Random ULCVs 14

Two days, two ULCVs, and two distinctly different types of weather.

OOCL Brussels glided into a foggy harbor with

Ava ready for indirect towing.  OOCL Brussels is 10 years old and has box capacity of 13200 teu.

Here’s the bestickered AMP box ready for use.

Below the AMP box, in the aft mooring station, notice the speck of orange?

It’s still there as Justine passes.

That turns out to be a crewman, his 21st century version of a spyglass turned on me, just as I’d turned my camera on him.  Seconds later, I waved and he waved back.  Send me an email, sir.

 

A few days later, actually yesterday morning, Justine played a role again,

possibly a role as a press boat(?) for the gentleman with the camera slung over his left shoulder,

as Zim Sammy Ofer departed port.

Ofer represents another design for large box ships as well as other innovations, such as LNG or dual-fuel propulsion.  Keep in mind that no matter how much LNG is touted as “natural” gas, it’s no more natural than any other fossil fuel product.  However, it is cleaner and more energy dense.  Ofer‘s capacity is 15,000 teu.  Also, notice the unusual, non-bulbous bow.  More on Ofer here. 

This time, Capt. Brian was hooked in for indirect towing with Ellen standing by.

Note the fire monitor at the top of the stack

and the crew sans spyglass at the morning station.

 

As they departed with Marjorie and 

Ava also assisting,

they exited the Narrows and Ambrose and soon were heading SW at 19 knots!

All photos, any errors, WVD.

Retro Sixth Boro 60

A decade ago, the split-hulled trailing suction hopper dredger Atchafalaya was in the sixth boro.  These days in 2023 the 1980 vessel in the St. Johns River of the Alligator and Sunshine State.  I don’t believe it actually worked in the sixth boro.

The west side walkway made for a lot of photography on my part in spring 2013, like Asian King here making the turn at Bergen Point with assist from Gramma Lee T Moran. The 1998 RORO today goes by Liberty King and is located between Hokkaido and Honshu.  Gramma Lee is working in san Juan these days.

Evening Tide is currently in chrysalis state in Brooklyn. 

Pretty World had to be “dead-ship assisted” into port 10 years ago.  The assist tugs (l to r) are Margaret Moran (I think), Marion Moran, and Gramma Lee.  The 2007 tanker now goes by a much more prosaic Central and is in port off Ivory Coast. Marion Moran is now Dann Marine’s Topaz Coast. 

Click here for the latest in the French frigate Aquitaine.

No comment needed on this tale of two cities.

Maersk Ohio is currently in Norfolk. 

The US-flagged Maersk ship is assigned on the northern Europe run. 

Superior Service is now Genesis Vision, currently in Lake Charles LA.

The 1971 Fred Johannsen, usually mostly up the Hudson, came down in April 2013 to do-si-do back upriver with Taurus, now Hay’s Joker. 

Ellen McAllister is still Ellen McAllister.  But from this angle, a proto-drone view from the Bayonne Bridge, she appears more rotund than I usually imagine. 

Marion Moran focuses on giving the 1996 HanJin San Francisco an extra amount of shove to round Bergen Point. I believe 4024 teu container ship has been scrapped. 

And finally, North Sea is now Sause’s Kokua, now working around Maui.

All photos, any errors, WVD, who loves these opportunities to look back at all the changes that have transpired. 

Retro Sixth Boro 58

February 2013 saw Patrick Sky still working in the boro. 

The walkway still flanked the west side of the Bayonne Bridge, which allowed images like the ones that follow. Sun Right and Suez Canal Bridge were regulars. Since then the 1993 Sun Right has been scrapped.  The 2002 Suez Canal Bridge continues to work under the name Suez Canal.   Container capacity for the two vessels comes in at 2205 and 5610, respectively. 

Winter 2013 saw these pipelines getting staged and buried across Bergen Point.  I believe they were these for natural gas, somewhat controversial at the time.  If so, it’s interesting to note the message here on “natural gas” compared with a shift in attitude that seems to be gaining traction.

