Retro Sixth Boro 49A

Let’s jump back to May 2012.  Over along the Manhattan side of the East River then, I caught this scene.  Since then, there’s been some movement:   Peking to Germany,  Marion M to the Chesapeake,  Helen McAllister to  . . . rebirth as new steel.

Cheyenne has migrated to the Lake Michigan for now.

Twin Tube is still around but sans the boom.

Ellen McAllister is also still hard at work in the sixth boro, but I don’t see her doing much indirect towing as here.

Mark Moran was just passing through from the shipyard to Charleston.

Swan, built in 1981 and showing as her last movement three and a half years ago in China, has likely gone to rebirth as new steel.

But a decade ago in May 2012, she was here to move some used tugboats over to West Africa. Here she’s already down and BFT No. 38 with a crew boat strapped on has already been loaded, while

McAllister Sisters and McAllister Girls wait with three Crowley tugs, 

Cavalier, Pioneer, and Mars. 

After they are floated aboard, the tide turns the anchored Swan.

Socrates and Heron also float aboard, and

overnight, Swan gets deballasted and raises the hull, so that we can see their five-bladed wheels.   More of the story here.

Also in the boro those days was Picton Castle, showing the flag and more, maybe recruiting some hands

before sailing away.  Does anyone have news about her?  Has she really stayed in Lunenburg since late 2020?

All photos, WVD, exactly 120 months ago.

Unrelated to any of this, read this May 2004 article by the late great Don Sutherland and reflect on how much change has occurred.

Retro Sixth Boro 40 B

Today the sixth boro and environs face Henri, whose story is yet to be told.  August 26, 2011 . . . I was at the Staten Island Ferry terminal, and these Hurricane Irene signs were up.  When Irene’s story was told, it had done unusual damage upstate far from salt water;  here’s more.  Some repairs took until 2016 to complete.  From here I took the ferry to Whitehall in Manhattan, and then over I walked to South Street Seaport, where I wanted to see storm preparations.  See the story at the end of this post.  

In late August 2011, I was documenting a slow decomposition, getting footage of what became a documentary film called Graves of Arthur Kill. Gary Kane was the producer;  I was the director, or something.  If you’ve not yet seen the documentary, you can order it by clicking on the disintegrating wooden tugboat image along the left aside of this blog page.  Some of the vessels in this post are discussed by multiple sources in the documentary.  Keep in mind that these photos and the footage in the doc recorded these scenes a decade ago, almost to the day.  Hurricanes, freezing and thawing, and just plain daily oxidation have ravaged these already decrepit vessels for another 10 years, so if you were to go to these exact locations, not an easy feat, you’d see a devolution.

I’m not going to re-identify all these boats–already done elsewhere and in the doc–except to say we saw a variety of boats like this tanker above and the WW2 submarine chaser alongside it.

Other WW2 vessels repurposed for post-war civilian purposes are there.  More were there but had been scrapped prior to 2011.

See the rust sprouting out from behind WW2 haze gray.

In the past decade, the steam stack on this coastal ferry has collapsed, and the top deck of the ferry to the right has squatted into the ooze below.

Some steel-hulled steam tugboats we never managed to identify much more than maybe attributing a name;  they’d been here so long that no one remained alive who worked on them or wanted to talk about them.

We used a rowboat and had permission to film there, but the amount of decomposing metal and wood in the water made it nearly impossible to safely move through here. We never got out of the boat to climb onto any of these wrecks.  That would be if not Russian roulette then possibly some other form of tempting fate.

Most emblematic of the boats there might be this boat, USS ATR-89, with its struggling, try-to-get-back-afloat stance.  She was built in Manitowoc, WI, a town I’ve since frequently visited.

Wooden hulls, wooden superstructure . . .  I’m surprised they’ve lasted as long as they have.

Since taking this photo in August 2011, I’ve learned a lot about this boat and its four sisters, one of whom is now called Day Peckinpaugh. 

I’ve spent a lot of hours this month pulling together info on Day Peckinpaugh, launched as Interwaterways Line 101;  the sister vessel above and below was launched in July 1921 in Duluth as Interwaterways Line 105. The ghost writing in the photo below says Michigan, the name she carried during the years she ran bulk caustic soda between the Michigan Alkali plant in Wyandotte MI and Jersey City NJ via the Erie Canal.  Anyone local have photos of this vessel in the sixth boro or the Hudson River?  I have a photo of her taken in 1947 transiting a lock in the NYS Canal system, but I’ll hold off on posting that for a few weeks when the stories come out. What you’re looking at above and below is the remnants of a vessel currently one century and one month old. 

The Interwaterways Line boats were designed by Capt. Alexander McDougall, who also designed the whalebacks of the Great Lakes, like Meteor. Here‘s a whole blog devoted to McDougall’s whalebacks.

This ferry used to run between Newburgh and Beacon;  on this day in August 2011, we just rowed our boat onto the auto deck.

At the beginning of this post I mentioned Hurricane Irene and going over to South Street Seaport Museum.  Two of these vessels here have seen a lot of TLC$ in the past decade. That’s a good ending for now.  Helen, with the McAllister stack, is still afloat and waiting.

