MB 2019 H

What a view Toronto offers from the lake!!  no matter the time . . . day or  . . .

night or day.  Here Salvage Monarch heads out.

Hope takes a spud barge out to the job.

In the Port Lands, this unnamed vessel all decked out in camouflage paint waits.

Maybe someone can help with more names too. . .

Or stories . . . ?

 

Iron Guppy wins my prize for most colorful name.  Bravo to the school kids who dubbed it such.

And here’s the story that links Iron Guppy with William Rest.

All photos by Will Van Dorp.

 

Thanks to Barrel 2

Alpha is the caption on the photo, but there’s no 1928 boat by that name on this list.  Might it also have been called Captain Eric Bergland?

Convoy is one of the four sisters delivered by Leathem Smith in Wisconsin in the spring of 1941. I love the coil on the hawser rack.   I posted photos of wo of the four sisters side by side in this post a few months back . .  scroll.

You can read here a story of Evanick, christened in 2006 by the widow of its namesake.  Here’s the Professional Mariner story of her, comparing the Texas-built Evanick‘s power (3000 hp) as twice that of Raymond C. Peck, the vessel she replaced. Peck became Martha T and , unfortunately, made casualty news here in March 2013.

Bluestone Drifter is not much unlike the self-propelled scows (SPS’s) used extensively on the Erie Canal.  This “crane boat,” as the USACE calls it, comes from Utica IN in 2001, making it much newer than the SPS’s on the Canal.

Grand Tower, also Indiana-built, was commissioned in 2001.

Prairie du Rocher is a 2002 product of the same shipyard as Grand Tower and Bluestone Drifter.

Ditto Sanderford, 2005.  I’m starting to want to make a trip along the Ohio visiting shipyards  . . . soon.

Iroquois, delivered in 2005 from a Louisiana shipyard, operates from the Nashville USACE yard.

Barrel calls this Racine, but I can find no info about a newish USACE tug called Racine.  Anyone help?

J. C. Thomas is a 2000 product of Jeffboat, also along the Indiana bank of the Ohio.  Click here for another product of Jeffboat, Cape Henlopen, some folks’ favorite people mover. Is it true that Jeffboat is considered the largest inland ship builder in the US?

I don’t know the date of this photo of Derrick Boat #7 and tug Pilot, but the style of the derrick is quite similar to what is used in the Erie Canal.

And finally for today, there’s an unidentified USACE tug pushing dredge William L. Goetz.  Anyone have an ID or an idea?

Many thanks to Barrel for these photos.  More of them to come . . .

For an article on what is claimed to be the largest diesel towboat operating on the Mississippi–I’m always skeptical about superlatives–click here.  That article actually describes what could be called MV Mississippi V.  The largest one I’ve ever seen is MV Mississippi IV, now pulled up on a bank in Vicksburg, MS, a museum.  Enjoy these photos I took there three years and four days ago.

 

 

 

Grouper Westbound

Type”grouper” into my search window, and you’ll get almost 10 posts, the most recent is this from December 2009.  But I could have called the vessel Gary, its original name, after the city, I suppose, which itself is named after a founder of US Steel.    Enjoy these fotos taken Valentine’s Day weekend 2010.  Doubleclick enlarges most.  Notice something

different, other than

the deep snow?  Here’s a link to Gary info from the BGSU database.  Enter the name “Gary ” (case sensitive), click on “begin search” and  then click on the 1912 tug one.

Specs:  73′ x 19′ x 10.’   Owned from 1912 til 1934 by Dunham Towing and Wrecking, it then passed into ownership of C. Reiss Coal Co, still extant and one time owner of Reiss Steamship Company.  It later did some time at Florida Marine Terminal in Miami.  Anyone have fotos of the Florida portion of its life, transit north?

Next two are from Jon’s collection.  As Iroquois and

before that, in Reiss colors,  as Green Bay.  Long and low, a perfect canaler.

As to something different about my three shots?  Grouper finally faces west!  In all previous posts, she faced east.  Come spring, west she will go!

First three fotos by Will Van Dorp, taken on V-Day weekend.