staten island ferry: the John F. Kennedy

The John F. Kennedy is the oldest ferry in service in the harbor, making the 5.2-mile (8.4-km) run between Staten Island and Manhattan Island in approximately 25 minutes. She’s a beautiful old double-ender with propellers and rudders on both ends. The propellers are connected by a continuous shaft to the engines in the center of the vessel. When going forward, the rear prop pushes, the front pulls, and the forward-facing rudder, is locked into place by a pin which goes through the deck and into a hold in the center-forward section of the rudder quadrant.

forward, the pin is down:

aft, the pin is up (it weighs 90lbs)

The deckhand had just pushed the pin in, the ferry moved out of the slip. “Twenty years! This friday will be my twentieth anniversary of working here. Doesn’t seem that long. No, I’m not taking off, I’ll be here working.

“The funniest story? well, it was actually kind of sad. We were fueling and doing drills, right over there, so we were at the fueling dock. A woman jumps into the water. Well, it’s no problem, we got the lifeboat in the water, so we get over there.

“I tell you, she must have weighed about 350 lbs. And guess what she was wearing? It was summer, probably July. Guess! Spa-a-a-ndex. She was wearing Spandex. We were pulling and pulling— it was not a pretty sight—and we just could not get her into the boat.  So we had to drag her along over the side, over to the pier. Yeah, she was fine, but she was fighting us, so we had to knock her out. But she survived. I told you: funny, but kinda sad.”

Happy 20th anniversary on the Staten Island ferries, dear Sir, and thank you!!

John F. Kennedy

Commission Date: 1965
Builder: Levingston Shipbuilding, TX
Length: 277′ (84.4m)
Width: 69′ (21m)
Draft: 19’1″ (5.8m)
Gross Tonnage: 2109
service speed: 16 knots (30 km/h)
crew: 13
Passengers: 3500 / (40 vehicles, pre 9/11)
Propulsion: Diesel Electric 600 volts DC
Engines: GM-EMD-567C16 (x4)
Horsepower: 6500 (4.8 MW)

Veterans Day

Happy Veteran’s Day! In honor of our seafaring veterans, I’ve got a real treat. I stumbled acrossBowsprite’s booth at last year’s National Stationery Show and was immediately enchanted with the sea-kissed line.

Artist Christina Sun carefully and lovingly illustrates ships and seaworthy elements. “I’ve worked on little harbor work boats to busy passenger vessels to huge party cruisers, and it is the camaraderie of crew and the marine community that I love,” she explained. “Sea stories are the best — whether they are true or not.”

First up is this engaging and artful array of nautical tattoos, available as a tea towel printed on Irish linen. Each tattoo has its own meaning — “Hold Fast” across the hands was meant to give a sailor good grip in the rigging, while an anchor tattoo signifies that a sailor had crossed the Atlantic, or is a Merchant Marine. $20.

Christina also renders the ships found in New York Harbor, and these are available as tea towels as well, $20. “I love to draw outdoors, by the ship, (rather) than from photographs. Mariners tend to be quite proud of their vessels while they are working on one. Ships are beautiful, from noble traditional sailing vessels to little workboats or ferries.”

Miss January is the hydrographic survey vessel Michele Jeanne — also Christina’s first deckhand job! July meanwhile is the Staten Island Ferry John F. Kennedy, 1965.

There are lots of maritime treats to be found in Christina’s Etsy shop, so check it out! It is so easy to get lost in her lovingly rendered visions of the sea-salty life.

———————————Thank you, Sarah! Thank you, The Paper Chronicles!———————————

Are you a Vet? do you know someone who is? write me for a Veteran’s special on items in my shop. If you have served at sea, drop me a line: what vessel? where were you? what would you like to tell about your time in service?

Thank you!

 

Nautical tattoos posted upon by Owen James Burke of the Scuttlefish!

Warship 21, out to sea

Farewell, USS New York!

