Winter Solstice 2023

Technically, the solstice today is EST 2231, well after dark.  Sunrise today was 0716, and sunset will be 1631.  That’s about nine hours and 15 minutes of daylight.  People call tonight the longest night of the year, but actually, tomorrow night is just as long.

In Prince Edward Island, daylight today lasts only eight hours and 37 minutes.  At the summer solstice, however, NYC has just over fifteen hours of daylight and PEI, nearly sixteen.

And what does that have to do with MV Vaporetto Queen, you’re wondering . . . .  

If you can’t expand the print enough to read it, here are the main points:  the original vessel was the 40′ Expo Service No. 5, one of an unknown number of fiberglass ferries  built to speed up to 60 people at a time into the Expo ’67 grounds, the molds were destroyed after the build to prevent additional boats to be created from them, and in 1970 the Jorgensens purchased Expo Service No. 5  for refurbishing and then using them to do excursions in Charlottetown PEI harbor. How long that service lasted remains an unanswered question.  Then it languished in a New Brunswick shipyard.

Fast forward to 2015, when Ride Solar‘s Steve Arnold purchased the vessel, replaced the half-ton diesel with a 100-pound electric motor powered by topside solar panels, refurbished again, all for use in harbor excursions from May 1 until October 30.  

For all the specs from the naval architects E.Y. E., click here. For a portfolio of E.Y. E.’s other boat projects including the Halifax cross harbor ferries, click here. 

The photo above, any errors, WVD, who would have taken more photos that day, but there was gusting and horizontal rain happening.

For photos of other solar boats Solar Sal and Solaris, click here and here.   Then of course there was Turandor PlanetSolar.  More on PlanetSolar and a list of other solar vessels here. 

Happy solstice!  I hope you get out and get some recharging sunshine today.  That’s my plan.  Previous winter solstice posts can be found here.   If you want to see how many excursion vessels are in Antarctica water today, check AIS.  There’s a traffic jam on the Drake Passage!!

 

Summer Sail 7

Here were previous iterations of this title.  Number 3 is most relevant. Port Colborne is related as well although I never saw the schooner in question this summer.   Here’s what I did see though.

Above, as we hunkered down in a safe weather port behind the breakwater in Cleveland, some folks were out testing what Lake Erie could send them.  Below, Chakra was heading eastbound off Manitowoc, making good speed.

In the Detroit River, sailboats raced a course off Fighting Island.

On another transit, sloop Janine  crossed over from Amherst Point, and in front of tugboat Victory (I think) and barge Maumee.

The 1930 Kajama has operated on Lake Ontario now for over half a century.  See that link for the unexpected origin of the name Kajama.

Next summer I’d like to schedule a tour onboard and

learn the origin of the delightful kraken mural on its house.

Halifax has a similar vessel, the 1939 Swedish-built Silva.  Check out Dennis Jarvis info about her here.

Twice this summer I passed HMCS Oriole, a 1921 Toronto/Boston-build ketch;  the first and clearest view was below in Port Colborne.   More on the vessel here.

The cold didn’t matter as long as the river was free of ice, as these two sloops played in the river off Quebec City.

Empire Sandy was built in 1943 as a deep sea tugboat, as you can see in photos here, somewhat hard to imagine when seeing her in this current rig and configuration.  In the early 1970s she was saved from the scrapyard and converted to a sailing vessel.

Empire Sandy is another Toronto-based boat I would like to sail and tour summer 2024.

Inland Seas was working in the Detroit area this summer.  Here she sails under the Ambassador Bridge, with one of the Viking cruise ships beyond.

Both Viking ships were in Detroit that same day.

Ketch White Hawk won the Chicago-Mackinac race this summer, and the photo below I snapped as they celebrated their win.  You might remember the photos here by Jeff Gritsavage as he followed them from NYS Canals and into then Great Lakes.  Masts unstepped, they fit through the Canals.

