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“Black gold” . . . oil makes power. You can’t see or smell wind, but it can be used for power . . . and that’s the title of this post. Yesterday’s photos hinted at the work happening now in the water to eventually harvest that power, and today . . . this records parts of the ribbon-cutting for
the first North American-built wind farm service vessel.
Completion for this 70’6″ x 24′ x 4′ vessel is projected for April, although crews will be training on similar vessels in the UK starting this coming winter.
Hull and superstructure are being worked on separately.
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To the left is Marcia Blount, CEO of Blount, and speaking here is Charles A. Donadio Jr., owner of Rhode Island Fast Ferry.
Over 150 people attended the event.
All photos by Will Van Dorp.
Click here by Kirk Moore for Workboat.
Here’s the index on previous second lives posts. I use “second lives” for what land folk call “adaptive reuse.” It strikes me that there may be more instances of repurposing re-design and -engineering on water than on land, but that’s may just be my opinion.
But first, I thought to call this “pre-boomed” to follow up on yesterday’s post and the wonderful backstory I got in email yesterday from William Lafferty, frequent contributor here. Here also sent along the photo below, which shows Twin Tube in 1951, i.e., before I was born and I’m 63.
Here’s part of what William wrote: “It shows the Twintube just after it entered service in fall 1951. Twintube was launched 28 August 1951, Captain Blount’s mother doing the honors, and built on Blount’s account. He used it as a travelling “demonstrator” for his shipyard’s products (it was Blount’s hull number 6) but also used it to haul oysters. Power plant originally was a rather rare 4-cylinder Harnischfeger 138-hp Diesel. (Click here for a 1950 news article including a photo of a 6-cylinder marine diesel.) Harnischfeger (the H in the mining equipment manufacturer P & H) had been set up in 1945 at Port Washington, Wisconsin, by P & H to exploit the workboat and yacht market. P & H closed the division, then at Crystal Lake, Illinois, in 1963. In spring 1952 Blount sold the vessel to the Staten Island Oil Company, who converted it to a tanker with a 40,000 gallon capacity in eight 5,000 gallon compartments within its “tubes.” The rest is, as they say, history.”
By the way, reference to “Staten Island Oil Company” brings me back to one of my favorite articles by the late great Don Sutherland here.
Here’s the index for all my previous Blount posts.
All this repurposing leads me to the second half of this post. A friend named Matt–former all-oceans sailor–is looking to write a serious history about Cross Sound Ferry vessel Cape Henlopen, ex- USS LST-510. Note the 510 still carried on its starboard bow. She was built in the great shipbuilding state of Indiana.
Cape Henlopen preparing to depart Orient Point March 2014
Here she passes Orient Point Lighthouse at the start of its 80-minute ride over to New London.
Matt is interested in interviewing past and present crew and seeing old photos of the vessel in any of its previous lives: Cape Henlopen, MV Virginia Beach, USS Buncombe County, or LST-510. If you send your interest in participating directly to my email, I’ll pass it along to Matt.
Many thanks again to William Lafferty for the Twintube story and photo. I took the photos of Cape Henlopen in March 2014. Here’s a version of the vessel by bowsprite.
Here’s the index for previous Twin Tube posts. This freight vessel is 64′ x 19′ x 8.5, and I’m sure I’ve mentioned before that it is one of the first Blount built vessels ever, launched in 1951. Here’s the index to all my previous Blount posts.
Twin Tube January 2013
This is how I imagine her, but recently . . .
the boom has been missing. I don’t know the story, but I’d like to.
Twin Tube April 2015
and the brants are discussing it . . .
Dec 2013 approaching the gauntlet of Balder‘s docklines
Most larger cargo vessels provisioned by Twin Tube have their own on-board cranes, so maybe the boom was removed to avoid having to negotiate the dock lines as she had to here in a blinding snowstorm back a year and a half ago.
dipping under the the boom under the lines
and then raising it again
All photos by Will Van Dorp.
Unrelated but important: If you are local, free and have the slightest inclination to make merry, there’s a soiree on Lehigh Valley 79 THIS Friday night, as a means to consolidate doubloons to keep the barge afloat. Details here. See you there, if my best approximation of pirate hood. Here’s a post I did nearly five years ago. And one more.
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Wow! It’s been quite a few years since I’ve used this title. The sixth boro has diverse conveyances for folks who want to get out on the water . . . from NYMediaBoat . . to CircleLine . . . with many options in between, too many to list here, although if you have a favorite way of getting out onto the water, please add a comment to the blog.
The red hulled vessel Louisiana-built vessel called The Manhattan (1970) now does tours in the sixth boro; it used to work out of Cape May taking folks to see whales.
But the Blount-built passenger vessel below certainly demonstrates the cosmopolitan nature of the sixth boro more clearly than most other vessels.
All photos by Will Van Dorp, who’s still looking for your family photos that relate to the 1950s and 1960s Hudson River National Defense Reserve Fleet.
