You are currently browsing the tag archive for the ‘Mary Turecamo’ tag.

If it seems I have a dirty lens, I don’t, but this winter has been a season of the good light and my schedule not coinciding.  No matter . . . the subject just looks grayer than I’d like much of the time.

When this ULCV arrived the other day with Mary Turecamo as one of the assists, I was reminded of how high the deck is on these ships, and they’re getting ultra-larger and higher.  In this post, Mary’s upper house was way above deck level on the tanker. 

Will this nose be superseded by Marco‘s style of nose?

Janet D was sharp, but note how hazy the distant shore is.

HMS Liberty is appreciably closer than Barney Turecamo, and therefore is sharper, until 

Barney gets closer. 

Enjoy these others:  Jillian Irene, 

Horizon’s Edge (a newby in the boro?) and Regulus

Schuylkill

another shot of Liberty

Crystal Cutler and Patricia E. Poling

and finally Margaret

All photos, WVD.

Sarah D is here because before wearing the attractive NYS Marine Highway colors, she wore Moran colors for about 20 years, as seen here

What I thought remarkable about that afternoon is that all the photos here were taken in the space of half an hour the other day.  An outatowner watching traffic on the sixth boro would have concluded that all tugboats in the boro have an M on the stack.  What was happening in fact was that three ships were moving and this was a surge to assist these ships.  

If you follow this blog, you’ve seen them all before, but you may not have seen a Moran wave before quite like this.

 

 

As you can tell, I maintained mostly the same vantage point while taking all these shots.

 

 

All photos, WVD. 

Kimberly headed out on a mission, as 

did Mary.

They converged alongside Bow Chain, 

where crew mustered. 

As daylight opened between Bow Chain and the dock, 

Kimberly moved to the opposite side

and with guidance

Bow Chain moved slightly forward and toward port and 

 

rotated counterclockwise

with Kimberly helping the bow around while

Mary pushed the stern. 

Pilot and crew directed from the bridge wing

and once sailed, Bow Chain began a voyage to the Gulf of Mexico. 

All photos, WVD. 

 

I’ve seen lots of pairs in winter, some in spring, but never until now in fall, at least not acknowledged until this post.

Two sets of pairs appear below, one Centerline and another Moran, the latter escorting in CSCL South China Sea.

Ellen and Patrice here are going to different jobs.

Mary Turecamo and James D Moran here work on the CSCL box ship.

Lots are boats here;  clockwise from the farthest, Haggerty Girls (I think), James D, Margaret, Marjorie B, and James William.

Around 0900, a brace of migratory birds headed north . . .  F-18s maybe.

B. Franklin got an assist from Matthew Tibbetts.

Two old ferries ply their trade:  Barberi with the highest flagpoles and Marchi.

Two top of the line sixth boro McAllister tugs joins forces.

Two old style boats:  Manhattan II and Wanderer, the latter from the Sippican River.

And finally, this juxtaposition passed and allows a comparison of the lines of the 2015 6000 hp Kirby Moran with the 2008 5100 hp Laura K.

All photos in the past week, WVD.

Earlier in the month, I got views of the first details marking the October awareness of the scourge, one of many.  Since then, I saw more, which I honor here.

Eastern Dawn marked it.

Kirby Moran shows the awareness.

So do Mary Turecamo and Laura K mostly obscured.

ONE Stork and ONE Wren have that color as livery.

Marie J Turecamo does too.

Sapphire Coast does.

 

All photos, WVD, who tips this hat.

Kimberly Poling and barge lie alongside Maritime Gracious for lightering.

 

Eastern Dawn, here pushing a mini barge, continues to work in the sixth boro,

with a base over alongside the dormant Evening Tide

Bruce A. travels west in the East River after a job over near Throg’s Neck.

I love the “whitewater” on the uptown side of the 59th Street Bridge.

A mile or so behind Bruce A., Ellen McAllister passes  Rockefeller University’s River Campus.

Back exactly six years ago, pre-fab sections of the new campus building were lifted in place by a fleet of DonJon vessels here

And finally, in the late spring haze, it’s Mary Turecamo

approaching her next assist.

All photos, WVD, who’s entrusting these posts to the tugster tower robots.  Hat tip or whatever, robots.  Actually, I don’t even know how many robots are involved in this effort, since they appear happy to subsist on nothing more than the electricity I provide.

I’m trying to get together a post or two from my current location, which I was supposed to depart from a week ago . . .

Happy spring.  All photos in this post were taken in winter two days ago and over a six-hour period.  Before noon, the five boros and the next state were obscured out of existence. I really think they didn’t exist during those hours, just like the imaginary sun crossed (??) the imaginary equator at 11:33 NYC time.  Crossed .  . by boat or chariot or blimp or goat cart . . .  I don’t know.

Kimberly  passed by and Robbins Reef was barely there.  Mariner brought boxes in, and Kirby passed by, and they might as well have been at sea.

Neptune shuttled by, and hints of Bayonne showed themselves.

Justine came by and the sunshine was making progress burning off the moisture.

When Cape Canaveral crossed in front of me, Manhattan was there, albeit like a matte painting;  right, that’s just a movie set, right?

The large gray ship . . . Soderman, that too was a different painted background, this time for Captain D.

Before Mary Turecamo appeared over on the starboard side of New York‘s trans-harbor load  of containers, I had no idea what I was seeing.

