.
In that recent gallivant, I did look along the west side of Port Richmond Avenue at this church and graveyard.
This is some old NYC history, and
names memorialized in places are reflected here . . . . Prall’s Island today is uninhabited but known to everyone who travels through the Arthur Kill.
Many thanks to Ingrid for use of the Vega-Altair photo. More of her photos to come.
And while you’re at the Reformed Church, go another 100 yards inland and check out Nat’s Men’s Shop and buy some warm work clothes.
Here was the first in this series of titles, from almost seven years ago.
The barge with green containers, the bridge, and the Glovis roll on-roll off (RORO) vessel all look great bathed
in January morning light,
a bit of wolf moon light thrown in as well.
I don’t know if this RORO has called here before, but she is less than a year old,
and you can tell.
She leaves our fair city for Tema, Ghana. I’d love to see her in tropical light. Anyone there reading this?
And here’s the FLOFLO for today, this common goldeneye who flew onto this water and will flow off north when the days lengthen and the sun gets hotter. The last other type of FLOFLO–the one that floated Peking out– was documented here.
All photos by Will Van Dorp, who’s eager to hear from folks in Ghana on this vessel.
So what is different? Look carefully.
It is underway.
If you said she’s under way and moving astern, you were right.
Training, I suppose, from near Port Elizabeth . . . all the way back–literally back–to the yard.
Well, six names later (George E. Wood, Russell 9, Martin Kehoe, Peter Spano, Edith Mathiesen, and Philip T. Feeney),
125 years after transforming from hull #7 at Bethlehem Steel Sparrows Point MD, to a Baker-Whiteley Coal co. boat
after many crews lost to time and countless jobs and
lost numbers of miles in salt water and fresh,
and all the ravages of neglect,
sabotage,
and time
scrapped from the bottom yesterday without
upsetting the crane,
Philip T. Feeney is gone.
Closure I hope.
Many thanks to Skip Mildrum for the first photo and the last three. Click on the other photos to see the tugster post where I first used them.
This is the second of three digressions I’m making from the GWA series, and what a digression it is.
How can one postpone posting these photos of the largest ever single unit transported by barge down the Hudson! And with outstanding photos like these. By the way, the first two, by Glenn Raymo are available to purchase here.
I post about this cargo, which has been covered extensively on FB, because not everyone enters the labyrinth called FB.
Two of the same tugs made the high profile tow to Rochester via the Erie Canal earlier this year as seen here.
When this tow entered the Kills, many hours later, the passed the salt pile, where Brian DeForest took these shots.
Click on the photo below to read the banner, part of which says “union built in the USA.”
Hats off to all involved. Many thanks to Glenn and Brian for photos I couldn’t chase.
Click here for more prints by Glenn.
Previous photos of Mister Jim here, CMT Otter here, and Helen Laraway here.
The flight back home through LaGuardia the other day chilled with its turbulence but thrilled with scenery. I used my phone rather than camera to avoid hitting the window with the lens.
Here we enter NYC airspace over Raritan Bay. Imagine this on a clock face at the 0800 and heading clockwise. The land is the SW corner of Staten Island. That’s Outerbridge Crossing over the Arthur Kill (AK), and the cargo vessel following the ever-so-strange channel is SCT Matterhorn, all 538′ of her outbound.
Here we look at the creeks in Freshkills Park, Isle of Meadows, and then Carteret NJ on the other side of the AK; just off the left side of the photo is the location of the marine scrapyard featured in my documentary, Graves of Arthur Kill.
A few seconds later, our Embraer 190 crosses the KVK; dead center is the Bayonne Bridge and Shooters Island at the confluence of Newark Bay (to the north, or right on this photo) and the Kills . . . Arthur and Kill Van. We’re now at about 0900 on our clock face.
Here’s my favorite shot of the series . . . the entire length of the curvy KVK. Exiting the Kills and bound for sea past the Staten Island Yankees stadium is the 751′ Hoegh Asia. I’ve no idea who’s on first. The salt pile and the IMTT tank farm are key landmarks.
