Inside Beaufort Inlet

Click here for an account of gallivants in and around Ocracoke and Hatteras Inlets as well as my connection to these waters.  Beaufort Inlet–near Cape Lookout–is scheduled for some depth maintenance these days with Marinex Construction excavating what McFarland count not extract.  Katherine Weeks enters the inlet from sea with a light scow.

The only USACE presence I saw was Snell.  USACE awarded Marinex the contract to subtract a half million tons of sand from beneath these waves.

I believe this is cutterhead/pipleine dredge Savannah, connected by pipeline to this

scow and loading equipment.

When Katherine tows the loaded scow out–here past Sea Quest II, a dive boat (more on that later)

Na Hoku-formerly a K-Sea vessel–

tails.  The Sea Knight helicopter

just happened overhead.  I’d love the view from a helicopter here.

Once through the narrow inlet, Katherine heads out for the dumping area and Na Hoku returns to its holding station.

Who knew the inlet could be this busy . . . l to r:  Grace Moran, Aurora, Na Hoku, and Salamina1.  More on the last one on that list tomorrow.   Aurora, listed as a sulphur carrier, carries PotashCorp colors.

Potash Corp has their big mine about 35 miles from here, as the pelicans fly.

Chief is clearly a Marinex tug.

I’m not sure the ID of the inbound vessel here passing Chief, here heading out to the dredge.

I can’t say for certain about that dive boat early on and whether the divers had been on Queen Anne’s Revenge, but there’ve been lots of salvage activity around the Inlet in recent days.

All fotos by Will Van Dorp.

Delaware Traffic

I’d seen McFarland before . . . once at the dock stern out and another time anchored in the middle of the night on Delaware Bay, lit up like a parking lot.  I’m so thrilled that I’ll run a series of her . . . .starting with the USACE dredge passing Pac Alnath.

A first sighting for me . . . Charles Burton.

Back to McFarland . . . one of four ocean-going hopper dredges operated by the USACE.  Can you name the other three?

. . . Nanticoke and Peter F. Gellatly, both pushing Vane barges.

Huge turntable on McFarland.

Chief . . . I believe the 1979 built vesel.

From this USACE publication, I like this statistic:  a full load of dredged materials McFarland carries equals the capacity of 310 dump trucks.

Just before sunrise, she steamed by . . . and passed B. Franklin Reinauer in the city of Benjamin Franklin himself.

All fotos by Will Van Dorp.

The other three dredges are Wheeler, Essayons, and Yaquina.   For comparison info about the four, click here.  For Bert Visser’s directory with fotos of all the large dredgers in the world, click here.

For a post on Delaware River tugs from 2010, click here.  What I’d like to see one of these days is the loading of livestock down in Wilmington.    Currently, Falconia is at the dock;  I saw her from the highway on Friday.