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Click here for a series of posts and photos of Wards Island from a point almost exactly four years ago, in mid November when I spent a long day photographing the old crane ship on what was to be her last year working. Today she lies at the bottom of Hempstead Reef, a few nautical miles of the west end of Jones Beach Island, in 50 to 70 feet of water. A map follows below. I’d love to hear from anyone who has fished or dived on the reef during the past year, since she has graced the bottom with her hospitable presence.
Although I’ve posted some of these photos, the day I spent on her pulling Erie Canal navaids out of Oneida Lake was a magical day . . mid November, but warm and without wind. Enjoy this set.
Photos were taken from morning to night on November 16 and then the last one is November 17, 2015. All are re-edited.
She ran, if not quite like a deer.
Heading eastbound into the Lake had the look of space flight.
For a crane ship fashioned from a double-ended ferry, she plucked buoys from the water quite efficiently,
replacing them with ice buoys, of the right color of course.
But for November,
it was an enviable day for photos.
Some of the navaids in the Lake rest on concrete-capped shoals, islands.
At the end of the day, all buoys were transferred to a barge so that Wards Island had cleared decks for the next day of work.
Click on the DEC map below to get to an interactive map.
Click on the photo below to see more of the Flickr photo stream from which it was taken.
All photos not otherwise attributed taken in November 2015 by Will Van Dorp, who is eager to see photos of her taken in her watery home.
And as a wise friend, frequent commenter here has said in relation to another vessel, “[New boats] have come along to supplant and surpass their predecessors. We should count ourselves fortunate to have known so many of the elegant and durable old-timers while they were still around, and feel privileged to help transmit their images and stories into the future.” Thanks, Lee
Wendy Marble took these photos today when her crew was preparing to cast off lines on the Erie Canal.
This is looking forward from wheelhouse of tug Syracuse towing DB6 west from Mays Point, NY.
Then another friend jogged my memory about the date, Nov 16. The rest of these photos I took on Nov 16, 2015. It was shirtsleeve weather, tug Syracuse was busy, and so was . . . .
craneship Wards Island. Yes, the one that’s currently almost 100′ down north of Long Island; you can see it here (scroll) and no, it’s not a 115′ barge.
The above shot I got on Nov 17, 2015, but all the rest here are from Nov 16.
Syracuse speeds the crane out into Oneida Lake,
and the crane goes fishing, or buoying, replacing summer buoys with winter spars.
At the end of the day, temperatures dropped along with the sun, and the buoys were craned over to a work barge, where the buoys would be refurbished over the winter.
Syracuse is quite the unique tug.
Thanks to Wendy and Dave for jogging my memory. Thanks to Wendy for sharing the photos from Mays Point.
Hats off to Glenn Raymo for figuring out where to be to catch this tow at first light.
I know it’s fruitless to wonder whether any archive has photos of any previous trip Ward’s Island made on the Hudson. The only other trip it’s made may have been northbound in the late 1930s.
Hats off to the crews who can do this safely. With the rounded bottom propped up by welded on support beams,
she looks like an animal once living.
Dimensions of the hull are 115’6″ x 38′ x 14′.
It’s a job and it’s a melancholy sight too., knowing the next stop on this express route is the bottom of the ocean off Fire Island.
Many thanks to Glenn for catching this. Previous “canal reef express” posts can be found here.
What is that? asked one gentleman standing at beside a lock. The geese took no chances and scurried as it approached.
From this angle, its ferry origins are quite evident. Scroll to compare with SS Columbia and SS Astoria.
This is the bow of Ward’s Island; she’s departing the way she arrived around 1937 but stern first, leaving under duress.
Here the tow departs E-12 for Amsterdam.
That’s E-11 in the distance, and from this vantage point, I see
the hull as a sounding board for an as-yet invented instrument. I believe that before she goes to the reef, her crane and wheelhouse will be once again mounted. For show.
From one of her former crew, here’s what a working Ward’s Island looked like late in a season, replacing summer buoys with winter buoys.
The next batch I took near E-10, a lock allowing photos from the sunny side.
As you can see, she was certainly rotund.
To close out this post, . . . to that gentleman who couldn’t identify the blue rotund hulk, I’d say this reefing plan is obliterating some NYS history that could be repurposed. Eradicating context destroys a dimension of the Canal. What do you think?
For more about the photo below by Jon Crispin, click here.
The photo above by Jon Crispin. All others by Will Van Dorp.