0740h, ch13:  “Warship 21, Warship 21, changing speed to 10 knots, over.”

background: USCGC Sailfish (WPB 87356), 87-foot Coastal Patrol Boat (WPB) – Marine Protector Class
foreground: Coast Guard Auxiliary boat Lady B, the former 82-foot U.S. Coast Guard cutter USCGC Point Brown (WPB-82362)

The USS New York makes calls after the Statue to tugs outside the KV, to the Staten Island Ferry, negotiating through another busy day :

(definitely NOT to be used for navigation! this AIS program is off by many minutes and does not read the signal from some ships. Notice: none of the official vessels are showing. Then, you have captains at anchor who don’t turn to ‘at anchor’ mode but drift in ‘underway’ mode, which is nice, because you can see them draw circles as the tides go in and out:)

before 0800h: “CG Sailfish, this is Warship 21: speed change to two-one, two-one, over.” And they go…out to sea.

2009 World Maritime Day Parallel Event

The IMO (International Maritime Organization)’s 2009 World Maritime Day Parallel Event was held last weekend on Chelsea Piers:

NOAA Hydrographic Research Vessel
208′ Ship Thomas Jefferson
(formerly one of three U.S. Navy survey ships, all named the USS Littlehales.)

Coast Guard Buoy Tender
175-foot Keeper class Coastal Buoy Tender James Rankin (WLB 555)

Coast Guard Patrol Boat
110′ Island Class Patrol Boat Bainbridge Island (WPB 1343)

Tug Boat
K-Sea Transportation Davis Sea

Coast Guard Medium Response Boat
45′ Response Boat-Medium (RB-M 45614)

Passenger Vessel: Statue Cruises ferry, Miss Gateway (sorry, not shown. She left before I could thaw out to draw her. Also, the advertised Staten Island ferry did not seem to be in attendance, but they are not far from this pier and our hearts.)

(not done yet! more to come on this event and the ships…)

a day on the kill van kull

I am fond of the Kill Van Kull—the waterway, not the band (admittedly, I have not yet heard the band.)

Unlike the magical Arthur Kill further on southwest, which is very beautiful if you blot out traces of human intervention, I like the KVK as it is.

The north side of the KVK (New Jersey) is lined with rows of tanks, tubes, and aging docks. Different colors & shapes for different companies.
On the south side (Staten Island) are shipyards, apartment buildings, a salt dock, the elegant, historical Snug Harbor, telephone poles, trees, a passing bus, Tugster’s outdoor offices.
And the meat, the juice, is the traffic that streams by, endlessly, over the water. Containerships and tankers share the road with the littlest boom boats…and tugs galore.

“Heading into the stream” is what you hear on the radio: tugs pulling barges into the ‘stream’, the federal channel. The channel is cerified to 43′ depth, but most has been dredged to 50′, to be certified 50′ by 2013 [Army Corps of Engineers].

We were working in an area that had been dredged to 45′ several years ago, but needed to be deepened. The job, going inland, was not clay, as was originally thought, but a very soft dirt. The dredge was making cuts and creating shoals at the ends, which rose up and did not make grade.

We left our little survey boat and boarded the giant dredge for a quick meeting. Friendly faces peered over, asking if I needed help making the hitch.

The dredge’s charts that shows the cuts they make is called a progress chart, and this is what the men studied while I looked around. All was neat, tidy and sparse. An ear plugs dispenser was only colorful thing there, amid all the metal and grey. Out on deck and up close, the winches were HUGE, towering in circumference over a crew member.

It was getting late in the day, the dredge crew was tired and anxious, for some had flights booked that afternoon to go back south to their homes. We got back onto the survey boat, two tugs that were on standby moved in, and the spuds were lifted on the dredge barge.

As we moved away from the dredge, we heard a loud bang from a neighboring pier. A tug pulled a barge out quickly and struck another barge, denting it and snapping its line on a bollard. Four men went running to the frayed line, and then one could see how thick that line was!

“Oh, that’s the most dangerous—an empty tanker! The spark from striking steel could instantly ignite the gases, and there would be a huge explosion,” said my boss, matter-of-factly, glancing out the window.

Me, neophyte and naive: “But, we would have survived it?”

“Oh, no. The impact would have killed us, pieces of steel the size of cars. Very dangerous. OK, ready? Fathometer on.”

