Random Tugs 195

I see this tug light so infrequently that I didn’t recognize her at first.  A clue . . . some years ago she was painted red.

That’s Bouchard Boys distancing, but can you name the approaching vessel?

This one may almost be close enough to read.

And this one has the biggest give-away colors . . . .

Evelyn Cutler used to be Melvin E. Lemmerhirt, which I remember as a noisy boat.

Ross Sea I first saw in NYC’s sixth boro as Normandy, not

the current Normandy.

McKinley Sea first appeared here as Annabelle V.

And to round this out, Foxy 3 used to be a fleet mate of Lemmerhirt, mentioned above.

All photos on a windy day last week by Will Van Dorp.

 

Pairs in Springtime 5

Paris this springtime has seen new waterfronts, quite miserable for anyone wedded to the old margins.  Click on the image to read the story.

But I’m not focusing here on “paris,” but rather “pairs” that have been “pairing” around the sixth boro.  And that appears to be Flinterland over beyond the warehouses just arrived from Paramaribo.   Both Paris and Paramaribo are on my list of “gotta got there soon” places.  In the foreground and eastbound on the East River, it’s Foxy 3 and Rae.

I caught Marie J Turecamo and Mary Turecamo doing the do-see-doe allemand left recently just off Caddell.

The background margins seemed to be trying to add a script.

With the Turecamos, the background served as a record of change on the Bayonne Bridge.

 

 

 

And Mary appears to have just had a makeover.

 

And what’s this on the margin of the sixth boro and Brooklyn . .  other than a surplus military vessel in the Navy yard?  Here’s a previous allusion to IX-514.

Are there pairs in those boxes?  Yes, I know these are the flocks of pigeons that are said to create art when they fly.  Here though in daylight they look like Joseph Perkins boxes with living creatures in them, mimicking a microcosm of the residents of NYC.

But I’ve somehow gotten myself off topic, but no matter, it’s springtime.

All photos by Will Van Dorp, who took a break from catfishing and stumbled onto an answer thanks to the site naturalareasnyc.org.  According to them, NYC includes over 76,000 acres of open water, i.e., the sixth boro.  That number of acres converts to about 119 square miles (mi²⁾.  Manhattan, in comparison is only 23 mi².

Here are the other land boros’ areas:

Bronx, 42 mi²

Staten Island,  58 mi²

Brooklyn, 71 mi²

Queens, 109 mi²

And size matters.  It’s time for the 119-acre-boro to have its own official name and status.

OK, I’ll hand this back to the robots and reel in my catfish.

Thanks to Paul Strubeck

I’m not going to count, but there must be dozens of posts here with photos from or some mention of Paul Strubeck.  Here I’m pleased to dedicate a whole post to him in part because these photos make me see the sixth boro with new eyes.  Enjoy.  Cornell . . . by foggy night and compare to my photo from about the same day but at dawn here and scroll to the third photo.  The location is the soon-to-open Brooklyn Barge Bar, where I’m eager to imbibe a sunset beer. Also in Paul’s “roll” of film are

Pinuccia and Specialist mostly obscured,

Captain D ,

Nanticoke passing the East River Seaplane base,

an unobscured photo of Specialist,

Sea Robin secured to Sugar Express at the sugar plant in Yonkers,

James William,

and Foxy 3 pushing a Thornton barge, which

brings us back to a great photo of Cornell, which Paul used his special lens for.

All photos here are used with permission from Paul Strubeck.  Thanks much, Paul.

Unrelated:  Here’s an East River seaplane photo I posted here many years ago. And a photo of Sugar Express towed south by a former fleet mate of Sea Robin.

Second Lives 18

This hull was called Melvin E. Lemmerhirt for almost 40 years.  I took the photo below in 2007, as she passed in front of a then very different piece of Brooklyn land’s edge.

Here’s how the vessel looks now, known as Evelyn Cutler, maybe good for another 40 years?

Evelyn‘s fleet mate looked like this in 2007 and today Kimberly Poling

looks a lot better.

Also in 2007, I caught a Barker Boys looking like this . . .

and here’s a closer up a month later . . .

Well . . . very recently, just after northern Mardi Gras and St Patrick’s, here

is the same

vessel now known as Foxy 3.  I love the colors. I took the photo last week when it still looked like winter.

Since 2007 seems to be serving as baseline for this post . . . here was a tug known as Dory Barker then and

just plain Dory now.

All photos by Will Van Dorp . . . in the sixth boro.  Here’s an index to previous “second lives” posts.  Honestly, my favorite–for now at least–is Second Lives 10.  I’d love to find an answer to this . . . the truth is out there.