You are currently browsing the tag archive for the ‘Rebel’ tag.
All these photos were taken in the second half of January 2013. This 1973 livestock carrier Falconia was in the Brooklyn Navy Yard getting some work done. I’d love to see a cargo layout for the vessel. Also, just back from the foremast, those are large bales of either hay or straw for the livestock. What would you guess her disposition in second half of January 2023? Answer follows at the end of this post.
The tanker here is today in the Gulf of Guinea on a run between Gabon and Netherlands. Kristy Ann Reinauer was scrapped in 2015.
The green tug Mary Gellatly was transformed into the very busy CMT Mackenzie Rose.
The behemoth Rebel has become Ken Vinik, awaiting a makeover in the Arthur Kill.
The name of the hull–we’d spell it “Sovkomflot“–is one you will not see in the sixth boro these days, and it seems the icebreaking tanker is currently
anchored where it has been for at least the past six months in Murmansk.
The Penn Maritime Coho has become the Kirby Coho, currently in Savannah.
Note the ice and snow on the boats above and below; January a decade ago was frosty! Barbara McAllister has become Patsy K, which I’ve never seen. She’s in Panama City FL right now.
It’s clamming time in the boro, and many of these clam/fish boats come out of this creek in NJ. More Dutch Girl tomorrow.
Grey Shark may be a dead ship or even a scrapped one by now, last recorded in the DR.
And finally, Megan McAllister is alive and well, busy as Charles James.
All photos from January 2013, WVD.
And the answer to the question about the current disposition of Falconia: she’s renamed Dragon and in Midia, Romania on the Black Sea, flying the Togolese flag, and still working, having just arrived in from Libya. For a tour of a much newer and sophisticated purpose-built livestock carrier, click here. More on this category of vessel here, and Dragon specifically on page 49.
For a disturbing report–if you choose to followup here–google Queen Hind livestock carrier, which capsized in Midia in 2019 and resulted in the “lost cargo,” i.e., death 14,000 sheep.
This monthly practice of looking back a decade gives me an opportunity to dust off a specific part of the archive in tugster tower. Besides sneezing sometimes because of the dust, I also feel amazed about the amount of change, small changes maybe but significant it seems.
Evening Mist has become Everly Mist, and is in a new endeavor. Palva is now Laurentia DesGagnes operating on and out of the Saint Lawrence River where I saw her a few years back. Only Eastern Welder in the background remains.
I made a few trips out to Greenport a decade ago, and walking through a shipyard saw this vessel from Suffolk Count Department of Health and its unusual top deck exhaust. Is that still around? I’m guessing it might check water quality on shellfishing areas . . .
Bebedouro (1974) and Atlantic Conveyor (1985), now both dead and scrapped. Brendan Turecamo still works here all day every day.
Rebel (138′ x 46′) is still on the NJ side of the sixth boro, waiting for an opportunity to get back to work.
Viking (132′ x 34′) has been cut up.
Annabelle Dorothy Moran was on her delivery run, making her way to the Chesapeake/Delaware Bay area, where she still works. Those range markers are no longer in place on the Brooklyn Heights bank of the sixth boro.
John B Caddell was nearing the end of this shore leave, heading for her final one. Note Sarah Ann tending the crane barge and WTC in the distance not yet completed.
Commander, a WW1 USN vet as SP-1247, was still showing its rotondity.
Joan Turecamo, a late Matton product, was still in the boro. Now she winds her way around the curves of the Lower Mississippi.
Sarah Ann and others of the Donjon fleet kept me up most of the night in December 2012, as she stood by a barge carrying WTC antenna sections that were lifted onto Manhattan . . .
across a blocked west side highway . . . lowered onto a vehicle with dozens of axles . . .
and trucked inland
In other night photos, quite rare on this blog . . . it’s Clearwater lifted onto Black Diamond barge with Cornell standing by.
I hope you enjoyed this backward glance as much as I have. I might have to get out and do some documenting of nighttime events on the sixth boro this December.
All photos, December 2012, WVD.
If you’re still wanting a tugster calendar 2023 version, click here for info. You can even order a few or a dozen . . .
January, once every four years, involves a formality that we mark today. Inaugurate has a strange derivation, you figure it out. With this post, I’m in no way intending to divine futures. Really it’s just sets of photos taken four years apart.