It occurs to me that someone might want to start a website using the slogan above.
Click here for previous canal reef express posts. For Urger posts responding to and with the same urgency, click here.
Here are the previous posts in this series. And here are the posts I’ve done earlier on the 1929 Ward’s Island, whose builder’s plate photo I took in October 2016. I was told it was removed some time ago and is in a safe place. Here was my first post on “Ward’s.”
As a baseline photo of the double-ender ferry entered a second life in 1937 as a derrick boat or “crane ship,” I offer this shot I took in Lyons in March 2018. That’s snow in the foreground.
In one of her most notable roles, she assisted in the clean up near lock E-12 after the Thruway bridge collapsed into Schoharie Creek, an event I recall vividly because I traversed that bridge just the day before.
Note the bow prop. I wonder if at one time it had a rudder, as
you see in this photo of the stern prop.
The rest of these photos come from Bob Stopper. Notice the glass has been removed from the wheelhouse, but the flag still flies.
Little by little, its crane abilities are removed and placed alongside the dry dock.
Pulling the shafts proved complicated,
x
but eventually the once crane ship looks more like a curvaceous barge.
Who knows whether these props will be reefed along with the ship . . . .?
A tug is expected to arrive in Lyons imminently to move this vessel from central–almost western New York–to tidewater, then down the Hudson, and out to the designated reefing ground.
And in other news from Lyons, here’s who showed up late Tuesday afternoon . . . with some new signage on the stack and engine cover. Compare with here from a month ago . . .
Just when I thought I had no more photos for another installment of “seats,” uh . . more appear. This arrangement of seating in this Erie Canal tug has to win a prize. I can’t tell which lock it is, nor (I believe) can Bob Graham, who sent it in. The captain on the Feeney at one point was Bob’s grandfather.
Is that a folding chair way high up on Augie?
January 2014
Might folding chairs be more common than one might expect?
Ceres has become inactive after a noble attempt to sail north Country produce down to the NYC markets.
Angels Share is the largest Wally yacht I’ve ever seen, the photo taken in North Cove in September 2013.
But the person on the helm got no seat, unless–you suppose?–they’ve got a folding chair in the lazaretto. It’s since been soldand renamed.
NYC-DEP Hunts Point has a variety of seating options.
And let’s end with two European boats: Tenax and
Abeille Bourbon. Tenax has appeared on tugster in 2012 here, and Bourbon . . . here.
Many thanks to Xtian, Vlad, and Bob for sending along these photos. Here are the two previous “seats” posts.
And a final shot below, that was tugster in 2011 at the Dossin Great Lakes Museum in Belle Isle at the helm of the detached house of SS William Clay Ford. Note the “old man’s” chair in the background.
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Here’s the series that this follows, a series that shows how busy this craneship still is at certain times of the year. Of course, this could also be called what do you do with an obsolete New York City ferry, a vessel delivered by Electric Boat on October 14, 1929 and replaced by a bridge in fewer than 10 years.
Yes, this is the bow of the craneship, and until I spent a day on board last fall, I assumed the bow wheel was non-functioning if even present.
Excuse the rain spot.
Closeups of bow and
stern.
Here’s a shot from the deck of Wards Island from the incredible warm late November day last year when we pulled a day’s worth of buoys from Oneida Lake, and at the
end of the day, getting a glimpse of the builders plate in the engine compartment.
All photos by Will Van Dorp.
By 3:00 pm, the deck of Wards Island was at capacity with buoys. It was time to head back west to a scow on the wall in Brewerton, an accidental destination for
Champlain almost exactly 400 years ago. Champlain was a gallivanter extraordinaire, crossing the Atlantic about 25 times in those days, and a guy even better at negotiation and diplomacy than he was at traveling. But I digress.
Since there are two bridges between the Lake and the scow, the boom had been lowered and now it’s raised for the job. Attached to the scow is the larger tender known not by a number but as Dana.
It’s clearly November when 4:30 looks like this.
Boom is lowered for the several miles back to Lock 23, where a surprise
awaits me. I had assumed that only the stern propellor on Wards Island was operational, but after Syracuse uncoupled and we started the rotation to tie up,
there was prop wash from under the bow, just as you would expect from a double-ender ferry.
In order to spin the boat 180 degrees without having to make a 36-point turn, Syracuse put some pressure on the bow,
and by 5:40 we were all fast. Then it was time to
put the power of Wards Island to sleep. Below deck there were a bunch more surprises, like these port lights as seen from within and the rivets.