Vessels are just machines, but I prefer to anthropomorphize them, and thus miss them when they go. On this transition day, I want to acknowledge some vessels that I’d come to enjoy seeing but will now transition away .
Scotty Sky is a Blount design, launched as L. G. Laduca in 1960. I took the photo in January 2011. Click here for a photo of this vessel operating on Lake Erie.
Patrick Sky is also a Blount design, launched as L. G. LaDuca II in 1966. Click here for info on her other names and identities. Both were built for West Shore Fuel of Buffalo, NY, and named for the family of company president, Charles G. Laduca. Click here to see a 150′ version of these Blount boats. Click here to see an interesting but totally unrelated and now scrapped vessel called West Shore . . . fueling a steamer with coal.
Capt. Log is the smallest and newest of the now timed-out single-hulled tankers in the sixth boro. Click here for the recent Professional Mariner article on this vessel.
The three above vessels are still fully functional tonight, phased out notwithstanding. Crow, seen here in a photo from September 2011, was scrapped this year in the same location where
Kristin Poling, another single-hulled tanker seen here in a photo I took in March 2010, was scrapped two years ago. Click here for a number of the posts I did on Kristin.
Out with the old . . . in with the new, mostly because we have no choice, as time sprints on.
All photos here by Will Van dorp.
Let’s follow the evolution of this boat. Two years ago she went by Coney Island. I was looking forward to having a tugboat by that name in the sixth boro. A check of the USCG vessel documentation site showed that previously she had gone by Mister Jordan, a vessel I’d never seen.
The builder’s plate showed that prior to using the Mister Jordan name, she was Beth I. That sent me to the Blount site, where I also learned she was first built in 1958 for Bethlehem Steel, and that Vulcan III might be a twin.
Next I saw this vessel high and dry and in different colors. Now watch what happens with the stack. It’s a black “muffler” here, and then when next I saw her,
the black housing was gone and there were two pipes with smallish mufflers sprouted from the back of the house.
Enjoy a few more shots taken in the past few months of Coastline Bay Star.
A handsome vessel working past the half century mark, launched the same year as this powerhouse and one of these.
All fotos by Will Van Dorp.
Of course, here’s another approach to lifting smaller boats onto a transport deck. All fotos here are compliments of Rod Smith, about 10 days ago. Rod operates Narragansett Bay Shipping, where I know him best for his tireless documentation of vessel construction at Senesco Marine. (Doubleclick enlarges.)
It starts here, as Ocean Freedom enters the Bay, passing Castle Hill Light, Saturday, May 5, 0740. Ocean Freedom works for Intermarine.
And here’s the cargo. A recent Workboat article discusses the deal: four new Army ferries bound for the Marshall Islands, specifically for the Reagan Test site. The builder is Blount Boats, which I did posts about here and here.
Sunday, May 6, 1313h.
Sunday 1436h. Note the diver in the water directly below the port prop and rudder.
Sunday 1448h.
Monday, May 7, 1035h. In the foreground is Conanicut Island; Newport is in the distance.
Monday 1038h
Monday 1039h.
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All of which answers a question: given my recent obsession with the Panama Canal, I was wondering if Ocean Freedom carrying possibly the latest government boats might cross paths there with a US government boats on its last voyage. The vessel is USS Glacier, and it is in tow by Rhea and the company that recently towed the Artship (also with South Pacific connections) to the scrappers. . . but according to marinetraffic, as Ocean Freedom heads into the Pacific, Rhea and Glacier are following Baja California.
Many thanks to Rod Smith for the fotos and to David Hindin for the info on Rhea and USS Glacier.
Not quite two weeks ago I did my first post of Blount-built boats in far flung places. Read it here; a list of sixth boro Blount vessels appears at the end.
Now I’m thrilled to put up these fotos, generously sent by Julie Blount, executive vice president of Blount Boats, Inc. This is the launch of Blount’s cargo vessel Kasai, 1960, bound for
the huge inland waterways of the Congo.
Unrelated but what you might see on the inland waterways of central Africa could include MV Liemba, the second oldest operating steam ship in the world. MV Liemba is the ex-Graf von Götzen built 1912 in Papenburg, Germany on the Ems River, taken apart, and reassembled on the banks of Lake Tanganyika) . See this fine fine video trailer of MV Liemba underway.
Gratuitous foto of an interesting Blount vessel Sailor, taken on the Delaware River south of Philly last summer, and
one of Twin Tube provisioning Songa Emerald taken in the sixth boro last week. Fire Island Ferries operates over a half dozen Blount boats.
Back to Blount’s Kasai, I wonder where it is today. For an interesting set of fotos of Congo River system vessels from the time of Joseph Conrad until the relative present, click here. The last shot of the skeletal remains of a steam vessel on a riverbank is haunting.
Thanks again to Julie Blount for the two fotos from the Blount archives. The last two fotos by Will Van Dorp.
tugster: a waterblog 
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