scenes from the sixth boro and gallivants beyond by any and all the crew
Know the build years for these boats? Answer below.
Fort McHenry and Fort Schuyler
Bohemia
Patuxent
Choptank
Jacksonville
Anacostia
Fells Point
Anacostia again
Jacksonville again
Cape Fear
Dates of build: Fort McHenry 2016 and Fort Schuyler 2015, Bohemia 2007, Patuxent 2008, Choptank 2006, Jacksonville 2018, Anacostia 2009, Fells Point 2014, Cape Fear 2018.
All photos, any errors, WVD
What’s going on here?
The next two photos show icebreaking from USCG 65′ icebreaker Hawser. Click on the image below to see video and hear the sounds.
The top image as well as all the rest here I took, recording the USCG recording the icebreaking video.
WYTL-65610, built at Barbour Boat Works in coastal North Carolina, was commissioned 53 years ago! Click here to see photos from Barbour as well as a long article I did about my ride-along from more than a decade ago, breaking ice up north of the Hudson Highlands.
A glance at my photo library from 2024 shows that on this date flowers were blooming in my local park!
Heading for USCG Bayonne, Hawser passed Dobrin at the Statue.
All photos as credited, WVD.
Over the years, this blog has featured many boats built by Blount. Among sixth boro boats, a lot of familiar names on this record of their shipyard history of the yard opened by Luther Blount. The list is not complete because it has not been maintained since around 2022 because of the passing of Tim Colton, keeper of the lists.
Of the Blount boats active in the boro, the oldest has to be Twin Tube, a chandlery boat that began life as a tanker.
I still miss her boom, but these days I suspect she’s as effective delivering goods to ships in port without as with.
Another prolific Narragansett Bay shipyard is SENESCO. A glance at this incomplete shipyard history also shows that a number of vessels that transit the sixth boro came from there.
Windserve Frontier came off the ways there less than two years ago, and she’s no longer the latest CTV to launch from SENESCO.
The list of changes in evertything marine-related in the 74 years between the launches of these two boats is too long to enumerate, but notable is the fact that Narragansett Bay still matters in the world of US ship and boat building, and
that’s worth noting.
All photos, any errors, WVD.
But first . . . glory halleluyah: the photos are back, the early years November 2006, December 2006 . . . . The photos had been disappearing, I alluded to it first here, I was thinking to give up, BUT wordpress tech support [aka happiness engineers] has come through and fixed the problem. The trigger came when this first pic of me canoeing through the bushes in New Hampshire below–from circa 2004–became a broken link. I wanted a graphic record of who I was 20+ years ago.
Well, it’s back. Grand hat tip to the robots, the ロボット, theingenieros de la felicidad, and the humans. Feel free to go back and peruse those early years. Below is another from a few years later. It had also disappeared but is back.
But enough of that, and back to blog business . . . views of the sixth boro and beyond. The “beyond” part starts back up in April 2026. I hope you’ll join me. The boro is icy! The NYC Ferry is not running. I’m hearing a lot of folks saying “Ice out!!” By the way, in some places in the world what floats in the waterways is trash. Ice is much preferable, given that.
With temperatures below freezing for mre than two weeks, a lot of ice had grown in the boro.
The year is one for the record books.
Dobrin took it very slow,
although the big orange ferries just crashed on through.
Ice was broken, then refroze.
Daisy Mae seemed to drift for a while in a clearer area
If you live near the sixth boro and have not come out to witness this year, bundle up and come see for yourself before the temperatures dissipate this beauty of winter.
All photos [except the two returned vintage ones], any errors, WVD, with gratitude to the wordpress “happiness engineers” as maybe all engineers should be called.
Related: If you’ve not been following the ice situation in the Great Lakes aka inland seas, check out GLERL here.
Here were the previous NRT 10 posts. Today is a non-random day, which I’ll explain below.
So photos of the lion tugs, beginning with HMS Justice, seemed appropriate.
The non-randomness of today needs to be confronted head on, like this
bargbe, muscled forward by CF Campbell.
Adeline Marie as well wears the lion.
All photos, any errors, WVD, who has witnessed–or can have– over 27,000 sunrises as of today. I’m grateful to be still counting.
Jill was lightering Torm Louise the other day. The Danish tanker has since left for Houston, and Super Ice notwithstanding, the tanker is heading for warmer water, a port sans ice. Note the image of the penguin on Torm Louise‘ superstructure?
x
A week or so ago, Jill was also lightering [I think] this time from RTC 145 and Christian Reinauer.
