Random Ships 99

It’s been months since I used this title, so let me play some catch-up.

with a RORO and an ULCV.   The RORO RCC Africa is the oldest vessel in this post, launched 2004. Its dimensions are 656′ x 105′ and at this moment it’s heading from the east to the west side of South American via the Magellan Strait. Triton, 2016, is the largest vessel here:  1210′ x 167′ and it’s currently heading for Colon PA.

Wye River is the tug meeting above;  Kirby Moran provides an assist to a tanker below.

Angel Star, 2006,  is the shortest in this post, measuring 590′ x 105′ and it has recently transited the Panama Canal on its way to the Baja California port of La Paz, seen here in a post from three years ago. 

Another ULCV,  Cosco Shipping Orchid, 1200′ x 157′, is the newest vessel here, launched in 2019 and currently making for Busan.   Note the gaggle of Centerlines, once Bouchards.

In closing, two years ago I’d not heard of Wan Hai, or if I had, it made such little impact that I quickly forget the name. Wan Hai 315 dates from 2006, and measures 699′ x 105.’  At this time, she’s headed for the Suez from this departure out of the sixth boro of NYC.

Speaking of names, Wan Hai is as creative with names of ships as trucking fleets are with tractors or I am with series of blog posts.  This one was Wan Hai 315.

All photos and any errors, WVD, who never ceases to be amazed by the range of traffic calling in the sixth boro, often the forgotten boro.

Happy Lady and the Green Giants

I’ve posted a lot of unusual ship names here over the years. 

If you don’t read Greek, as I don’t, the one above and below are the same ship, just from different angles.

Triton is a 14k+ teu vessel, making it quite the giant. 

Whether it’s jolly or not, i can’t tell.  It is truly jam-packed.

Over on the far side of Triton, yup, that’s Happy Lady.

 

Justine, Ava, and Ellen all played a role in getting Triton safely into if not out of the sixth boro.

 

Taipei Triumph is a bit newer and has roughly the same teu-capacity. Notice how small the ferry Barberi, which is closer, looks in comparion.

Gregg McAllister is working the starboard bow, 

with an untethered JRT Moran following, and Bruce A. ready when needed.

Bow and stern on the two green giants are slightly different.

Other than the sixth boro setting, the escort tugs, my framing in the post, and the fact that all the photos were taken by me, WVD, they are unrelated.

Anyone catch the vessel in this post that I did not acknowledge in any way?

Retro Salish Sea 2

In July 2010, the 1968 Black Hawk was one of two sister tugs operated by Sound Freight Lines.  Since then, the sister Seminole has been sold foreign, and Black Hawk has been sold to Sause Brothers Ocean Towing.  Sause refurbished her and for an account of Black Hawk towing a barge from San Francisco to Vancouver, click here. Details on Black Hawk are 112′ x 34′ and 3700 hp.

Chief, 1999, is/was one of Crowley’s Harbor class tugs.  She’s 97′ x 36′ and 4800 hp.

James T. Quigg is no doubt now wearing Centerline Logistics colors.  She dates from 1971 and measures in at 98′ x 30′ and 3000 hp.   Since launch, she’s worked the US East Coast, once called Fournier Boys,  and Hawaii, as well as the West Coast.

Alaska Titan came off the ways in 2008.  She’s one of a half dozen “titans” operated by Western Towboat.

Currently following the waterway through the islands of the Alaska panhandle, she measures in at 112′ x 35′ and 5000 hp.

Westrac, 1987, is another Western Towboat vessel, measuring in at 63′ x 28′ and 2500 hp.

This Triton, launched 1965, now goes by Wycliffe.  She’s 115′ x 31′ and 2500 hp.   She’s currently in Ensenada MX.

Dixie, 1951, has a history in towing log rafts on the Columbia River hundreds of miles above Portland OR. She’s 46′ x 15′ and 575 hp.