All photos in August 2011, WVD.

A final sentiment on Graves of Arthur Kill . . . Gary Kane and I set out to document what was actually in this much-discussed boneyard;  we wanted to name and show what existed, acknowledge what had existed but was already gone, and dispel some of the legends of this place.  We were both very proud of the work and happy with this review in  Wired magazine.  If you still want to write a review, get in touch.  It would be like writing a series review of Gilligan’s Island, but still a worthy exercise.

 

From the Line Locker 27

Here’s a photo from a friend who works for a naval architecture firm.  Guess the function of the completed vessel below.

Here’s a rendering.

To the gentleman from New Zealand from the William C. Daldy Preservation Society who recently inquired about functioning steam tugboats in the US, I can’t think of any.  Can any reader here?  Here and here can get you info on steamer Daldy.  And all that smoke was photoshopped in, I was told.

Christiaan Brunings was built in 1900 as an icebreaker home-ported in Dordrecht NL, in the Rhine delta.  She survived two world wars that happened all around her.  I took this photo in Dordrecht in 2014.  For more photos of smoky Dutch steam tugs, click here.

If coal was the fuel of the past, then wind will make up a share of an increasingly harnessed renewable sources of energy.  Susie S was at the the Damen Den Helder yard back in 2014, same trip.

Even more variety is  here, the reason I put this post in the “line locker” group . . .   tugs on the highway . . .

and the boat ramp, and

sometimes nearly getting away . . .  once they enthusiastically take to water.  Well that tug, formerly know as Atlantic Hunter has changed hands and is now Little Giant.  Neptune himself was consulted about the deal and he approved.  Keep your eyes peeled.

And further rounding out this post . . .  On July 14, 2017, Peking was floated out of Caddells by the tagteam of Dorothy J and Robert IV to

be slipped onto the back of Combi-Dock III for transit over the Atlantic.  See the full story here.  Today, September 7, 2020, it arrives fully restored at its new museum in the port of Hamburg.

After more than three years of work, Peking will be arriving here today.  The FB site is shown there. If you don’t do FB, I have permission to copy some pics and paste them in a future blog post.  To the Hafenmuseum, where I wanted to be today . . .  Herzlichen Glückwunsch zur schönen Restaurierung!

Back to those first two images, that is a state-of-the-art Russian factory trawler called Captain Sokolov, one of six identical vessels being built at the St. Petersburg Northern Shipyard.  Here’s more on the design of these vessels with a capsule hull.  Dimensions are 268′ x 51′ with a cold storage capacity of 1200 metric tons. Here’s more on Norebo.  The design is by Knarr Maritime Consortium of Iceland.

The first two images thanks to Aleks, number 3 is from seapixonline, and the others, WVD.  Many thanks to Rembert for reminding me that today is the day Peking in Hamburg goes public.

Finally . . . it’s Labor Day, which I learned is a good day to work.  But if you want to stream some good music on a Labor Day theme, try this from Bread and Roses, where I used to go when I lived in the Merrimack Valley of MA.

 

 

Retro Sixth Boro 21

I have represented these “retro” posts as a slice of the sixth boro exactly a decade ago, but it more like  . . . what in the boro caught my attention.  So welcome back to December 2009, as seen from today, December 2019, taking advantage of 20/20 hindsight.  And, to digress, I’ll bet the term 20/20 [2020?] hindsight will seen a bit strange in the next thirteen months.

Over at South Street Seaport, a group of vessels then is no longer there: Marion M, Peking, and Helen McAllister.  Of those, Peking, though not the oldest, has the longest and most convoluted saga.

Sea Raven is no more, but with those high pipes, she always caught my attention.

Cable Queen seemed to have a future back a decade ago, but naught seems to have come of it, since last time I looked, she was still docked in Port Richmond.  For context to this photo of the 1952 vessel, click here.

NY Central No. 13, scrapped in 2017 . . . also seemed to have a future back in 2009, although the owner was not in a rush to complete the job.

In 2009, the sixth boro was in the midst of a several-billion-dollar dredge project, as folks were talking about these ULCVs that would be arriving after the opening of the new Panama Canal locks. GLDD’s dredge New York was part of that effort.

I don’t know if Volunteer is still intact, but I’ve not seen her in years.   Here she lighters Prisco Ekatarina while Mark Miller stands by.  As of this writing, Prisco Ekatarina is in the Gulf of Finland.

Does anyone know if Horizon Challenger, built 1968 in Chester PA,  still floats?

Patriot Service currently works as Genesis Patriot.

I believe Escort is laid up.

And let’s close with these two.  Below it’s the now modest looking Ever Divine and Tasman Sea, and assembling photos for this post, for the first time I see the Taz’ devil sign on the stern of Tasman Sea . . .   Maybe I’d seen it before and just forgotten.   Ever Divine is currently crossing the Indian Ocean.

There it is . . .

All photos taken in December 2009 by Will Van Dorp.