Thankfully, Towmasters cleared the air with the reassurance that cargo tanks use some sort of Inert Gas System, filling the empty spaces with inert gas produced on board by using boiler exhaust to reduce oxygen that would support combustion. [Oops…I have been corrected. Towmasters writes: “Some (repeat, some) tank barges do have IGS, but they are pretty few and far between. Some of the newer Crowley ATB’s, mostly. Although there may be an exception here or there, I know of no conventional tank barges regularly working New York Harbor that are equipped with IGS. In contrast it’s commonplace on tankships, except for some of the oldest ones.

For an example of what can go badly wrong on tank barges read this post from NY Tugmaster’s Weblog about the explosion of the Bouchard 125 at Port Mobil in 2003.“]

When the day ended, I was dropped off by my bicycle tied up at an abandoned pier, and I cycled past our work site on my way to the Staten Island Ferry.

And, in front of the site, was this sign on the fence…

Indeed no, thank you!

For stunning photos taken on the KVK, please look here at the site of the intrepid kayaker, Frogma, who circumnavigated Staten Island several years ago in a kayak–about 26 miles of paddling!

brews for flus

Tuned in to VHF this morning for anything I could pick up on the clean up of the KVK oil spill or the Seastreak accident. Heard nothing about both.

But I did catch this on VHF13:

A NYHarbor tug which moves oil called out to a cruise ship, tied up at pier 88. The cruise ship responds. (Yes, I know the names; No, not naming.)

Tug: “Yeah, we’ve been here for 40mins, and not a hatch has opened.”
Cruise ship: “Oh…oh. Stand by, please, stand by.”  A few minutes go by.  “Yes, someone has gone to open the hatches, now.”

What do you say to the nice tankerman who’s been waiting on the barge for you?

sorry: posting while under the influence of flu. This is the first year I get a flu shot and BAM! hit by da bug. Hard.
To my aid came this from an old salt and top first aid administrator:

Old seamans recipe for a grog:

take a mug
fill it half with HOT water
add sugar, or honey and some citron
add half whiskey, or brandy
drink as hot as possible
take 2 paracetamol (we call it acetaminophen)

Now you have to hurry to make it to your bed, because you will probably faint. You will sweat all night. Next morning you will be still ramshackle, but are going to be ok.

This is the brew I used, killer-effective:

• 2 cups of water,

•12 to 20 thick slices of ginger,

• 3 to 4 teaspoons of brown sugar (not white)

Boil together for a good long while, until a quarter or a third of the water boils off.

Drink as hot as you can handle. It will feel like lava, but not due to temperature, but the ginger’s power.

Go to bed immediately. Sweat sear your bugs out. Wake up and thank the Goddesses you survived the brew.

*** galley version: 3 cups water, 1.5 tablespoon powdered ginger, 2 tablespoons brown sugar; boil 20 mins.
(*not white sugar. Only brown sugar.)

A tip from King Neptune:
Pickle juice.
More electrolytes than Gatorade. Just water it down to dilute all the salt.

Avoid coffee, tea and lemon: these are diruretic, which makes you move water out. Hydrate, hydrate, hydrate.

Stay healthy! Best to you if you were on the ferry this morning, under the bug, or otherwise not feeling A-1.

Happy Harbor Week!

NYHarbor was busy this week, and here are some of the highlights where partyers, stately visitors, and working mariners made it work, swimmingly:

12sept09 Saturday, 1411h  – “Requesting slow bell in the Buttermilk Channel for a flotilla of historic Dutch vessels visiting, requesting slow bell in the Buttermilk until 1500.”

Then, the navy vessels go by:

WaterTaxi to the Coast Guard Cutter (paraphrased): “Oh, please, please, may I go inbetween the navy ships? i’m just crossing the river.”

Coast Guard Cutter (verbatim): No. Denied. Forbidden. “You can stay where you are or you can go to the end and take the stern of the last vessel, but you may not cut through the parade.” The ships went by slowly, and the taxi was like a little boy who has to go the bathroom very, very badly, but could not.

