Sea Dart II

Whenever I see something new, it feels like a sunny day, no matter what the meteorologist calls it.  Like this day last week, I was hunkering down keeping these spots from messing with my lens . . .

It took some seconds to conclude I’d seen this vessel before, (scroll) here and here. It’s the 1953 Sea Dart II, originally T-513.

 

I’d love to see her Buda engine, at least not that I know the engine, although my father’s old Allis Chalmers tractors might have had one.

 

Anyhow, hat’s off Troop 228.

 

All photos by Will Van Dorp, who hopes to be seeing sea darts of another sort today.

Tug Petersburg

Here is one of the previous photos I’ve posted of Petersburg, a Higgins-built LT-2088, delivered in 1954.

Floating in a soup of eelgrass on a windless afternoon after a stormy week, every part of this half-century vessel begs to be admired.

 

 

The small fish in the clear water of New Harbor could not ever disturb the reflections.

 

All photos by Will Van Dorp.

Click here for more info on Petersburg, from an article in the NYTimes a few years back.

Unrelated:  In the late 1980s a “pirate radio” ship broadcasting as RNI  anchored off Jones Beach.  The ship was called variously Lichfield II and Sarah.  According to this entry in wikipedia, “it was towed to its location off Long Island by Frank Ganter using his tugboat the M/V Munzer.”  Does anyone know anything about Munzer or Mr. Ganter?

War Wood 3

Here were post 1 and post 2 with this name, both focusing on WW2 torpedo boats.  PT-728 used to be based on the Rondout in Kingston and would make visits to NYC’s sixth boro, but now you’d have to go to Lake Huron for an outing.

The vessel below is PT-305 and “diminished” version of itself spent from 1947 until 1988 in the sixth boro as Captain David Jones.  Does anyone remember it?  Have photos of it?

I say “diminished” because to bypass certain crewing requirements, four yards plus was chopped off the stern.  Click here and scroll through to see a photo of this chopped hull and NYC paint scheme.

If you’ve never visited Nola, you have to;  and if you visit Nola, the World War II museum–easy to get to–is a must-do.  And in one of many buildings–the Kushner Restoration Pavilion–PT-309 is returning to its former glory.   Parts have been rebuilt or returned from scrap heaps and river bottoms–like these exhaust ports salvaged from a wreck in a river in Connecticut.

The plan is for a return to the water, a possible trip all the way to Boston with a stopover in the sixth boro.

PT-305–like many torpedo boats–is a Higgins product, made right in New Orleans.

And before you go, read Jerry E. Strahan’s biography of the Andrew Jackson Higgins.  Click here for a Richard Campanella Times Picayune article with photos on Higgins.  Here’s an excerpt, showing Higgins’ methods when he needed to get fifty small boats built and shipped to the Navy in two weeks:  ”

Low on steel, he “chartered a fleet of trucks and armed plant guards,” wrote Strahan, “to persuade [a Baton Rouge] consignee to release the metal to Higgins Industries.”

Requiring bronze shafting, he sent his men to raid a Texas depot and arranged for complicit Louisiana police to placate livid Texas law enforcement as his trucks crossed the state line heading back to New Orleans. Needing more steel, Higgins begged and borrowed from a Birmingham plant, then sweet-talked Southern Railway officials into bending the rules to deliver the metal to New Orleans. “Never before or since,” wrote Strahan, “has a Southern Railway passenger train pulled freight cars.”

All photos by Will Van Dorp.