 

Circa 3650 Days Ago

I’m working on some tougher posts, but here’s an easy one.  Let’s flip the calendar back approximately 10 years, give or take a month.  Then it was Barents Sea, not Atlantic Enterprise.  Rowan M. McAllister is still around, although in Charleston SC.  And the container ship under the “un-raised” Bayonne Bridge is Zim Qingdao, currently eastbound across the Atlantic.  The other McAllister tug I don’t know.

Melvin E. Lemmerhirt, now Evelyn Cutler, eastbound toward the Brooklyn Bridge  . . . well, all’s quite changed about all this.

Maryland –I’ve yet to see her as  Liz Vinik–was bunkering the brand new Queen Victoria.

Peking was then–as now–out of the water, although currently her dry dock is in Germany.

Penn No. 4 still goes by the same name, but it’s now a Kirby boat.

George Burrows was never a regular here, and I’ve no idea of her current disposition.

All photos by Will Van Dorp, who hopes you enjoyed this backward glance.

 

Combi Dock III & Peking Saga 5

or . . . the final installment from the west side of the Atlantic .  .  .  and I’ll use (what I imagine as) NASA times here, but I’ll modify it from “t-minus” to “U–as in underway” minus and plus.

So, at U minus 53 minutes, there’s a man-basket dangling off the portside.

U minus 48 . . .  a crew boat arrives with the pilot.

U minus 37 . . .

the pilot boards Combi-Dock III,

U minus 9, the crew boat, Nicholas Miller,  departs  . . ., likely off to deliver three technicians departing Combi-Dock III.

Judging from when I first detected “under way – making way” from my vantage point, 1616, the photo below is U plus 11 minutes.  Movement at first was barely perceptible, gauged by watching juxtaposition of Peking masts and background features.

U plus 13.

U plus 14.  The traffic in the background will welcome me when I leave my station . . .  A note on the flags here:   the red one (below) is Hamburg’s flag, and the one high in the mast of Peking (next photo below) is that of Stiftung Hamburg Maritim (SHM).

And finally–I shifted my station about a mile to Camp Gateway, Staten Island . . .U plus 21.

All photos by Will Van Dorp.

Combi Dock III & Peking Saga 4

I passed by this afternoon, so here’s a quick post.  Peking seems to have disappeared in this hold.

But for scale, check out this photo I took while she was on a dry dock at Caddell’s  nine and a half years ago.  See the yard worker in a white protective suit lower right?

photo by Will Van Dorp Jan 9, 2008

Even the masts seem diminished by the cranes.

Safe passage!  And with that I pass her off to spotters off the coast of the UK!

Combi Dock III & Peking Saga 3

No need for much language here.  I started these photos around 0830.  Despite some rain, conditions were ideal for this loading . . . or engulfing.

Here Dorothy J gently moves the antique barque foot by foot closer to Hamburg.

Combo-Dock III, the engulfer, lies in wait.

Robert IV assists when needed.

Without the zoom, I imagined the gentleman with the yellow helmet to stand by on the helm.

We have 20 meters and closing . . .

 

 

 

With big power on minuscule tolerances, Dorothy J eases her in.

 

 

 

The barque floats gently forward in the hold.

Lines to capstans on the heavy lift ship are doing the work, as the tugs stand by until released from service.

 

 

 

 

 

Peking is now engulfed.  Time is about 1130.  Operations to make fast and secure now begin before they head out into the Atlantic for Germany.

Many thanks to Jonathan Kabak and Jonathan Boulware for the floating platform.

All photos here by Will Van Dorp, who is thrilled to have seen this today.

Combi Dock III & Peking Saga 2

I stopped by around midday today.  Trevor had been alongside all morning.  I presume this was loading cargo support materials. Here’s the last post I did where Trevor appeared.   These first two photos are taken from Brooklyn looking across at Staten Island.

Time is of the essence here, but I’ll bet working in the 90 degree F temperatures was draining.

Here’s the prep as seen from Fort Wadsworth.

Reynolds‘ Twin Tube appears to be standing by with supplies for crew and possibly spares.

 

Let’s hope tomorrow proves an eventful day. . .

All photos by Will Van Dorp.

 

Combi Dock III & Peking Saga 1

Yesterday at 13:31, Combi-Dock III is in sight . . .

14:04, she approaches the VZ Bridge . . .

 

I don’t know how many crew are on board, but soon they’ll be quite busy until they depart with their cargo . . .

 

Peking–I imagine–will float in here, as through a dropped tailgate on a pickup.

Who is this Peking, you ask?  Peking is a 1911 barque and  veteran of the nitrate trade from Chile around Cape Horn to Europe that has been featured in dozens of tugster posts . . .  but take the time to check out these two:   this post with photos supplied by Joe–from his uncle– show her under sail midAtlantic in 1929 or ’30 . . .   and this post showing her 1975 arrival in the sixth boro aka New York City, on a towline.

I expect Thursday will be spent arranging the cradle and ballasting the ship so that Peking can float aboard on Friday.  As to a little info about Combi-Dock III, click here to see her under construction in 2008-09.

All photos by Will Van Dorp, who may post a second time later today.