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Sooner or later, it seems, different parts of the sixth boro require dredging. I made a note to follow Saginaw Bay, the current Great Lakes Dredge and Dock crewboat, out to where the GLDD project was happening, and the other day I finally did.
It led me here to Rockaway Inlet. That’s Dead Horse Bay in the background, and this flotilla: Eagle, McCormack Boys, and David Winslow at this moment. Does that make this the Plumb Beach Channel?
I’ve seen Eagle before but can’t recall what I knew about it, and its fleet. Anyone help?
David Winslow has been in the boro for about a year and a half now.
Note the cloud-obscured WTC-1 to the left and Brooklyn Tower to the right aligned with the crane cable.
A bit later Saginaw Bay returned.
McCormack Boys first appeared on this blog summer 2007, and since the blog is unraveling and those photos no longer display, check
it out below, transiting the Buttermilk Channel.
All photos, 2026 as well as 2007, WVD, who’s also responsible for any errors.
Click here for previous dredgin’ posts.
I’m presuming for Cranemaster, since I’ve not found a name. As to Wavemaster, I don’t know much about her. What I do know is that Laurentia in now behind us. We are currently in the Atlantic. I took these photos in Northumberland Strait at Wood Islands PEI ferry terminal.
Et voila, the ferry.
All photos, WVD.
Name that unit? She’s worked in the sixth boro under a series of names, including Labrador Sea.
These days when you see tugboat Brooklyn, it’s almost certain, she’s Port Jeff bound with petroleum product, known to some of you but not me . . ., which petroleum product.
Ditto and looking in the opposite direction at roughly the same hour, when you see this unit, you can be certain of the which tug and towing what.
Thomas Dann once wore the same livery as Labrador Sea, back when the dann tug was called Amberjack.
Thomas Dann tows the dredging spoils brought to the surface by Virginian over in the MOTBY channel over at the foot of those cranes in yesterday’s post.
Box ship Kotka (any guesses on namesake?) inbound the KVK escorted by Kirby Moran, James D. Moran, and JRT Moran starboard forward. In the distance, the Left Coast Lifter to the left and the Staten Island approach to the Bayonne Bridge crossing to the right.
Kotka departed with this load of boxes from Singapore on January 10, another random load of cargo coming from thousands of suppliers made by –dare I say–millions of creators and transporters and soon to be distributed to hundreds of thousands of end-users by tens of thousands of transporters here.
All photos, any errors, WVD.
Kotka is a coastal town in Finland.
For a quick history of the specific sixth boro, aka New York harbor, click here from New York Almanack. For a quick glance at one of my other projects related to the NYS canal celebrating its 200th anniversary this year, click here.
In some other news, I’m heading away later this week for a jaunt or gallivant . . . not sure yet which it’ll turn out to be, but it will affect what I post.
Here were the previous installments. Sarah Ann pushes a barge past the busy cranes at Bayonne.
Here’s a different view of Bayonne Dry dock with Buchanan 5 in the foreground.
Different day, different vessel on the hard beneath the cranes. The newly arrived vessel here is USCGC Maurice Jester. To the right, is that USACE Currituck?
Thomas D. Witte passes
through the Upper Bay with
. . . I don’t recognize and can’t make out the name on that crane.
J. Arnold Witte stands by with Farrell 256.
Miss Cate and Virginian continue their dredge work in Port Jersey
here with Eastern Welder working in the foreground and HMM Dream transferring containers in the background.
Susan Miller and Desperado stand by as work continues on the Lower Manhattan Coastal Resiliency project.
I could go on, but here shipboard crane on Ottomana moves goods aboard from Twin Tube before heading off south.
All photos, any errors, WVD.
I’d seen her before in the ICW both in 2015 and 2017, so it was exciting when she came up for the dredging job in Bayonne, but I never managed to catch a glimpse of her until yesterday. She’d left the dredge area and was heading up to Jersey City, with a sizable head start.
Clearly, though, she was moseying.
Here she is, the 1982 99′ x 32′ former El Hippo Grande for a rendezvous with Katie Lynn.
AG for Atlantic Gulf Towing.
All photos, any errors, WVD.
Three years in January ago I caught this unusual ATB in the boro for the first time.
At 158′ x 52′, the tugboat is huge, as is her trailing suction hopper barge Ellis Island, at 433′ x 92′ and with a cubic yard capacity of 14,920, i.e., same as over a thousand full-size dump trucks.
