Daily Ship 5

Cold waters of the KVK were not warmed  by this swarm of colorful steel housing powerful engines.  From left to right here:  Margaret Moran, Torm Carina, Evening Mist, Joan Moran, and facing us on the far side of the waterway, North Fighter.

At the same moment less than a mile away and at the same moment, Louise Knutsen prepared to turn south, bound for sea.  Her port of registry is posted as Haugesund, which I had to look up.

Nicholas Miller helps with crew change, and

ABC-1 assists with supplies.

Scotty Sky glides by, looking more submarine than tanker.

BBC Germany bunkers in the anchorage over by BAT.  Tug on the bunker barge looks like HMS Liberty. BAT is a Cass Gilbert-designed harbor gem.

Meanwhile, west side of the harbor, Michele Jeanne and crew survey while bobbing in the wakes of  vessels like Heron.  An unidentified bulk carrier loads scrap metal in the distance.

For some beautiful contemporary maritime paintings, check out the site of Melinda Hannigan here.

OKAY . . . I have to put up one more foto, taken just seconds after the lead foto in this post.

The harbor never sleeps, especially not with these neon safety colors mixed in.   The warm colors might not warm the waters, but they do, the air.  More Torm orange here and here;  if I didn’t like that shade so well, I’d be tempted to call it “tormented orange.”  Carina, despite Danish registry, was built in Korea.  To see work at the Danish shipyard of Odense, click here.

Fotos by Will Van Dorp.

Random Tugs 64

Look like Atlantic Salvor . ..  or if you remember Barents Sea, like her?  Well, the middle vessel, Mister Darby, now goes as Atlantic Salvor.  And Mister Pete (launched from Halter Moss Point in March 1976 for Portland Tugs) operates as Barents Sea.  Mister Darby came off the ways in February 1977 at Halter Marine, along with a litter of similar vessels for Tidewater Marine, like  Mister Jean, Mister Andre, Mister Charlie, Raleigh Ann, … and the list goes on.   Thanks to Duncan Merritt for this foto.  Can anyone place the year?

Fairly new in the sixth boro is Lucinda Smith, 1975, ex-

Delta Trooper, Sound Eagle, and Sea Hawk.

Passing each other today in the KVK, Franklin (1984) and Zachery Reinauer (1971, ex-Tioga).

Here St Andrews (1978, ex-Melissa L.) gets a dock assist from

Captain Dann (1973), moved into

the berth just vacated by HMS Liberty (1978, ex-James William, Shirley Joy, and Douglas B. Mackie).

Extreme stern and below . . . it’s Bering Sea (1975, ex-Stacy Moran and Cougar).

All fotos by Will Van Dorp.  Here is a past foto of the vessels formerly known as Mister Darby and Mister Pete.  Is it true that Barents has returned to the east coast of the US?

Three Queens 2

Three years ago and a day exactly, I did a point-by-point comparison among QE2, QM, and QV.   I attempt something similar here.  I’ll throw out some names too, which wil be identified by the end of the post.  First set of names:  Olsen, McNaught, and Wells.  Know ’em?

The foto above and the one below . . . the bows of the two most recent Queens seem … identical?

Their cleavage . . . at least that which cleaves the waters .  . .

however, is not equally exposed.  And it appears the bulb of QV, below, has gotten mottled in her several years communion with the seas.  I trust the yellow color is a metal coating . . .

Portside frontal profiles, including the “balls” forward of the stack cluster, seem

quite the same also.

A close look at the bulb and loadlines shows that, for whatever the reason, QV  is about 40 centimeters

higher in the water than QE.  Notice the ice glazing on both.

With QE in the background, here is one of the four props of one of the vessels that has come up in a lot of conversations about the Queens, the mothballed SS United States, which used to deliver 240,000 hp to its wheels.

Bunkering QV here is Harley’s St Andrews, I believe.  While we’re talking about saints, here are two more names relating to these vesels:  Saint Nazaire and Marghera.

