Random Ships Along the St. Lawrence 5

Let’s record some of the ships along the same stretch as yesterday’s post did for tug boats, and the names are in the tags.

Nordic Barents was discharging iron ore for the Contrecoeur, although I don’t know the provenance of the ore.

 

The oil port is certainly concentrated.

 

 

 

I took Happy Buccaneer to be an almost new vessel . . . little would I have thought it was built in 1984!!

 

 

 

All photos by Will Van Dorp.

 

Pairs in Autumn

Here are all the previous “pairs” post, a direction I glanced at after seeing Bouchard Boys and Linda Lee Bouchard rafted up last weekend . . .  I’m not sure why the formation, but it certainly showed their relative size.

And once I see a pattern in one place, I start to notice it in others.  Here Otter and Pike almost appear to be in the right lane for Exit 10.   I’m eager to see Muskie and Gar.

Over in Hudson Yards below “the vessel” a pair of Schenectady’s finest EMDs hold a place in the rotation out east.

Between Montreal and Trois-Rivieres lies Lac St. Pierre, where I saw this pair.  To the right, I’ve already commented that Espada used to call in the sixth boro as Stena Poseidon.  Now I look up Laurentia–to the left–and discover she used to call in our watery boro as Palva!   If it’s about the witness protection program, the effort would be foolproof.  I’d never have seen Palva in her new color, suggesting to me that paint and color trump lines.

A report that continues to fascinate me about Lac St. Pierre is that it spawns “ice rocks,” which are rocks that become embedded in the winter ice in the shallow portions of the lake that freeze solid all the way to the lakebed, until these rocks are carried downstream encased in floating ice and become lethal targets for fast spinning propellers.  Ice rocks, what a concept!

Pairs of dug canal banks, as seen in midSeptember west of Rome, show how surveyor straight some parts of the waterway are.

Guard gates are essential canal infrastructure.

And I’ll conclude with a pair of liberty statues, one pointed east and the other west.  A few of you will know immediately where a pair of these “crowns” a building, and I’ll just wait for someone to make the identification.

All photos by Will Van Dorp, who asks as treat that you share your favorite tugster post or obsession or vessel  . . . today with some friends.  Be safe.

Oh, and one of my favorites is this post I did about a Halloween-escape trip seven (!!) years ago.

 

Small Craft 18

Here are previous posts in this series.

Below . . . could that almost be a dawn or twilight background?  And is that a canot a glace aka ice canoe –with oars instead of paddles–maybe?  Ice canoeing, some would say, is the real Canadian winter sport . . .

Well, no matter how much you squint, that is convincingly a small craft.  The 751′ Espada does a successful job of obscuring the small craft.    Without looking it up, I’d never have guessed that this Desgagnes tanker appeared in tugster here back in February 2013 as Stena Poseidon!!   This connection clarifies to me my often-felt question:  why do some ships call in the sixth boro once or a few times and then disappear forever?   They just get repainted, rebranded, and show up here or elsewhere….

This one was hard to understand until I learned it was started life as a warping tug built 1946.  Click here for some posts I’ve done about warping tugs, aka alligators.

To me, this runabout is the water equivalent of a 1950s sports car like these, in case anyone wants to buy me one . . .

This drift boat, I’m guessing, and I had to shoot it from a bridge through chain link.

New York State Bridge Authority?  I can’t find evidence they own such a boat . . .

This one’s truly intriguing, given the approaching season, but I suspect this is as simple as a pair of hunters with supplies to conceal their duck blind. I did not however see any armed punts or sneak boxes.

And since we started with a human-powered small craft, let’s end here…

All photos by Will Van Dorp, who is happy to post any photos of unusual small –or any sized–boats you may come across.