Access into the tugboat is through a stern door, as seen above. Below you see three crew, there to meet the crewboat as the ATB dredge worked off NJ back in 2022. I don’t think I ever posted my PM article on a blog post, so here it is.
With their deep draft, they were in the boro last week, possibly to shelter in rough weather. Currently, they’re back at work off Fire Island.
All photos, any errors, WVD.
I first noticed Miss Cate in the boro earlier this month, a name I’d seen on AIS but never actually seen. For a few days she tied up alongside the large split-hull scow 4001, and for a few days I only managed to see her from the stern.
Next Norfolk Dredging’s clamshell dredge Virginian appeared in the boro, and Miss Cate moved tight alongside the dredge, so it was hard to get a good sense of the tugboat’s lines. Then I got a break: Thomas Dann came into the boro to pick up the scow 4001, and Miss Cate cast off from Virginian, made fast to the scow,
and handed it off to Thomas Dann. For pics of all of Norfolk towing’s equipment, click here. More pics of the hand-off to come in a future post.
Then I finally got this uncluttered view of Miss Cate. Her history I find interesting, as Birk describes here. I caught her current fleetmate Elizabeth Ann along the ICW south of Norfolk here the better part of a decade ago, although as of today, she too is heading into the sixth boro. Unfortunately, today I leave the boro for inland for a week.
I’d love to see Miss Cate closer up, but this is what I’ve seen so far.
All photos, any errors, WVD.
Tony A caught more of the Norfolk dredge fleet here last year.
The sun was setting when we met Allie B at sea. Click on the link in the previous sentence and you’ll read that’s exactly what I wrote almost a year ago about another encounter with Allie B at sea.
She’s been working on a dredge project the past month or so in the boro, towing dump scows whose registry numbers I don’t know.
Here are her fleet mates and their specs. I might be mistaken, but Dann Ocean has recently been expanding their fleet in both numbers and in the size of their vessels.
When I was early on this journey, I once drove to Quincy to watch Allie B depart for the Black Sea with a tow.
All photos, any errors, WVD.
PS: Did you see that sailboat in one of the photos above? More on that soon.
I wasn’t sure what prompted McCormack Boys to come from the dredge sites and into the sixth boro the other morning,
and when I saw it, I was initially surprised. I’d not seen a barge like this before, but
upon reflection it made perfect sense . . .
all the vessels and their multiple engines need fuel. So either you bring other companies’ tankers or tanks out there
or you get your own, which I presume Great Lakes Dredge & dock have with the functionality named 1003.
All photos, WVD.
This photo on FB “historic Erie Canal” group on December 4. It appears to show a westbound vessel approaching Lockport on the Barge Canal, no date given, but the cars appear to be mostly late 1950s models, so it could be from the early 1960s. The Rebel is pushing a barge that looks to be a tank barge lacking a manifold. Maybe it’s a deck barge or a scow. A photo from the bow would be helpful. There’s also a derrick that I thought was along the portside of the barge. All the tanks on The Rebel confused me.
Groupsourcing resulted in this fantastic identification from William Lafferty: “It was a former YSD-11 class seaplane wrecking derrick for the Navy, YSD-28. It was built at the Charleston Navy yard in 1942. It was sold in the early 1961 to King & Doan, Inc., of Georgetown, Delaware, and converted to what we see here. King & Doan was a dredging concern. The tanks hold lubricating oil and fuel for the dredging outfit, I suspect. It was sold in 1971 and went to New Orleans for a couple of owners. Seems to have passed out in the mid-1980s.”
My conclusion then is that this was King & Doan’s trip through the Barge Canal to a dredging operation somewhere on the Great Lakes, maybe a Great Lakes port, possibly in 1961 or 1962. Googling King & Doan, I come up with one of my own photos and more context.
Click on the photos below to get their original source. Photos there include one attributed to frequent tugster-contributor George Schneider.
This last one comes from William Lafferty.
Adding to these connections, George Schneider sent along this photo (scroll) of Raccoon, a USACE debris collector that works in the Bay area. You may recall the the sixth boro has its own USACE debris collector, Driftmaster, launched 1947, a different design that must surely have been influenced byYSDs.
Unrelated to this post, but to OPP 91 (scroll) and tug Thomas (Weeks) in the Netherlands on a RT from/to Ascension Island. A Youtube channel I follow recently added a 17-minute video called “Unloading Stone at Ascension Island.” It tells a different part of a magazine article I did last year here.
If you enjoy “Unloading Stone,” give Joe Franta a like!
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