Pacific Star, launched 2008, now goes by Signet Courageous.  She’s 92′ x 40′ and 6610 hp. She’s currently in the Gulf of Mexico off Corpus Christi.

On Lake Washington, Lady Washington and Hawaiian Chieftain were out sailing.  The two vessels are now outside the Puget Sound in Gray’s Harbor, and Hawaiian Chieftain, as I understand it, has been “laid up.”  The two replica vessels have a waterline length of 72’and 62′, respectively.

Island Packer puzzles me a bit.  It seems not be cost effective to operate the 1943 converted landing craft between here and the Aleutians, where Chernofsky is located.  I suppose it was in Seattle that day for service.  I don’t know.

Katie Ann, launched in Baltimore in 1969, almost 300′ loa and powered by 8000 hp,  is one of six processing/packing/freezing vessels operated by American Seafoods.  She operates with a crew of 75.  As of this writing, according to AIS, she’s in exactly the same location I photographed her in July 2010, but only because she’s between seasons.

Viking has the lines of a converted oiler, like these.  She could be the 120′ crabber/trawler built for crabbing/fishing by Marco in 1975.

All photos, WVD, in July 2010.

 

 

Random Ships 68

By the way, did anyone get good photos of Triton, the biggest of the big ULCVs to call in the sixth boro so far?  She was coming under the Bayonne Bridge as first light was breaking.  More on that ULCV at the end of this post.

Let me start with two photos I took in Quebec City, over two years ago.

What caught my attention was the Tanzania registry.

Earlier this week I caught the “rest of the story” on this ship while reading the CBC online.  Click on the photo below of the captain to learn why this ship has not moved in over two years, a crew not shanghai’d but rather quebec’d or rather bahamian’d or most accurately, D & D maritime’d….

Now for some random ship traffic in the sixth boro, which no doubt has its own untold stories, how about this long glance at NYK Falcon, fleet mate of ONE Stork and one of the big birds of the harbor.

STI Leblon, a Brazilian reference,  heads out with an assist from Miriam Moran.  Here are many more STI tankers.

Genco Avra gets a partial load over in Greenville.

Nordmaple heads for sea.

Beauforte heads in, as does

Ems Trader.  Ems is a river reference, not an abbreviation.  Mary Turecamo is off her stern.

Did anyone get close-ups of Triton this morning?  I’d love to see them;  meanwhile, I’m hoping to catch her on the way out to sea, unless she leaves in the wee dark hours.  Port of Baltimore has made a big deal about this record-breaking vessel, as did the Panama Canal folks.

All photos by Will Van Dorp.

 

Thanks to Stephan Gmelin 5

Here, from a year ago, were previous Gmelin photos.

All I can tell about the photo below is that it shows Homeric, 1931.  Of the three tugs to her starboard and the six or so in the distance as well as the small sloop and stick lighter to the right . . . I can say nothing else and hope someone reading this will have some detail to add.

Six years earlier, some had criticized Capt. John Roberts for being unable–not unwilling–to rescue anyone from Raifuku Maru some 500 miles off Boston.

Homeric went eight years between keel-laying and entering service because a war intervened, then saw service for less than 20 years.

As was true for Homeric, RMS Empress of Australia was built in the German shipyard now located in Poland.  This Empress of Australia was launched in 1913;  Kaiser Wilhelm II made her into the royal yacht, imagining he would receive the surrendered allied fleets from her.  Oh well . . .

Other details here on the photo marked 1931 . . .  to the right behind the ship I can see a pier marked Ellerman’s Wilson Line, although I don’t know what pier number that would be.  And on the stern of the assist tug I can make out  the Howard portion of  . . . Howard C. Moore, a Moran boat by then.

My point is that visual detail and charm notwithstanding, there’s a vacuum of fact in these photos.

