Really Random Tugs 21

Let’s start with LT-5 at the H. Lee White Maritime Museum.

Here’s The Chancellor at the NYS Canals dry dock as it was being flooded.   Here’s a recent tugster post focused on this vessel.

Now the marketing name for this “tug” is a “barge pusher.” 

Here’s a closer up of the engine unit and hydraulic-driven thruster, operating near Rotterdam Junction.

From Maraki in St. Eustatius . . .  it’s Triumph.   notice the submerged tug off to her port side.

Here . . . tending the piledriver in Amsterdam is Sarah L_Anne . . .  I can’t quite make out the name.

Also from Maraki, it’s Statia Reliant off the Leeward Islands of the Caribbean.

Back to the waters just east of Lock 11, it’s Wm. Donnelly tending a scow.

Thsnks to Ashley Hutto, this photo of Buccaneer, taken Tampa.

And to end where we started . . .  it’s Oswego’s LT-5, accented by crepuscular rays.

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How to Swim TO a Helicopter

Actually the key is making it possible for the helicopter to find you.  In some cases, assisting the task of arriving at your location makes the difference between life and death;  things don’t always go so well.  On a windy unsettled afternoon last week I happened to be there when

an obsessively circling C-130 over Oswego’s lighthouse demanded attention.  I wish I’d stumbled onto this scene the day they trained search & rescue with a Reaper drone.   Here’s another link about that drill.

As it was, the helicopter here working with the USCG puzzled me, and

having no VHF or binoculars, I couldn’t tell whether the debris on the jetty was just drifted remains of a Lake Ontario shoreline tree, but

someone had certainly swum to proximity of  rescuer.

In the half hour that followed at least a half dozen “winchings up” and “down” before

it returned to USCG Station Oswego.   Click here for their flickr page.   Click here for info on the blue-yellow structure to the lower left, NYS Derrick Boat 8, the last steam-powered barge (with dredge capabilities at one time) on the Erie Canal . . . maybe even in New York .  DB8 is also known as Lance Knapp, named for a salvage diver.

A half year ago I watched a helicopter rescue drill  here.

All fotos taken within an hour by Will Van Dorp.  Here was my previous swimming post.

PS:  Enjoy the additional fotos below from the Port of Oswego, showing schooner OMF Ontario,  LT-5, and fishtug Eleanor D, and Oswego West Pierhead Light.

Veteran Tug

I’ve written about “second lives” and renaming. Among those are vessels or parts (like engines) that steam on after decommissioning. Patricia Ann fits that. So does the vessel below.

 

Built for the Navy at Jakobsen‘s in Oyster Bay and launched in November 1943, it took part in the D-Day invasion in Normandy, served in the Pacific, and then it retired to the Great Lakes. It bore the name Major Elisha K. Henson and John F. Nash (or Nash) before reverting to LT-5. See vintage fotos. Now it lives in Oswego on Lake Ontario, repainted its original gray.

 

LT-5 docks in front of the museum at the port of Oswego.  It took part in the shooting down of a Nazi Focke Wulfe fighter over Omaha Beach. See a link here, thanks to Bill K.

 

11/11/1918 at 11 am: Armistice Day aka Veteran’s Day. Float on, veteran.

Fotos here, Will Van Dorp