Other Watersheds 12 Redux B

If I have these dates right, Pieter Boele was built in 1893!  Clearly this hull was built for towing, that  bow  not built for pushing.

Of course, the same would be true of the 1913 Jan de Sterke.

Dockyard IX dates from 1915.  I know the small tug is called Furie, considered a push boat.  I can’t make out the name of the third and fourth steam tugs in this photo, beyond the small pusher.

Noordzee is a 1922 tug.

Roek dates from 1930, built in Vlaardingen, my father’s hometown.  He would have been three when it was launched.

Volharding 1 dates from the same year. 

Dockyard V, as seen here, was built in 1942, although the sparse design suggests it’s older than that.

As with part A, all photos in part B here were sent thanks to Jan van der Doe and taken by Leo Schuitemaker.  Scroll through here for some fabulous photos of the event.  Maybe I’ll go back there again in 2024.

Posting by tugster tower robots at the behest of WVD, who wonders why the Dutch are able to field such a rich field of restored and fully functioning steam tugboats.

 

 

Other Watersheds 12 Redux A

Eight years ago, I had the opportunity to go to the steam festival on the waterways in Dordrecht NL.  Here, here, and here are posts that came from that.  That festival has just completed again, and thanks to Jan van der Doe, here are photos of some fine restored circa century-old Dutch steam tugs.

Hercules, for example, is 105 years young and new-build shiny. 

By the way, the tower in the photo below is newer than Hercules.  Info can be found here.

Adelaar dates from 1925, and looks brand new.  The name means “eagle” in Dutch. 

Kapitein Anna, a paddle steamer, entered service in 1911. 

Scheelenkuhlen is German-built from 1927.

Furie is over a century old and looks pristine. Farther out, that’s Dockyard IX, 1942, and Maarten, 1926.

Hugo is from 1929.

Elbe, 1959, spent some time in the US as the mother ship Maryland  for Chesapeake Bay pilots as well as Greenpeace vessel Greenpeace.

All photos sent thanks to Jan van der Doe and taken by Leo Schuitemaker.

Fruits of Preservation 2

Here was the first in this series.  Guess the date these photos were taken?

Consider all that coal smoke.

As it turns out Dockyard III doesn’t always blow so much smoke. Click on this link if you wish, but what I find remarkable there is that Dockyard III and its sisters were built in WW2 for Murmansk and hence have the chimney-encasing wheelhouse (for heat) and an ice-strengthened bpw.

Adelaar dates from 1925.

Paddle steamer De Majesteit dates from 1926.  I saw her on the river in Rotterdam in 2014, and included her in a comparison of old passenger vessels here.

Dockyard IX, part of that same order that never made it to Murmansk, was completed in 1942.  Dockyard IX has been on this blog once before here.

Many steam tugs crowd the river below, but nearest the camera,  that’s Heibok 4, a floating steam crane dating from 1916.

SS Furie, dates from 1916.  I wrote about her extensively here in 2016.

George Stephenson had me fooled;  it was built starting in 2007, ie., she might be called steampunk.  I saw her in May 2014.

Hercules is the real deal steam, launched in 1915.  I was aboard her in 2016, as seen here.

And the answer is late May 2018 at the Dordrecht Steam Festival.  The photos come via Jan van der Doe from the photographer Leo Schuitemaker.

Looking at these photos, I’m again struck by the number of historic vessels preserved and in operating condition in the Netherlands.  Some are scrapped there of course.  Has anyone ever heard of the Dutch reefing boats to create North Sea fish habitat?  These, and I have many others from Jan and Leo I’d love to post,  have benefitted from loving restoration. Let me know if you want more steam tugs.

Amicitia, which I wrote about in 2011, is back to life after 60 years (!!!) underwater as a result of being bombed, not reefed, back then.

Do the Dutch have different financial tools that produces this fruit?  Is it because of their different attitude toward maintaining machines and buildings?  Are there just different priorities throughout Dutch culture?

A google search leads to this article referring to “artificial reefs around the world,” but the headline is quite misleading.