Which brings me to a book I reread yesterday and would recommend–Sailors, Waterways, and Tugboats I Have Known–although the title is bulky.  The author–Capt. Fred G. Godfrey, who also wrote a novel Fugitive Deckhand–though born ashore, lived from infancy on a canal barge his parents operated in the New York Canal system.  In the first chapter, he mentions the first tugboat he ever rode aboard, a Buffalo-built 1899 steam tug named Triton.  He was four then, and then later he worked aboard as a deckhand and cook.  To be fair, Godfrey included three photos of Triton, but I wanted more, although his details about the galley of a tug of a century ago are rich.   In chapter two, he writes about George Field, an 1882 Buffalo-built tug his father captained.   And again, there were two pictures, and I wanted more, although the anecdote of the time he intervened–as a kid–and shoved a helmsman bent on sabotaging the boat  . . . is great.    Third chapter  . . . it’s Junior Murphy, built 1909 in New Baltimore NY.  Again, two photos of the boat are included as well as info about cargoes–including hay– and ports of call that included St.-Jean -sur-Richelieu, QC.

I read this book a few years ago before I’d gained familiarity with these waterways and it was unsatisfying.  Now I know most of the references, and I want a thousand more photos and would have loved to converse with Capt. Godfrey.

I’m not being whiney.  I love the Gmelin photos and the Godfrey books. In fact, if anyone wants to trade some vintage photos of tugboats for my second copy of Sailors, Waterways, and Tugboats . . ., let me know.

I hope a satisfying record remains for the readers and researchers working here in 2117.

 

 

 

Really Random Tugs 36

Really random means photos from widely separated places by different people.  So here goes . . . the first two from Jed, who took them in the former Dutch Antilles about a year ago.  Triton is home-ported in Ijmuiden, another must-see place in the Netherlands if you’re interested in workboats. Click here for some posts I did about Ijmuiden, the mouth of the waterway out to sea from Amsterdam. Click here for a photo of Triton I took a few years back in Ijmuiden.

photo date 23 APRIL 2016 by Jed

Andicuri, named for a beach which itself is named for an Arawak chief,  was built just south of Rotterdam in 1983.

photo date 23 APRIL 2016 by Jed

Until about a year ago, Sand Master worked out of the sixth boro mining sand;  recently it was sold to interests and was spotted–not photographed–in Surinam.

photo date January 2012 by Will Van Dorp

Here’s a strange photo taken in April 2012 by Don Rittner, and part of a post called “Jets Along the Mohawk.”  Maybe I should have called it “early Cold War jets up the Flight of Five.”

And finally, here’s a photo I took in Beaufort NC in June 2013, Fort Macon tied up near the phosphate dock.

I hope you enjoyed these bounces within the northern half of the American hemisphere.

 

NL1

I’m back at the helm and have switched the robots off.  I’ve been in Netherlands (Nederland, in the language), which translates as “low lands.”  Where it’s low, you find water, of course, and where you have water, you’ll find boats and bridges.

You also find moats.  See the jagged blue rectangle in map below showing the center–the historical starting point–of the city of Leiden, a city of 122,000 midwayish between Rotterdam and Amsterdam.  All the photos in this post show one” block” of the Nieuwe Rijn (New Rhine), attached to the Oude (old) Rijn.   In fact, the Nieuwe Rijn (NR) is only a little over a mile channelized portion of the Oude Rijn, a 30-mile stretch of river no longer attached to the Rhine, the 750-mile river that everyone knows.  Think oxbow lakes along the Mississippi, only straight.

Imagine the blue rectangle as a clock;  you locate this one-block area on the map below at around the 4:00 position of the moat, at the intersection of the NR and the Herrengracht, a main vertical canal you can see there.

At this intersection there’s this old fuel barge.

I don’t know if it still functions.

Here’s the real focus of this post, low airdraft tugs like Jason.  The wheelhouse roof and windows are hinged, as you can see in this short video where Jason tows a barge through one of these low bridges.

