You are currently browsing the category archive for the ‘Weeks Marine’ category.
The sun was setting when we met Allie B
and her tow: Weeks 533 with Robert as tail boat. I’d seen the big crane only a week or so earlier doing some lifts in the sixth boro. This blog has featured this crane in a number of sixth boro jobs and moves going all the way back to hoisting US Airways 1549 out of the icy Hudson 14 years ago.
At this point, Allie B and tow were westbound at the west end of Buzzards Bay
on their way to the Cape, or so it appeared later. And yes, as contradictory as that previous sentence sounds, I meant it that way.
Had our meeting been a half hour later, I’d not have these photos.
Allie B has fascinated me since her epic 2009 voyage, when she took barge Brooklyn Bridge to the Black Sea.
Like I said, it was a fortunate meeting as we all sailed in the last minutes of brilliant light before the long winter’s night.
Enjoy the light show.
All photos, WVD.
From right to left then, that would be Allie B, Sarah D, and Weeks 533.
The two tugs assisted the crane barge that lifted a large electrical component onto a many-wheeled trailer inside the Red Hook container port. I’ll post my photos of the truck on my next truckster! post.
Well over a decade ago, I traveled up to Quincy MA to see Allie B move a long time piece of the landscape out of Quincy and over to the Black Sea port of Mangalia, Romania. What piece of landscape, you ask? It was the Fore River Goliath Crane, now painted yellow and set in a yard operated by Damen, although it seems it may now be inactive again.
Landing the crane at Red Hook yesterday, lifting the cargo, and departing all happened quite fast, less than 90 minutes from arrival to departure.
Happy solstice. Next stop summer.
All photos, WVD. Hat tip Cyclone Shark.
Hell Gate conjures up strong associations, whether you go with the English derivation or the Dutch one. I don’t go there enough to get photos.
But today, Joker brought Weeks 551 through the Gate, and I was there to record it.
It is truly an ever changing set of turbulences.
On a run from New London to sixth boro, this job is almost done.
All photos, WVD.
I could not make out what this barge was, although I knew the tug was one I first knew as Petrel, and first posted on this blog in 2008 and reprised here. Back then she had Sugar Express in tow.
Here was one answer; Northstar Integrity was moving Hughes 181 barge, chock full of equipment.
I’m not sure what project they’d all been working on or what this equipment was for.
After dropping off the barge on the west side of the Bayonne Bridge, she returned light.
Here’s a close up of the 1977 75′ x 25′ 1800 hp tugboat.
All photos, any errors, WVD, who’s offering these 2023 calendars that can be in your mailbox by week’s end. Today only, if I read the site correctly, use code CM22 at checkout for a 60% discount. If you try that, let me know if it works.
or maybe I could call these “roaring 20s” tugs in the sixth boro . . .
let’s start with likely the newest of these, maybe the newest in the boro, Charles Hughes, 3000 hp and 90′ x 34′ .
She’s a Salisbury-class, the fourth of that class from Chesapeake Shipbuilding.
Another product of the 2020s, it’s James K, 2400 hp and 75′ x 30′.
She comes out of the Rodriguez Brothers shipyard.
Jillian Irene is what AIS told me . . .
but that name is so new that the painting department has not yet caught up. I thought her only recently the newest hull/name in the boro, but welcome the soon-to-be-marked Jillian Irene, a product of C & C Marine and Repair.
All photos, any errors, WVD.
Let me interrupt my “out of the bayou” aka “regular programming” posts to a) announce my return to the sixth boro and b) update you on some exciting cargo that arrived in the sixth boro earlier this week. For the first 4 photos, I’m grateful to Benjamin Moll, since I had not yet returned here when he took those.
But first, do you remember 20 Barges, the post about a delivery of that many barges on a barge in June 2016? This is similar. Tradewinds’ Caitlin came into the sixth boro with barge Prometheus, seen below. Prometheus is a large 300′ x 100′ barge that came to the sixth boro at least once before and reported on here, back in spring 2019.
Two tugs also tagged along as cargo.
Eastern Dawn provided the assist.
I took the rest of these photos. By the way, as of today’s posting, Caitlin and Prometheus are still in town, over by the Weeks yard.
The new vessels will operate for the Haughland Group. More on Haughland tomorrow before I return to my Gulf of Mexico reporting.
Sarah D was assisting over at Weeks yesterday.
Many thanks to Ben for sharing his photos. Some previous posts with Ben’s photos can be seen here.
Any errors can be pinned on WVD, who provided the last four photos.
I’ve previously cited the line about eight million stories in the naked city, a reference to a 1948 movie and subsequent TV show. More on all that at the end of this post, but for now, with the sixth boro added in, I’d double that number . . . 16 million stories in the naked city, considering all six boros. And thanks to Tony, here are a bunch of stories from the past few days that I’d otherwise have missed entirely.
An Italian destroyer visited the sixth boro, D-554 Caio Duilio.
A Maine purse seiner Ocean Venture came through. I caught her coming through the boro here two years ago.
More on Ocean Venture can be found here on pp. 20-23 of March 2021 of National Fisherman.
And there’s more . . all from the past week, name that tall ship with the flag of República Dominicana?
That’s Weeks James K in the foreground.
So here it gets confusing; it appears this DR training ship barquentine is called Cambiaso. She was acquired from Bulgaria in August 2018. However, it’s possible that for a short and unrecorded period of time, the same barquentine carried the name Maria Trinidad Sanchez. What happened? Was that simply a delivery name, or am I still showing effects of my time in the heat with the alligators while the robots attempted a coup?
That being said, along with a DR training ship, there was also another DR naval vessel. Do her lines look familiar?