Ice and lightship yacht Nantucket floated in the harbor in mid January 2009. Do you remember what else was literally in the harbor?
Weeks tugs stood by ready to move a barge underneath the airplane when Weeks 533 lifted the Airbus 320 from harbor waters that had cushioned its fall . . . twelve years ago.
Next inauguration day, 2013, I watched fishermen drag clams from the bottom of Gravesend Bay.
Rebel, destined not to run much longer, pushed a barge across the Upper Bay with an incomplete WTC beyond. Many more details had not yet sprouted on the Manhattan skyline.
Mid January 2017 . . . CMA CGM Nerval headed for the port with Thomas J. Brown off its starboard. Here‘s what I wrote about this photo and others exactly four years ago.
Nerval still needed to make its way under the yet-to-be completed raising of the Bayonne Bridge, assisted by JRT Moran. This view was quite different in mid January 2017. As of today, this container ship in on the Mediterranean on a voyage between Turkey and Morocco.
All photos, WVD, taken in mid January at four-year intervals. Nothing should be read into the choice of photos. Sorry I have no photos from January 20, 2005, because back then I didn’t take as many photos, and four years before that, I was still using a film camera, took fewer photos in a year than now I do on certain days, and that skyline above was very different.
My inaugural event . . . cleaning my desk, my office, and my kitchen. If you’re looking for an activity, something might need cleaning. Laundry? Yup, work after work. All inaugurations call for clean ups.
And if you want to buy that lightship yacht above, here‘s the info.
Happy 2020, so let’s go a decade back, and see a selection of photos from January 2010.
Ross Sea escorts Rebel eastbound past Atlantic Leo in the KVK.
Lucy Reinauer, bathed in morning light, approaches Howland Hook in the AK.
Miss Gill and Lucky D head for the smaller Bayonne Bridge and Goethals Bridge, off to the west.
Athena is way out of Block Island Sound, here doing winter work in the sixth boro. Little did I know back then that I’d soon be taking my first ride to Block Island aboard Athena.
North Sea is on the hard in Kingston NY.
My favorite winter harbor fishing vessel passes Robbins Reef, leaving
the rest of the fleet farther to the NE in the Upper Bay. Note how different the skyline of lower Manhattan was then.
Doris escorts a tanker into the KVK.
Davis Sea crushes her way into the Rondout with a load of heat.
It was, as all these “retro sixth boro posts,” only a decade ago, but so much has changed.
All photos in January 2010 by Will Van Dorp. Happy 2020.
First, thanks to Joseph Chomicz . . . it’s Rebel and Dolphin over by the Philadelphia Navy Yard . . .
Quo vadis, Rebel?
And the second batch comes from Ingrid Staats with likely the most unusual backstory ever on this blog . . . Ingrid took the photos from a room in New York-Presbyterian Hospital, where her healthy baby was born. She writes, “We had an amazing view of the East River and for four days as Mom & babe recuperated. I amused myself by capturing as many tugs as possible.” Congratulations to all and here they are:
Sea Lion above moving recyclables and and Evelyn Cutler pushing petroleum product.
TJ and Catherine Miller . . . and is TJ really doing all the work here?
And finally . . . Navigator light and Gulf Enterprise pushing a petroleum barge westbound.
Many thanks to Joseph and Ingrid for these photos. And I’m happy to hear that one of the next generation of tugboat watchers has been born.
More than half a decade ago, I got these photos of Rebel juxtaposed with Ross Sea. Rebel, with her inordinately wide upper house base, is one of the largest tugboats in the oil trade through the sixth boro. Might she be under matched here with DBL 102?
So it made my day to catch her yesterday as she headed into the Kills.
A couple of weeks ago, I caught her northbound but was no closer than this.
All photos by Will Van Dorp.
I realize that snow days occur here every year, even though not as frequently as they might farther north, but the movement of a squall across the boros rewards with interesting photos in spite of the cold.
At 0925 the other day, Maersk Edgar was in the clear although a squall concealed the lower Manhattan skyline.
Here’s zoomed in closer because I hoped to confirm the unit to the left as Kirby’s Rebel, which I’ve not seen in ages. I hope I see her close up before she leaves town.
Corpus Christi was clear.