And two spacious accommodations, one on each side of the vessel.
Two engines, although only the Cat D353 Series E runs.
A Frankenstein knife switch board.
And mentioned in this post last year, Wards Island began life as a ferry in 1929, looking like her twin . . . Tenkenas, there were more surprises like
this speaking tube and behind it,
this brass builders plate.
All color photos here are by Will Van Dorp. I’m not sure of the source, the date,or the location of the b/w photo of Tenkenas above, although I know where and where else I might find more.
Many thanks to the NYS Canal Corp and its floating plant for permission to do this series.
Unrelated and sad news: I learned yesterday that John Skelson has passed. RIP, John. Click here for some of the many posts I credited to him in the past years.
These photos were taken November 16, 2015, with temperatures in the 50s and no wind. Obviously, mid-November is not always so ideal for this operation. In fact, photos on the boat showed this work being done in 1992, with buoys heavily ice and snow covered.
Here one crewman–let’s call him the signaler– radios the tug instructions for the approach to the buoy.
Once within two yards of so, another crewman captures the buoy with a boat hook.
Besides the VHF, the signaler uses hand signals for the crane operator, who hoists the hooked buoy as high as a connector link, which gets cleated to the boat while
the cotter pin connected to the shackle gets cut.
The crane operator relies entirely on signals from the signaler.
Once the summer buoy is lifted away, the anchor chain is attached to the spar buoy, which is then
pushed overboard, where it’ll stay until the reverse process in the spring.
Meanwhile, the beacon is removed from each buoy.
Oneida Lake has floating and fixed nav aids. This is Messenger Shoals, a fixed nav aid on a concrete island poured into sheet piling. To the left of the aid in Blind Island, and as little as a foot of water.
The aid here–113–is called a cabinet.
The large size–about 6′ high–used to hold batteries.
The entire cabinet is lifted off for the winter.
On the north side of the lake is a village called Cleveland, once important for supplying passing commercial canal traffic and glass making. Now it may go out of existence.
When the foredeck is full and late autumn sun starts to go down, we headed to the west side of the lake to offload today’s work and prep the boat for tomorrow.
And that will be tomorrow’s post.
Again, many thanks to NYS Canal Corp for permission to do this story and to the crews of Wards Island and Syracuse for helping me out.
At the end of the Oneida Lake series, you’ll see why this could also be called “second lives 15 part b.”
Technically, this post starts out early morning in Clay, NY, with tug Syracuse and crane ship Wards Island tied to the east end of Lock 23.
Wards Island–and her sister ship Tenkenas–were built in 1929 by Electric Boat of Groton CT. Later in the series I’ll show you the brass builder’s plate. By 1937, both were listed as abandoned. For some of the history of intervening years, check out A Long Haul starting on p. 128.
Here Syracuse pushes Wards Island under the rail bridge just west of Route 11 heading for the lake. A key to the location is the Brewerton Range Rear lighthouse, visible in the trees along the right side margin of the photo.
The lake is unusually glassy for November and the fall task of replacing the summer navigation buoys with winter “placeholder” spar buoys, seen here below between the crane boom and the spud. Wards Island is fully self-propelled in the manner you’d expect of a former double-ender ferry, just very slow, a time waste on a large lake like Oneida. Click here for info on tug and barge wrecks in the lake.
Type Syracuse into the left side search box and you’ll find many more posts featuring this 1933 workhorse.
Here’s the view through the controls of the crane looking toward the east end of the lake.
To the right you see the Verona Beach Lighthouse, and buoy 106 is in sight to the left of the hook.
The tow is maneuvered into position and a crewman captures the buoy with the boat hook.
The crew make the connection and 106 gets raised. In part b and c of this series, I’ll show the crew actions step by step.
Since no spar buoy replaces 106, anchor and all are brought up. In the distance to the left you can see the Route 13 bridge between Verona and Sylvan Beach. Click here for one of many posts I did in 2014 with photos from near the Route 13 bridge.
Buoy 107 is next on the boat, and
the first spar buoy goes in, anchored to mark the spot.
By 1130, we’re approaching buoy 109.
The crewman with the yellow sweatshirt is using a tool to hook between the buoy lift point and the crane hook.
Once a buoy is on the boat, the flashing beacon is removed and
stowed in a locker.
All photos by Will Van Dorp. More of Oneida Lake tomorrow.
Many thanks to the NYS Canal Corporation for granting permission to photograph the work of Wards Island.
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