Lucy waited for the tide with an ice-glazed RTC 60.
RTC 104 headed out, pushed by
Twins.
Gracie headed for the yard.
And with RTC 42, it’s the unmistakealble
Franklin. I’ll bet the climb to the upper wheelhouse on a day like today is a cold prospect. And I hope there’s a high-output heater too.
B. Franklin‘s here with RTC 81.
All photos, any errors or outright misunderstandings, WVD.
Hints exist here that it’s winter, like snow on the distant roofs as well as on parts of the sand piles in the shadows most of the day. Fewer but unmistakeable clues are here too about the temperature: ice chunks floating on the water and glazing on the hull.
Here the season looks to be winter mostly because trees in lower Manhattan lack leaves. Some ice glazes the stern of Mister Jim too.
More subtle is the blue/white tugboat out beyond Margaret. That’s Mary H with barge Patriot; they stay very busy in winter at the top end of Newtown Creek, so long as ice there is broken up so that the creek is navigable to the tank farm. In the first photo above, you catch a glimpse of the port bow quarter of Patriot off to the right side of the image.
Note more snow and
more ice glaze.
Winter work, it just
goes on.
All photos, any errors, WVD.
Some interesting post scripts here, first, enjoy a few aerials of salt and ice on the Delaware here.
Of course, this is a huge sports weekend and month. By that I mean the I-500 today and the big TV event tomorrow here. Later this month, it’s the 2026 Quebec Winter Carnival ice canoe race (La Grande Virée des canotiers) happening on February 28. See highlights of last year’s race here.
Imagine the scale?
Tampa Triumph is among the largest container ships that call in the boro.
Corcovado [know the reference or translation?] looks as large
but compared with Tampa Triumph, it’s 219′ shorter and 10′ narrower.
Notice anything unusual about this vessel?
It’s one of eight, certainly the newest fleet calling at the boro. Venture follows three others on the blog: Voyager, Victory, and Verde, No doubt I’ve missed some. They connect the boro to the Caribbean and Latin America. As to size, Venture is 387′ feet shorter and 50′ narrower than Tampa Triumph, whose sister Tokyo Triumph and Taipei Triumph are also regulars in town. I’m waiting for Timbuktu Triumph.
Corcovado [hunchback] is a wanderlust-provoking name carried by several mountains in South America, and you’ve seen one, I’ll bet, because a large statue is sited on it here. It’s also a bossa nova song.
All photos, any errors, WVD,
By the way, there once was a tanker named Timbuktu, the last name it carried before scrapping. To end on a wild digression, Timbuktu, a Sahara city, does have a port, and Mark Moxon has sailed there.
For reference, here was the article about crew transfer vessels that brought me here. There is a paywall. It’s also here.
February 4, 2025 I took this photo. This mural contains enough info to establish the location. I’d arrived in town late afternoon so that I could met my contact in the wee hours.
On February 5, after completing prelims and safety checks, we rode the tide out of the Acushnet, second in line through the open Route 6 swivel between Fish and Pope Islands heading across Buzzards Bay for an opening in the Elizabeth Islands, and
four and a half hours later, we saw the beginning of our destination.
The area is huge, as are the components. The top of the yellow structure in the foreground is approximately 80′ above the water. Large as it is, the infrastructure is not as large as that of other offshore energy projects, as you see here and here. If you’re not convinced, here’s another previous post.
The smaller vessel here between the nearest tower and the mother ship is our sister vessel, a crew transfer vessel (CTV), whose function is
exactly as it sounds. Transferring crew safely at sea, particularly with ship-to-ship or ship-to-structure, requires dedicated equipment and protocols as well as trained crew.
Transfers complete, we began the four and a half hour voyage out of the area and
arrived back in port well after dark.
After hearty sustenance and sleep, it was time to head home and write the story on a really tight deadline.
I hope you like the calendar pic; I did have a wealth of photos to choose from.
All photos, any errors, WVD, who is grateful for all cooperation from multiple companies. For the record, in order to get permission for this trip, I needed to successfully complete an online safety course. “It’ll take an hour and a half, ” my contact said, but I had to spend about five hours on it. Guess I’m a slow learner!?
Here was the January ’26 calendar choice.
As to US offshore windfarms, the past year has been “complicated,” but as of Monday, all five offshore wind farms under construction again have a green light for now. For an article from a few years ago, click here.
Cold wind, floating ice, those change nothing, as
there’s work to do and
money to make . . .
Franklin and Liz, a chance encounter off with different missions entirely.
All photos, WVD.
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