Catamaran Athina enjoyed the winds here at the straits.

I saw no name on this sailboat transiting the cross-harbor ferry lanes in Halifax.  Would the rig be called 

a free-standing schooner rig?

But the sailing vessel that caught my heart this summer was this one in Escanaba harbor, a Halman Bluejacket 23 motor sailer.

All photos, any errors, WVD.

Really Random Ships 3

Let’s start in the SLSW.  Algoberta here transits the South Shore Canal;  that’s the Saint Lawrence itself to the left of the barrier.  The river drops there about 45′ in three miles of distance.  Today, a month after I took the next several photos, snow already has dusted the bank.

From 2007 until last year, its operated as Chiberta.

Zelada Desgagnes began her career in China, as Beluga Freedom.

Above, note the heavy machines on the dock waiting to be loaded, and vehicles already placed aboard, below.

She currently supplies settlements in northern Canada.

Going from the freshwater portion of the Saint Lawrence to a saltwater port, ULCV OOCL Singapore, arriving in the sixth boro recently.  She’s currently making her way back to Asia.

The next three vessels are all ONE pink.  Note some differences.

Grus above and Apus below are from the same order. 

Their measurements are the same and both date from 2019.

See the crewman waiting to send the messenger line in the hull opening between the O’s?

ONE Monaco dates from 2018.  

As recently as February 2023, she appeared on this blog as Monaco Bridge.  

Note the differences in the stern between Apus and Monaco.

All photos, any errors, WVD. 

 

Government Boats 62

Many thanks to Pat English of FB’s St Lawrence Seaway Shipwatchers Network for these first two photos.  Pat caught a previous LCS here back in 2020.

That’s Picton Terminal’s Amy Lynn D assisting USS Marinette (LCS-25) as it heads out to sea through the Iroquois lock.  All the Freedom-class littoral combat ships built in Marinette WI have required an escort through the Seaway.  In fact, back in 2018 USS Little Rock got stuck downstream of the Seaway because of incompatibility with cold and ice.

Mamilossa, here just downstream of the Beauharnois Canal, is one of five hovercraft operated by the Canadian Coast Guard. 

A Cockerell hovercraft first crossed the English Channel back in 1959.

Pierre Radisson, 323′ x 64′ and in service since 1977,  is one of four CCG medium icebreakers.  

HMCS Margaret Brooke  AOPV-431 is the second Arctic Offshore patrol vessel recently built for the operations in the northern waters of Canada.

Docked near the shipyard in Halifax are AOPVs 433 and 432, Hall and Bernays, the two most recently delivered vessels in this class. 

HMCS Moncton MM-708 visited the sixth boro back in 2016, here.

Many thanks to Pat for sharing the images of USS Marinette transiting the Iroquois lock the other day.  All others, any errors, WVD.

More on LCSs here. 

Random Halifax Port 2

I said in May that I’d come back to this location, and here’s my coming back for the first time.  More returns to come when I can.

I first want to recognize work that other folks have done, and I had listed on my blogroll all along; namely, the work of tugfax by Mac Mackay, whom I’ve not met but would like to some day.  He also does Shipfax, where Halifax ship traffic is singled out for attention.

Mac certainly seems to do a good job of keeping up with maritime traffic of the Maritimes.

Here’s his take on Atlantic Bear, albeit from a few years back.

Here’s some movement of Atlantic Fir, as well as some local lore.

And here on Atlantic Willow.

With attention to framing, 

the Woodside area looks autumn pastoral.

Willow and Fir went over to a terminal for an assist.

All photos, any errors, WVD, with a hat tip to Mac Mackay.

 

Random Halifax Port 1

An interesting aspect of Halifax traffic is that they see many of the ULCVs just before or after they call in the sixth boro.  This was true the other day for ONE Wren.

They have some unique Canadian vessels as well in the harbor, like Dominion Bearcat.  More Dominion later in this post.