It wasn’t until well into the afternoon and–in the near distance–Bert Reinauer passed overtaking the Vane unit that I saw a boat pass by without a hint of fog.  That, however, was mostly due to the proximity

All photos, Friday, WVD.

First I need to make a correction:  in M2 I stated that Tigre would have traveled through the Panama Canal;  she did not because she worked out of the Peruvian Amazon in the area of Iquitos!  Thanks to Paul Strubeck for the image below.  That would have been an interesting delivery!!

Next, photos and details of the STs Matton built in the first half of the 1940s are detailed in this fabulous site compiled by by Dan Friend.

Now we jump to 1954 and this photo showing a Cleveland 498 engine being lowered into a tugboat simply named Matton, which was reefed in 1990 as Troy.

Moving forward chronologically, William Lafferty has shared these two old Kodachromes taken on a sunny late September 1960 on the Welland Canal and I adapt from his comments:  “The 1957 Ralph E. Matton has entered the lock.  The tug was powered initially by a Cleveland Diesel 12-278, 2100 hp, later repowered with an EMD 16-567C.  It hauled oil barges on the Barge Canal and Great Lakes in the summer, mostly for Seaboard Shipping Corporation and Moran’s Morania division, and fuel oil barges in the winter on Long Island Sound. Its Great Lakes service ended by 1962.” 

To add my comment, the opening of the Saint Lawrence Seaway in 1959 effectively ended transportation of cargoes between salt water and the Great Lakes via the Barge Canal.

“Bart Turecamo  purchased the Matton operation in 1964 and the 84′ x 25′ Ralph E. Matton became the Mary Turecamo and then Albany in 1972 for American Dredging Company of Philadelphia. In 1994 it was sold to Casco Bay Towing Company, Portland ME, where it was dismantled in spring 2007.”

“Following the Matton tug, the 1923 UK-built Keybar was carrying 2600 tons of pulpwood for a mill in Erie PA.    Keybar would then proceed from Erie to Oswego to load coal for Montréal, clearing Oswego 4 October 1960.   The handsome Keybar (look at those windows beneath the pilothouse) was launched 19 March 1923 at South Bank-on-Tees, England, by Smith’s Dock Co., Ltd., for Keystone Transports Co., Ltd., Montréal, a shipping firm organized by the Montreal Power, Heat and Light Company, Ltd., to bring American coal to its generating plants.  Laid up at Kingston ON after the 1961 season, it arrived at Port Dalhousie ON for demolition on 1 June 1963.”

Matton launched Everglades in 1959.     Later, renamed Captain Nelson, she shows up in this submarine assist.   That particular submarine suffered substantial damage in a Kittery ME fire, and was subsequently decommissioned.    

Everglades was Matton’s only tugboat in 1959, and their only one in 1960 was ChallengerHere she is after 1970 as Captain Brinn.    A 2012 image of her in Kingston, St. Vincent as Captain Bim can be found here.     This site claims she’s still afloat, but if you follow the location of her icon, she’s in mid-Sahara Desert, so  . . . uh, no.

Bart Turecamo was the first tugboat the shipyard produced after Turecamo had taken over the Hudson River shipyard. 

She’s still at work in Philadelphia bearing the same name, as seen in my photo from 2010.

After a series of launches for NYPD including the still extant No. 5, the yard released James Turecamo in December 1969, and she’s still works in the Albany area of the Hudson.  Has anyone seen James above the Troy Lock?

July 1971, the yard launched Mobil 1, which in 1992 was renamed Tioga and in 1993 was sold and renamed  Zachery Reinauer, still extant but I’ve not seen her in a long time.

In Sept 1976, the yard launched Largo Remo for Refineria Panama;  it eventually became Tridente and now (?) Vesca R-18.  Click on the photo below for more info.  Largo Remo is an island on the Caribbean side of Panama.

After Largo Remo, the yard produced only three more tugboats or boats of any kind:  Michael (now in Honduras as A. J. Ellis) , Joan, and Mary Turecamo, the latter in March 1983 being the very last.  Mary is alive and still working in the sixth boro, as evidenced in my photo from October 2021.

Many thanks to Paul Strubeck, William Lafferty, and the Canal Society for offer of and use of these photos.  Any errors in information attributable to WVD, and correction of such errors is appreciated.  Changes in font happen because of cutting/pasting.

Remember the Canal Society winter symposium is coming up a week from today;  I plan to be there.  Also, remember the conference in the early fall 2022.

 

Two boats working for the same company.  Mary Turecamo dates from 1983, and built in NYS at Matton Shipyard, their last build.  She’s 107′ x 32′ and brings 4300 hp to her work.

 

Doris Moran dates from around the same time, but built by McDermott in Louisiana. 

She’s a bit larger and more powerful than Mary, at 118′ x 34 and 4610 hp.

 

It’s always a joy to see them at work.

All photos, WVD, who has more Matton and Turecamo boats from the Canal Society archives coming soon.

See the crew?

Scale is interesting here, even though Torrente is NOT a large container ship by today’s global standards.

Now you see him clearly, but recall the context provided by the first image.

That line is bigger around than his arm, yet gossamer compared with the ship and the tug.

With line all made up on the forward H-bitt, the crewman is done . . .  for the moment.

All photos, WVD.

Now contrast this set of photos with a set from almost a decade ago, when a crewman had a very bad day.

 

 

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