Vintage? Where launched?
Today she’s known as DR’s Almirante Didiez Burgos. But at launch in Duluth in 1943, she was USCGC Buttonwood, a WW2 veteran and now flagship of the DR Navy. She reminds me of USCGC Bramble, which I saw way back when on the St. Clair River. After an epic journey from Michigan to Mississippi for refitting by a private individual, she might now be scrapped.
All photos by Tony A and shared with WVD, who feels privileged by this collaboration.
I also think, given the reference to Naked City, that moving pictures producers should revisit the concept of a Route 66 series, incorporating Charles Kuralt’s influences. Want the season 1 episode 1 of Route 66? Click on the image below and prepare to go back in time for good or ill! It’s disturbing watching. Season 1 episode 1 provides some backstory about how a “broke” Manhattan kid came to be driving a 1960 Corvette. Hint: Hells Kitchen, the East River, barges, and bankruptcy are all involved. A luminary of the series was screenwriter Stirling Silliphant, a name I should have known earlier.
And to give equal time to Charles Kuralt, watch this 8-minute segment on wooden replica vessel building in Wisconsin. Watch highlights as the boat builder, Ferd Nimphius, works on his 113th build.
June 2012 was pivotal for me. A photo sent along by a friend alerted me to Canal commerce–Canadian corn– entering the US at Oswego, a place I knew something of from my youth.
If that was a spark, then the breeze that fanned it was an invitation to do my trial article for Professional Mariner magazine, which led me to Kingston NY, the mouth of the Rondout, and a project involving use of a half century old tug Cornell to do TOAR signoffs. My most recent article in the magazine came out today and can be seen here.
On that assignment, I was privileged to have a mentor, Brian Gauvin, do the photography.
Other big events for June 2012 included the movement of shuttle Enterprise from JFK airport ,
ultimately to the Intrepid Museum to be
hoisted onto the flight deck as part of the display, now covered.
My daughter went off to Brasil (again) and the Amazon, leading me to go there myself a year later, fearing she’d never return because she loved it so much there.
I’d given her a camera before she went, and was rewarded with some quite interesting photos, like these small motor boats that looked almost like slippers …
with straight shafts coming straight out of air-cooled engines.
During my trip up to the Rondout, I stopped in Newburgh, where replicas of La Niña and Pinta, crafted using traditional techniques on the Una River in Bahia, Brasil, attracted crowds, one of many stops along the great loop route.
Other festivities on the Hudson that summer . . .
included the sails and music associated with the Clearwater Festival, and of course the small boats moving in some of the venues.
Patty Nolan and Augie were the small tugs, and of course the sailboats including Mystic Whaler, Woody Guthrie,
and of course the sloop Clearwater. The Clearwater organization will not be doing a music festival in June 2022. Mystic Whaler is now working in Oxnard CA at the Channel Islands Museum.
Summer time and the living is easy well, at least it feels that way some days . . . .
All photos, except the first one, WVD. That first photo was taken by Allan H. Seymour.
Dace lighters STI Excel.
Neptune comes into town again.
Buchanan 12 makes a rare appearance light, but everyone needs to refuel periodically.
Janet D follows Seeley into the Kills.
How a bout a four’fer . . . counter: Marjorie, Kristin Poling, Nicholas, and Jordan Rose.
Sea Lion heads eastbound.
B. Franklin travels west, and
Discovery Coast, east. . . both light.
Nathan G moves a deep scow into the Kills with Cape Wrath lurking in the background.
Traffic never stops, and it’ll outlast me, the photographer, WVD.
I’ve used this title a dozen times before, but never have four relatively recent hulls shared sixth boro waters until now, at least not that I’m aware of.
So let’s start here with an obvious logo and a name I couldn’t quite parse, Viking
Octantis, until I realized it was named for a star visible in the Southern Hemisphere.
From here, they head north and are expected on the Saint Lawrence by the end of April. This is the vessel that is supposed to transform cruising in the Great Lakes, including Lake Superior, using Milwaukee as its hub for the summer months. I can say from experience that Milwaukee could be a great city for this. Here, here and here are more Milwaukee posts previously on tugster.
I understand that Blount tried Lake Superior with their vessels years ago, but Viking will bring in a few hundred guests at a time. Other itineraries explain the name, as they will sail under the southern skies. As of this writing this 2022 vessel is still at the passenger terminal, unfortunately, stern to land, and I wanted to see the bow. She was delivered from the VARD Shipyard in Søvik NO in January 2022.
As of 1130 today, she headed for sea, for Charlottetown PEI, specifically.
Another 2022 vessel arrived in the sixth boro yesterday, USCGC Clarence Sutphin WPC-1147, the 47th Sentinel-class cutter has delivered to the USCG. After christening, WPC-1147 will head off to Bahrain.
Christening is here most likely because the namesake was a Queens native. I thought that learning this would help me understand the origin of this major street near where I live, but it seems both street and hero have names traced back to the old country. The new cutter overtook the container ship under the VZ Bridge.
While we’re looking at hulls delivered in 2022, here’s another, with noticeable style-cousins already working in the boro. I’ll let you look for the similarities in superstructure. James K was recently delivered to Weeks, as reported here.
She’s been hauling dredge scows the past few days, as was the case Easter morning at first light.
See the resemblance certainly with James E. Brown? Rodriguez Boatbuilders needs their history site updated.
Another fairly new hull in town, possibly calling in PoNYNJ for the first time is CMA CGM Osiris. I’ve not yet seen it, but she may depart today.
All photos, WVD.
tugster: a waterblog 
Recent Comments