Here’s a small CCG vessel, Sigma T.

No identification here, but it appears to be a commercial fishing vessel.

The cross-harbor ferry fleet has an unusual look, and although there’s a fee to ride, paying to get aboard could not have been easier.

 

I’ve a post coming up on the designers of these ferries, a group with the intriguing name E. Y. E. Marine Consultants.

Let’s round this post off with Dominion Diving.  I correctly thought I’d seen this vessel before, here. 

Dominion Rumbler is a Damen Stan 1205 that crossed the Atlantic on a barge from Spain.

It was great to stumble onto a role they play in Halifax harbor.

All photos, any errors, WVD.  More Halifax and eastern Canada to come.

Unrelated but interesting:  Bayou Bandit will likely come through the boro this weekend with a barge heading for MD.  I believe that on that barge will be the former presidential yacht Sequoia.  Currently they’re off southern Maine, southbound.  Here from three years ago is the northbound run that turned out to be futile, for reasons I do not know.

 

Saint Lawrence Workboats 2

This follows from months ago, and now–as then–it’s about using my wee hours to catch up.  The most expeditious way to do that is just descriptive . . .  pics and names and links.

So above it’s W. B. Indock and below Ocean Macareux.  I’d love to interview both, assuming that machines can talk.  Of course, maybe the folks who operate them will converse and reminisce. 

 

Then, there’s the very active Ocean Guide.  I was going to say “tireless,” but  . .  I see some tires. 

Ocean boats LaPrairie and Duga . . . I don’t know the story.  

 

 

Ocean K. Rusby, on sanitation barge duty here, has been around for quite a while. 

All photos, any errors, WVD.

CFAV Haro

I consider myself fortunate to have seen this tugboat yesterday.  It appeared to be doing sea trials, or just tweaking . . .  Here’s a story about an Isle-aux-Coudres, Quebec tugboat.

Some specs can be found here.   See it out of the water here. 

The namesake is this strait.  The rest is mostly photos.  Enjoy.

Too bad we passed the shipyard under darkness;  it would have been interesting to see any sister vessels on the ways.

 

 

Those hillsides?  That’s the Laurentians in minimal fall color.

 

All photos, any errors, WVD.

For the latest generation US Navy tugs, the YT 808 class, click here. 

Government Boats 52

. .  . starting with Canadian government boats, Coast Guard vessels and CCGS-to-be.  Tor Viking is the Davie Shipyard near Quebec City in Lévis, where she’ll be transformed into CCGS Vincent Massey,  a medium class icebreaker, following the wakes of sister ships into CCGS Molly Kool and CCGS Jean Goodwill.  Another CCGS, Sir Wilfred Grenfell, recently left Labrador for the long trip to British Columbia.

CCGS Sipu Muin has appeared here before with photos from her first pass.  Two days later she flew by even closer, determined to be seen.  That gull off her starboard looks spooked….

 

 

In the distance with the large green dome, that’s Canada’s largest church.

How about a US vessel–USS Indianapolis LCS-17–commissioned in Indiana less than a month ago, here transiting Quebec near the downstream end of the Saint Lawrence Seaway?  Here are my previous photos of LCS models  . . . and others’ photos are here.

And let’s conclude with local sixth boro NYPD marine crew monitoring something

on a red channel marker in the lower portion of the Upper Bay yesterday.

The USS Indianapolis photo comes with permission from Marc Piché, whose photos have appeared here previously.

All other photos by Will Van Dorp, who posted about NYPD boats previously here.

Gallivant Quebec City

I’m not adding much text in the next few posts.  Why gild the lily or rouge the autumn maple leaf.  When I’m back in the sixth boro, I’ll revisit some of these photos.   For now enjoy Quebec.

 

 

 

 

This is Montmorency Falls.

 

Amundsen will be breaking ice soon.  Winter is coming.

 

 

 

All photos by Will Van Dorp.