At 10:00 Weeks’ tugs Thomas and Shelby moved in to retrieve a crane as soon as they completed the salt pile job. That’s Dreggen in the background. Nearly eight years ago Thomas and a crane were involved in a job that involved fishing out a certain geese-ingesting aircraft from a forgiving North River.
Red Hook moves a barge past a snow-cloaked IMTT.
Emerald Coast heads out at 11:37.
Peking appears from the edge of space.
And here by noon, I was disappointed in my hopes to get a photo of Hyundai Pluto, entirely invisible beyond ACL Atlantic Cartier. The port may have been closed around this time because Hyundai Pluto had arrived inside the Upper Bay, then spun around–not a lightly undertaken feat–and headed out to the Long Beach anchorage. Atlantic Cartier anchored in Gravesend, and Atlantic Conveyer did the same off Stapleton, not a common occurrence for a containership. Or maybe I just misunderstood what what going on, my perception beshrouded from myself.
All photos by Will Van Dorp.
Random means random, and I challenge you to come up with a more random set . . .
Let’s start with a Gmelin photo from 1930. I’ll give the name of the tug later in this post so that all experts of arcane sixth boro history can play. Since today is the V-Day, let me mention that Herbert Hoover was POTUS, and not very popular at that time, post-crash, in spite of his 1928 campaign slogan “A Chicken in Every Pot and a Car in Every Garage.” Well, that did not work out so well. A few things impress me about Hoover though, like . . . in what language would he and the First Lady–Lou–converse privately when guests were in the White House. By the way, why is the 2nd Tuesday in November Election Day? Answers at the end of this post.
Here’s a photo from my archives, Surrie Moran (2000 built) assisting with a big south-bound Crowley barge El Rey (1979) in June 2013 on the Delaware River. I was shooting against the morning sun. You see a little of Cape Henry (1967) on the stern also. Any guesses which Crowley tug was towing?
And another photo from 2013, January, in the KVK. It’s Rebel, built 1976, with her odd hull. Is she now scrapped?
So now a few from the past week . . . James D. Moran (2015) passes the KV buoy heading for the North River.
Genesis Victory (from 1981) heads into the Kills.
The 2002 Labrador Sea comes in from somewhere out east.
And over on a waterway I don’t get to see that often, I stumbled onto the 1940 Ireland,
1958 Bergen Point, and
the 1947 basic Harbor II.
And since a lot of things are cyclical, we’re back at the mystery tug.
With my magnifying glass, I read enough to make me think this is Richard J. Barrett, which would have been 11 years old in 1930. Here’s Birk’s info. The ship is the 1925-launched MS Gripsholm, significant as the first transAtlantic liner powered by a diesel engine.
And Hoover and his wife spoke Mandarin for their secret asides when guests were in earshot. I’m impressed.
And towing El Rey, here’s Sentry (1977).
And we have our 19th century agrarian roots to thank for the 2nd Tuesday being election day . . . here.
Entering the KVK from the east . . . it’s the tallest tall ship sailing the sixth boro.
At about the same moment, entering the KVK from its west gate, aka the Bayonne Bridge, it’s Rebel, followed by Nicole Leigh Reinauer.
Clipper City, launched in Florida in 1984, is a replica of a wooden schooner that operated on the Great Lakes during the second half of the 19th century.
The schooner is only 20′ longer than Rebel.
Clipper City is headed for a haul-out.
Later I catch the stern of Rebel westbound back to the yard. I believe the near-twin of Rebel in the distance is Yankee.
All fotos by Will Van Dorp.
In a recent post, bowsprite put up a message, which set me off in search of omens and other signs of the times, starting from the one in green below, which sounds vaguely like a line from a hostage situation. “Ok, my hands are raised over my head and I’m really trying to cooperate.”
SCF is a Russian company, which makes me wonder about a chicken-or-egg question here: Safety Comes First is clever. I would not advise complying with the order to “tug” though near the base of the ship’s ladder.
Propellor warnings are common
enough, although not all look the same, which I like.
Some signs can be lengthy, whereas others
are short. Or is this a command? I wonder.
Some just make you wonder.
All fotos by Will Van Dorp. If you’ve seen any good signs–whether they augur ill or well–lately, please send them along.
tugster: a waterblog 
Recent Comments