Thursday after noon up to an hour before QM2 started to move upriver in search of her calves, this unidentified Vane boat was bunkering her in Red Hook.  Anyone know which Vane tug stands by here with the bunker barge?

Here’s another shot of the Brooklyn passenger terminal, showing (from left to right) Mary Whalen, a Watertaxi vessel, and an unidentified Reinauer tug and barge unit (anyone know which?) directly in front of the Vane boat and QM2.

By the way, can anyone help me out with the name of the green-gabled skyscraper in the right portion of the background?

Two hours later, here’s a shot of (far to near) QM2 and QV, showing their stepped stern decks.  Some numbers:  3056–1253, 2250–1253, and 2092–992.  These numbers are maximum passenger capacity to crew size 0n QM2, QV, and QE, respectively.  If you want the best passenger-to-crew ratio, it appears, then take QV.

In contrast to the two slightly older Queens, QE has a fuller, boxier stern . . .  hence, the slightly larger passenger capacity on QE relative to QV, which both came into existence in Marghera, a “suburb” of Venice.  QM2 was constructed in Saint Nazaire, on the  west coast of France.

Finally, that first set of names (Olsen, McNaught, and Wells), these are the Masters of the three Queens.  Inger Klein Olsen is from the Faroe Islands and Cunard’s first female captain.  McNaught is from Glasgow and son of a marine engineer.  Wells worked on Shell tankers and became second officer on QE2 before becoming master of QM2.

All fotos by Will Van Dorp.

Equinox 4

My intended title here was something like “….so I thought I’d get out early this morning and take some fotos of the harvest moon setting, but the morning arrived all foggy in the sixth boro…”  but that would have been been too long, even though everything I just said is true.

Practically the first thing I saw on the KVK this morning intrigued me, after a summer of seeing houses, bridges, and  more*

I wondered.  It looked like an industrial park building was eastbound on the KVK.  Hunt Girls:  the boat name charmed me too, since it sounded like the message the “voice in my head” first told me when I was an early teenager…  to talk with them, of course.  Imagine a work vessel named “cherchez les femmes.”  Vane’s Bohemia had a rumble seat view of the tow.

I wondered what other tows might be forthcoming:  foggy days–as Stephen King knows well–always usher in the unlikeliest visitors.

*More earlier includes the power plant ventilators that Bowsprite captured below earlier this week.  It looks like either Crow or Cheyenne and Margot.

St Andrew–the sixth boro’s resident Oregonian– never quite caught my attention as it did today, seen here full frontal.

Out of the mist came Donal G McAllister, usually based in Baltimore.  By the way, I finally tracked down Rosemary McAllister;  it seems she runs for G & H Towing,  a Houston company,  now under the name  Rosemary.

Here, in close quarters, APL Arabia is flanked by Barbara McAllister and Thomas D Witte.

Alexandra, the LaFarge barge, is positioned by Turecamo Girls alongside and Mary Turecamo, in notch.

Timothy L Reinauer and Ellen McAllister wore a conspiratorial air as they held this formation westward along the KVK.

Huron Service passes an unidentified safety-colored survey boat a half mile east of the Bayonne Bridge.

I later learned that I would have heard and then seen OSG Vision if I’d stayed at the Kill for another half hour.  Oh well, then I would have missed this terrestrial apparition below.  This intimidating sight pulled up behind me in Elizabeth, NJ yesterday as I went in to work!!!  Why on earth would a battlefield-ready Ford 550 bear NJ plates and cruise that modest-size greater sixth-boro landing!?

I wondered if I’d slipped into the twilight zone in which maybe this blog and my Babylonian Captivity one had merged, as in dreams, especially ones during a full moon.

But I made it back to tell the tale and post the fotos…  Will Van Dorp.

Nothing was injured while researching or writing this, but I did discover a kindred Flickr account.