It was the view of vessels rounding Bergen Point in the morning light I enjoyed the most back then. 

Let’s follow Sun Right around, here assisted by Ellen McAllister and Marjorie B. McAllister. Out below, that’s Shooters Island, Port Ivory, and Elizabethport in the distance.

 

The benefit of the lower bridge was 

proximity to the vessel and 

crew.  Obviously, that proximity was also its drawback; the global fleet increased in size and air draft with the obvious impediment to container ship traffic in the boro.  

I recall the crew below seemed eager to have their photos taken.  I wonder where these guys are, a decade on.   See the whole series differently here. 

All photos in early February 2013. 

Random Tugs 388

Even on overcast days, the sixth boro aka NY harbor offers sights.  It’s long been so;  here’s much abridged paragraphs 3-5 Chapter 1 of Moby Dick:

[People] stand … fixed in ocean reveries. Some leaning … some seated … some looking over the bulwarks of ships from China… [some] pacing straight for the water…  Nothing will content them but the extremest limit of the land… They must get just as nigh the water as they possibly can without falling in. And there they stand…  infallibly [move] to water…  Why did the poor poet of Tennessee, upon suddenly receiving two handfuls of silver, deliberate whether to buy him a coat, which he sadly needed, or invest his money in a pedestrian trip to Rockaway Beach? Why is almost every robust healthy [youth] with a robust healthy soul… at some time or other crazy to go to sea? Why upon your first voyage as a passenger, did you yourself feel such a mystical vibration, when first told that you and your ship were now out of sight of land? Why did the old Persians hold the sea holy? Why did the Greeks give it a separate deity, brother of Jove? Surely all this is not without meaning…. we ourselves see in all rivers and oceans … the image of the ungraspable phantom of life; and this is the key to it all.”

OK, so that might be over the top, but I find at least as much entertainment along the water as in all the other places in NYC.  Maybe that makes me a hermit, but that’s irrelevant.  Can you name these boats?  

At less than 10 miles an hour, trade comes in, commerce of all sort goes on. 

different hour different goods, 

different tasks, 

different energies

and errands 

by different 

companies . .  .

All photos, WVD.

And in order, Jonathan C Moran, Meaghan Marie, Ellen McAllister, Andrea, Schuylkill, Rowan R McAllister, Thomas D Witte, Susan Miller.

 

Assists 14

Tugboats, large and powerful as they are, seem to shrink when beside a global container giant, like Ava here beside Adrian Maersk.  What comes to mind, and if a paraphrase of Archimedes is acceptable, give me a tug and position alongside, I’ll move that world-traveling behemoth and make it look easy.

Capt. Brian here and Ellen get OOCL Singapore for the always preferred routine entry, shift of boxes, and then nudge back out to sea.

Ditto Laura K, CSCL Bohai Sea, and Kirby.

Ava stands by here with Mustafa Dayi, in an anchorage usually filled with tankers. 

Jonathan C sees Ever Legion in the door.

Mary Turecamo stands by with Endo Breeze.

Ellen escorts a loaded tanker into the Kills.  Notice here that the antenna deck is flush with the deck of the tanker, quite unlike the case with the largest container ships into the boro, as in the last image farther below in this post.

MSC Azov gets Kimberly and Laura K as assist boats.

James D  has already terminated her business with Cosco Harmony and is now traveling to the next job.

And let’s conclude this post here, as mentioned earlier, the 6000 hp Kirby (?) looks insignificant beside 15000+ teu container ships.   The key word here is “looks.”

All photos, WVD.

Pairs in Fall

I’ve seen lots of pairs in winter, some in spring, but never until now in fall, at least not acknowledged until this post.

Two sets of pairs appear below, one Centerline and another Moran, the latter escorting in CSCL South China Sea.

Ellen and Patrice here are going to different jobs.

Mary Turecamo and James D Moran here work on the CSCL box ship.

Lots are boats here;  clockwise from the farthest, Haggerty Girls (I think), James D, Margaret, Marjorie B, and James William.

