Retro Sixth Boro 48B

Let’s go back a decade.  Then MSC Emma was on the west coast of Bayonne leaving town; now she’s on the west coast of Central America, leaving Lazaro Cardenas for Panama.

Above she was assisted by Gramma Lee T [now in Norfolk] and Margaret and setting up for the turn from Newark Bay into the KVK;  here we had almost gotten ahead of the trio of vessels.

A strange trio was in the sky

over the sixth boro. The piggyback rider is still in town, albeit likely to never fly again. More here.

Meanwhile, over in the Arthur Kill, a boring machine was placing charges in holes below the bottom of the waterway and connecting them to the stringy orange signal cord to blast when the time was right for them all to detonate at the same millisecond.  That day I touched some hefty but perfectly safe explosives, inert until the right signal is applied, which sounds like some folks I know.

More on “kraken” the bottom here.

Back then, I was spending a lot of early mornings near Howland Hook waiting for my work to begin, and I caught a Double Skin 37 moving bunkers

and maneuvered by Coral Coast.  Was that mechanical dredge Captain A. J. Fournier in the distance above?

The Joker was then a more sedate Taurus, before joining the hilariously-named over at Hays.

Put Tasman Sea into the picture too.  Is the Tasmanian still laid up in Louisiana?

And it was a great April 2012 day I caught the seldom-seen Patty Nolan

moving a houseboat into the sixth boro.  Patty seems to be preparing for a comeback.

And the 1972 2325 teu Horizon Navigator, here with Samantha Miller alongside,  was still working.  Is the 1972 container ship still intact?

And let’s wind this up with Ellen and Maurania III returning to base after a job.  Ellen is still in the sixth boro, and Maurania III is in the Delaware.

All photos, WVD, April 2012.

Entirely unrelated, check out these Smithsonian photo winners.

 

 

Kraken and Diggin’ the Bottom

Yesterday’s post featured a dredge that vacuums diamonds off the seabed.  I’d thought this remained mostly still the stuff of Jules Verne, but here’s a fairly recent assessment from the Economist, a half-decade-old article from Der Spiegel, and a southern African treasure trove of several sorts.  Dredging in the sixth boro allows trade worth billions to proceed in orderly fashion and without  . . . groundings.  Here MSC Emma heads southbound out of Newark Bay and toward the Bayonne Bridge, KVK, and …  the Atlantic.  Notice the tallest building in NYC (as of today) about seven miles away in distant Manhattan across the peninsula of Bayonne.

For outatowners, check out the lower left of the AIS screen capture below; doubleclick enlarges.  See Elizabethport?  Move toward the right along the bottom . . . see Kraken?  The foto above was taken roughly where Maurania III appears.   Now move across Bayonne toward the upper right and you’ll see lower Manhattan, where 1WTC is located.  The sinuous body of water along the lower center of the image is the KVK, the west end of which is crossed by the Bayonne Bridge, which you’ve seen at the top of this blog since post #1.

Below is the backhoe dredge Capt. A. J. Fournier, represented by the lowermost left magenta diamond.  Elizabethport’s St. Patrick’s Church is in the background between Capt AJ’s spuds, which appear of different heights because one is implanted in a deeper portion of the channel than its mate.

Notice the red clay,

overflowing buckets of it, 105% full

buckets of it.  On the south side of the gantry cranes at Port Elizabeth near the Horizon Lines vessel, another

dredge is working.  Foto taken from F. J. Belesimo showing self-dumping scow looking west and

east, again toward Manhattan.

Finally, here crew inspects the swivel motors inside the cabin of F. J. Belesimo.  Notice the diameter of drums that control the clamshell bucket.

Again, many thanks to Frank Belesimo for this tour of Cashman’s  Newark Bay/Arthur Kill project.    Any errors are my own.

And all this dredging relates to all the digging down in Panama.

Unrelated:  Note the new button . . . upper left.  Tug Pegasus (1907) and Waterfront Museum Barge aka Lehigh Valley 79 (1914)  have teamed up in a grant application for $$ for preservation work each vessel needs.  As a component of the decision-making about who gets the $$, Partners in Preservation have a “socialmedia-meter” running from now until May 21.  To help Pegasus and Lehigh Valley 79 register high on this “meter,” you can do two things from wherever on the planet you may be:  1)  befriend them on Facebook and get dozens of your friends to befriend them as well, and 2)   vote DAILY here.    DAILY!  Seems like a crazy way to run an election, but  . . . that’s social media and in this case, the cause is worthy.

Here’s the Facebook link.   For some background on Pegasus and its captain Pam Hepburn, watch this great video from almost 20 years ago.    And you must watch this. . .  a video made last week in which Pam and David explain their project . . . most compelling.

Random Ships 19

Here was RS 18.

Let’s start with two fotos from Ken on the North Coast.  In fact, this first foto shows American Spirit on the legendary Whitefish Bay.  Note all the wind turbines on the distant ridge.  The 1000+ footer was built in Ohio and operated by American Steamship Company of greater Buffalo, NY.

Here the Wisconsin-built John G. Munson enters the Soo Locks, at the southeast corner of Whitefish Bay.  No visitors to the sixth boro have quite these hull designs, which border on neo-razzledazzle a la bowsprite.

Ships calling at the sixth boro tend to look more like this, Pacific Endeavor having been delivered from an Asian shipyard, this one from Oshima Shipbuilding.

Or . . . escorted by Gramma Lee T. Moran,  Santa Bettina comes calling, built five years ago in that place of many industrial superlatives that used to be assigned to Detroit . . .  Ulsan, Korea;

or NYK Demeter, Ulsan 2008,  stopping in NYC once every few months on its trans-Panama shuttle between eastern US and China;

or Korean-built MSC Emma . . .  operating between eastern US and

eastern South American ports, although registered in the Marshall Islands.  In the shot about, it’s Moran’s Laura K near Emma‘s stern and Barney Turecamo,passing to port.

One more . . . Korean-built sixteen years ago . . . it’s another Panama Canal-frequenter  APL Spinel, here escorted in by Louisiana-built  Amy C. McAllister.

Top two fotos thanks to Ken of Michigan Exposures; all others by Will Van Dorp.

Two resources I’ve just (finally) added to my blogroll are Workboat and ShipsandHarbours.