Buffalo to Port Weller

BFD’s fireboat Cotter is always a high point of a Buffalo visit, a Crescent Shipyard 1900 (!!) Elizabethport NJ product, aka the world’s oldest active fireboat. 

Headed west for Port Colborne, we’re treated to beauty over SteelWinds. 

As darkness looms, JW Cooper arrives to drop off a pilot.

Imagine my dismay passing MRC after dark,

and head down to Ontario level through the night.

Daybreak brings us to nearly Ontario, and we wait for Wilson T. Cooper to exit the lock W-1.

Port Weller’s shipyard a year ago was occupied by Presque Isle. 

 

We drop off our pilot and

 

enter Lake Ontario.

All photos by Will Van Dorp.

 

From the Line Locker 16

Inquiring minds have demanded more context . . . to Whatzit 16.  It’s called Harvest Dome, SLO Architecture‘s fun art project, which is intended to float in the Gowanus near 3rd and 3rd til late Spring 2014 on the watery side of this place.  Here are some fotos of the trip from Governors Island to the Gowanus Canal.

Note the Times photographer lower left here at the foot of the bridge and

lower right seen through the frame and recycled umbrellas. Unrelated:  Check out this informative article on recycling in Taiwan.

R/V Blue Sea passes in front of Pier 5 BBP.

And since we’re on the topic of water and recreation and/or art . . .  it’s Beacon NY and this sloop.

Woody. . .

as well as these arts panels.  The next few fotos I took in August 2013.

The idea of these “line locker” posts is that they allow me to catch up and throw in even the kitchen sink if it relates in even the slightest way, check out this “river tug” byulit in St. Louis, MO by the same shipyard that built the Stephen L. Colby, which sank in the Upper Mississippi earlier this week.  Check out the 1966 as well as the 1967 work on hull#2326.    Now travel back on this shipyard list to the icebreaking tugs built in 1944 and ’45.  Click on the foto below for more pics of these unusual looking US-produced tugboats.   Does anyone have updates on this class of vessel?

Some random things I stumbled upon yesterday include these old fotos of NYC harbor aka sixth boro;  a Canadian self-unloading bulker that was weather-bound off the mid-Jersey coast about a week ago was actually Algoma Equinox, a newbuild on its way to Canada from a Chinese shipyard;  a Christmas train from Canada visits northern NY state and captured by Fred of tug44.    (No, the train wasn’t captured per se.  I just meant in fotos, although I’m sure Fred could always have surprises in store.)