Around 0900, a brace of migratory birds headed north . . .  F-18s maybe.

B. Franklin got an assist from Matthew Tibbetts.

Two old ferries ply their trade:  Barberi with the highest flagpoles and Marchi.

Two top of the line sixth boro McAllister tugs joins forces.

Two old style boats:  Manhattan II and Wanderer, the latter from the Sippican River.

And finally, this juxtaposition passed and allows a comparison of the lines of the 2015 6000 hp Kirby Moran with the 2008 5100 hp Laura K.

All photos in the past week, WVD.

TS Empire State VI Final Farewell

She powered herself away from the Fort Schuyler dock for most likely the final time.  Click here for all the previous posts I’ve done on this soon-to-be-replaced training ship. Her replacement is already in the water in Philly for fitting out, sea trials . . . .

This morning Ellen and Marjorie pulled her away from the dock as a number of cadets waited

in the rain.   Cadets and alums traded stories.

 

On many departures, she’d be rotated and pointed westbound on the East River, but today

she ducked under Throngs Neck Bridge, past Fort Totten, and 

made for the western Long Island

lighthouses.

All photos, shortly ago, WVD.

 

Random Sixth Boro 13

Here was the post I’d planned for yesterday, put together in a moment when I thought a single focus was too elusive, random scenes, like a container ship anchored off Stapleton, elusive detail in a set all diverging from usual patterns. 

Or seeing a Mein Schiff vessel in town after a hiatus… with Wye River passing along her stern?

Or this bayou boat discovering it offers solutions all over the boro and beyond, here passing a lifting machine?

How about this speedboat chasing a tugboat, or appearing to, with lots of hulls in the distance?

Or a single terrapin crawling out of the surf in a non-bulkheaded margin of the wet boro?

Two pink ONEs at Global terminal?

A ketch named Libra or Libre heading south with a scrap ship at Claremont?

Two commercial vessels out at Bayonne?

Two Ellens?

And finally two elongated RIBs with

camouflage-clad Coasties aboard?

All photos, seen as slight deviants from existing patterns, WVD.

 

Newest Hull in the Sixth Boro 15

Here’s the newest, following directly from 12 for Sandy Ground and 10 for SSG Michael H. Ollis.  Or how about a redux for both. 

Now unless ferry and tug travel on a maglev frictionless cushion of air when offshore and distant, this is just the fata morgana effect when the vessels are seen a ways off, in this case, about six miles.   In the photo below, there’s a hint that Sarah Dann is riding on a foil board, 

and that the ferry has a dreadnought shaped hull.

Well . . . I’m just messin’.  These were photos of yesterday’s arrival of the third of three new ferries.  Note New York Media Boat out to snap their first welcome photos. Photos of the christening down in Florida happened months ago here.

Here the tow enters the Narrows, and the ocean called the Upper Bay, where Dorothy Day will transport hundreds of thousands and even millions of passengers in the next decades.

Ellen McAllister moves in close, not to provide the assist but rather to convey photographers needing to confirm that the vessel is in fact a ferry for the City of New York.  confirmation provided andn documented.

 

All photos, WVD, who’s ridden aboard MHO but not yet Sandy Ground. 

For reportage on all three newest ferries, check out this report from New York Media Boat here.

 

Random Tugs 379

Janet D, product of 2015, comes in a 67′ x 26′.

 

Ellen McAllister, the oldest here launched in 1967, measures 102′ x 29′.

Marjorie B McAllister, from 1974, is bigger than I imagined . . .   112′ x 30′.

The two McAllister tugs were heading to assist tanker Sakura Belle, 26960 dwt contained within 558′ x 88′, launched in 2011.

Janice Ann Reinauer, the newest tugboat here, came off the ways in 2020.  She measures 113′ x 35′.

 

And finally, doing dredge spoils runs, we have Douglas J, 2004, 110′ x 38′ and

 

Atlantic Enterprise, 1976, and the largest tugboat in this post, measuring 136′ x 40′.

 

All photos, this week, WVD.