See the blue/white sign near the left center;  it reads “Herrengracht.”  I love the paint job on that Smart.

The blue tour boats are operated by a company called “bootjes en broodjes,” or small boats and rolls.

Eat. Drink. Tour.   Also, learn about Leiden.  Talk.  Duck!

And among low air draft tugs in this block of waterway, here’s the real focus, the tug on the waterside of the small covered barge is called Triton.

Notice the fuel barge and Jason?   In a lot of places in the waterways in Leiden, those smooth but curved top barges have seating on them as bars and restaurants.

Here’s Triton with a house to get out of the weather.  She’s 100 years old exactly, a mere youngster compared with the buildings surrounding the waterways.

Triton reminds me a lot of Augie and Heidi.

Now if the spelling “rijn” seemed familiar, think of this guy . . . a favorite son whom we all know by his first name, Rembrandt.

Many more Dutch photos to come;  remember this is just one block of waterway. All photos by Will Van Dorp.

 

 

More Sail Amsterdam 2015

Sail Amsterdam ended a month ago, but these photos come from a relative who works for Dutch law enforcement and could mingle freely with his vessel.  Thanks cousin.

New Yorkers should easily recognize this vessel, in spite of some slightly different trappings.

Guayas, the Ecuadorian tall ship, called in the sixth boro three years ago.  

Guayas was assisted by Aaron on the bow.  Can anyone identify the tug hanging on the stern?  Aaron appeared here once a year ago.

Sirius is an Iskes tug that outpowers Aaron by about four-fold.

Steam tug Scheelenkuhlen (70′ x 21′ x 6′ draft and 65 tons) dates from 1927.

Anny, built 1957, has a telescoping wheelhouse visible here and works Amsterdam’s canals, as seen here.

A876 Hunze, launched 1987, is one of five large tugs operated by the Royal Dutch Navy.

Shipdock VI measures 52′ x 13.’

I can’t tell you much about Jan.

Voorzan III dates from 1932.  Stadt Amsterdam has called in the sixth boro several times.

Triton 2008 is another Iskes tug. 

They’re all beauties . . . from Zeetijger to

Maasstroom.

And this has to be a tanker that delights when she calls into port at the end of the day.

Let’s call it quits for today with a tug operated by the Port of Amsterdam . . . PA5 aka Pollux. 

 

All photos by “Hans Brinker.”

Dutch Tugs 2

Arion is one of the smaller Iskes tugs, here towing City of Dubrovnik out toward the mouth aka Ijmond of the North Sea Canal. 

Aaron is the smallest of the fleet.

Friesland . . . built 1982.

Here’s another shot of Triton (farther) and Telstar (nearer).

Another shot of Triton, built 2008 in Turkey.

Pollux (Germany built in 1963) and Saturnus (Germany 1978).

Svitzer Svezia, Italy 1988.

PA 1 aka Castor looks like it could tow if equipment were added, but it’s actually an enforcement vessel.

And we end with a 1927 boat . . . aptly named . . . Obsessie.

All photos by Will Van Dorp.

Dutch Tugs 1

I certainly saw great assist tugs like Triton, here steering a bulk carrier into the locks at Ijmuiden.  Click here for more Iskes tugs.

Louise van der Wees is less new.

Devotion is an Urk-based vessel working a mini-heavy lift unit.

But it was the sheer number of restored-to-operational-condition vintage tugs that impressed me, like the 1946 SS. Gebr. Bever.   If that link is in Dutch, you can switch languages at the bottom.

Ditto Roek, 1930.

Spes . . . 1946

Wouw

Citius

Wisent and many more.

Here’s another shot of Elbe (former Maryland Pilots vessel) being passed by Hercules 1915 . . .  and we end this installment with

a 1977 Hercules.

All photos by Will Van Dorp.

Personal note:  Today I begin an extended gallivant in northern and western New York, the state.  I have many more Dutch photos, but my ability to post may be limited.