Below are the twin peninsulas of MOTBY, with Bayonne Drydock and the Bayonne Cruise terminal directly across that peninsula. In the lower rightmost patch of green on this peninsula you can locate the statue dedicated by Putin . . . yes, THAT Putin. The peninsula to the right–the Global terminals Bayonne— accommodates container ships and ROROs. In the distance Newark Bay Bridge and the rail bridge to its right cross Newark Bay.
Slightly farther north, you can see Global terminals, the Weeks Marine yard, the Greenville rail docks serving NYNJ Rail, and Sims scrap yard in Jersey City, where an unidentified bunker loads.
Approaching 1000 on my clock, here’s the confluence of the Hackensack (nearer) and Passaic Rivers, forming the SE point of Kearny NJ where they become the north end of Newark Bay. Several hundred ships were built in the Kearny yard–this side of the point–in the first half of the 20th century. The Passaic disappears here into the tall buildings of Newark NJ.
Behold the meadowlands, and if you want to read a good book about that marsh, here’s a review of Robert Sullivan’s book, one of my all-time favorites. Captains Bill or Hughie give fun tours there too.
So remember this flight is headed into LaGuardia from the NE, so that puts us at 1400 on our clock face, and that means we’re over New Rochelle this point in the approach pattern and that’s Hempstead Bay beyond Sands Point, with Execution Rocks Light looking like a submarine near leftish center of photo. The top of the photo looks SE across Nassau County.
It’s City Island, the most unlikely part of the Bronx, to which it’s connected by the City Island Bridge.
And just before landing . . . it’s Throgs Neck … and a few seconds later, touch down.
All I can add is that I was glad for a portside window seat on the Embraer. All that water, that’s what I call the sixth boro. More Jetster soon . . . .
It turns out, I’ve done a post like this once before . . . in 2012 here. When I took the next two photos on Tuesday, I’d thought all the fleet week vessels had already departed. Well, wrong . . . there went LHD-3 USS Kearsarge . . .
which reminded me this would be
a good time to use a photo by a jolly tar back about 10 years ago. Notice the long-gone, long transformed Odin bunkering LHD-3….
Mid afternoon Tuesday this was a sight to behold along the East River, here approaching the Williamsburg Bridge . . . whatzit?
It’s another of the fleet leaving town . . . USNS Yuma (T-EPF-8). The photo above and next two come from an alert Tony A doing his commerce on the East River. In the photo below, it’s the green-fronted UN Building along with river with Trump Tower (dark) rising behind it.
When I caught notice of this, I thought I could hurry to Fort Wadsworth to catch photos of Yuma with Manhattan behind it, but my underestimation of EPF’s speed and the coincidence of hitting every stoplight on Bay Terrace meant that when I got to the Fort,
Yuma was already making almost two dozen knots and headed for Norfolk, a trip that took less than 24 hours.
The EFTs are a further evolution of the HSTs, which I posted about here. By the way, Alakai was renamed USNS Puerto Rico, but then later that name was removed, since there’s a new EFT with the name USNS Puerto Rico in the offing. So is the former Alakai now nameless?
Many thanks to Tony A for sending along the East River photos. Thanks to JED for the Odin/USS Kearsarge shot, and all the others by Will Van Dorp.
Happy June!
I’ve posted photos like this one of Thomas D. Witte moving recycling, but I’ve never
been inside Pratt Industries plant on the Arthur Kill. Recently, William Hyman has though, and he’s shared his photos here. It looks –and probably smells–like any waste handling facility, but
giant claws move the scrap around and
caldrons do their magic and
cardboard stock comes out.
Photos I’ve taken of the recycling barges back almost 10 years ago are below.
Unless otherwise identified, all photos by Will Van Dorp. William Hyman’s previous photos can be found here. Thank you, sir.
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