Squeeze, Seven Seas, and Sounds of the Season

Call this  . . . everything but the kitchen sink and ballast water.

I’m still arrested by the thought of the squeezing pressure on this hook dangling from the boom of Chesapeake 1000 and all the loads its carried.  Click here and here for that hook and crane on other gargantuan jobs.   Here’s one more.

Seas . . .  check out the “must-read”  article by Keith Gessen in the Dec, 24 & 31 New Yorker.  “Polar Express:  A Journey through the Melting Arctic, with sixty-odd thousand tons of iron ore,” and the odd there is significant.  On the voyage from Murmansk to Huanghua, Nordic Odyssey traverses seas by the names Barents, Kara, Laptev, East Siberian, Chukchi, Bering, of Okhotsk, of Japan, East China, and Yellow . . . and that’s more than seven.

And finally from Astoria on the West Coast, could the sixth boro some year have a new year’s concert like this described by Joanne Rideout of the Shipreport?

All fotos by Will Van Dorp.

Journey to the Center 3

A year, a month, and three days before I was born, Joseph Mitchell published the essay below in the New Yorker.  I don’t know when the first dredge appeared in the sixth boro, but

in Mitchell’s day, as now, dredging fleets and their crews sculpted the invisible portions of New York harbor.  The above hard-to-read text made its way into the beginning of  the essay “The Bottom of the Harbor” in Mitchell’s Up in the Old Hotel.  For fotos of the crew of dredge Florida at their various duties, check through several dozen new ones on my Flickr stream to the left.

And it does take a fleet of specialized craft, like Apache, which

drills holes into “hard rock,”  inserts explosive charges, and blows bedrock into fragments.  Here’s a KVK blast video from USACE.  This is how the process looks at a site in Finland.  For images and description of blasting in Hell Gate in the 19th century, click here.

The next three fotos come thanks to Allen Baker.  Loose clay mix slop

looks like this dropping into scows and smelling, by Allen’s description, as

“aroma there’s not enough vocabulary for.”

Drier particles, chewed up by the cutter head, might

get scooped by an excavator like 996 on

dredge New York.    Here is video of a very scary day a few years back aboard New York.

Other areas of the harbor bottom get sculpted by vessels like Padre Island and (below) Terrapin Island.

Padre Island and Terrapin Island suction stuff up with heads like these.

And performing liaison duties among all the ships and machines in the fleet are crew boats like Brazos River

here driven from the exterior control station by Capt. Bill Miller.

Thanks to Bowsprite for taking the fotos above and below.  And thanks to Bill Miller for his hospitality.

And finally . . . back to the teeth:  cost is between $150 and $180 each, depending on size and manufacturer.  And ,

this beaut weighs about 35 pounds.

Also, in case you  wondered about the date of Mitchell’s essay in the New Yorker:  January 6, 1951.

Stone Trade

Unrelated to this post, but take 2.5 minutes and enjoy this audio slideshow for an article in the 4/19 New Yorker magazine, a story of a family towing life written by Burkhard Bilger.

For an earlier post on the stone trade almost three years ago, click here.  All today’s fotos come from Jed.  Trident (ex-Delta Trident, Delta Eagle, and Libra built in 1982)  is a new boat in the boro, I believe.  I’m guessing she’s currently a sibling of Eastern Dawn (ex-Delta Mule).

Crushed rock . . . what building project could proceed with it?  A major quarry is located upriver in Clinton Point;  see the last foto here.

Buchanan 12 seems to be dedicated to the

stone trade.

Imagine if all this crushed rock moved exclusively by truck.  Horrors!

All fotos … thanks to Jed.

Unrelated but tall ship opportunity:  PortSide NewYork FreeSail Clipper City 4-12-2010