The ships went up as north as the 79th boat basin, turned and went south. Here, one passes Pier 40, home to the Steamship Lilac and Fireboat John D. McKean:

Little Flying Dutchmen joined the parade:

Cargo ship Ocean Atlas steamed south alongside the Sloop Clearwater, calling out 5 bells to warn sailing vessels ahead:

Ocean Atlas (120m x 20m; draught 7.7m, destination Houston)

What ship is this?

Then, a call on VHF 13: “A flotilla in the mooring!”

The working harbor draws comparisons of the regatta to Nature: “Yeah, watch out, I got a lot of fleas here on my right.”

“Uh, Heyward, I’m going to go south of these mosquitos, see you on the 2.”

(The views expressed here are not the opinions of the blogger, who rather saves the discourtesy for the cigarette boats.)

This view is looking south, where the regatta is at the Battery. The hexagonal stupa is the Holocaust Museum, the patina’d copper green topped roof and tower is Pier A, the old fireboat station. The strip of land midground is Governor’s Island. The waters are the deep water range (fore), and Buttermilk Channel (behind).  The background land is Brooklyn. The Verrazano-Narrows Bridge straddles Bay Ridge, Brooklyn to the left and Staten Island to the right.

Sunday: Harbor Day. The morning started calmly with Half Moon and Tromp riding between Penobscot Bay and Thunder Bay. Hawser 65610 was also in service.

Sorensen Miller brought a large number of passengers onto the Warship Tromp.

The USCG Cutter Penobscot Bay began to announce on ch13 that a security zone would be in effect from 1100 until 1600: no traffic allowed on north river during that time, from the Battery to Berth 64 (about 24th street.) The announcement was made at intervals.

KP: “Kimberly Poling is in the ConHook Range, splitting the 29 and the KV buoy, headed up the north river.”
CGPB: “Kimberly Poling, this is CG Cutter Penobscot Bay, you going all the way through?”
KP: “Oh, yes, sir, I’m going to Albany, to Rensselaer.”
CGPB: “OK, well, please hug the Manhattan side.”
KP: “Very good.”
CGPB: “Thank you, have a good day.”
KP: “You too.”

KP (to buddy on radio): “Yeah, I just made it before they closed.” “You’re lucky.”

Another vessel is not as content: a series of insistent 5 blasts were made as boats were right in front of its path (photo is taken when they just cleared away.)

Arcadia, faltering: “I..I can’t believe you just crossed my bow like that…”

1003h  “Don, what are you doing, cooking everybody’s pop tarts with that radar?”
“Oh, you like that screen, huh?”

“Minerva Zoe, in the ConHook Range, headed out to sea.”

1045h “Jervis Bay (cargo) is at the KV buoy, inbound for Port Elizabeth.”
1109h Half Moon and Onrust announce they are about to fire guns. I never did hear them.
McKean: “Yeah, you can pump 25.”

Marjorie McAllister uncomplainingly steers with a partially loaded barge and heads south.

Unknown: “Can you go 1 whistle? we’re going to raise an RHA on the starboard side.” (–what is an RHA?)
Containership Bauci: “We’re coming on the 28 here, see you on the one.”

Which tallship is motoring without sails set? yes, Clipper City.

1100h – Penobscot Bay declares on ch13 the security zone is in effect, “closing North River from the Battery across to Morris Canal, Jersey City. The south marker is this unit, Penobscot Bay. The north marker is Thunder Bay, a straight line across berth 64.”

Despite the warnings all morning, boats call out.

“Penobscot Bay, we need to refuel at Morris Canal…”

“…requesting to transit north to North Cove…”

“Penobscot Bay, we need to get across the river to the Battery…”

“…do you have a radio on there?” (If this does not elicit a response, try to talk louder.)

Penobscot Bay responds to almost all of them, and repeats: “… you will have to wait until the end of the race, at 1600.” “If you do not have a flag, you may not enter the security zone…” “Negative, you may not enter the security zone…”

sundry tugmen: “How about some working channels here?” “Wouldn’t it be nice to have a race channel on the working harbor?”

The DEP’s North River, going on North River after the security zone is in effect.

to be continued…

Central New Jersey Rail Road Terminal, Jersey City

Voilà, the gem of Liberty State Park!

The Central New Jersey Rail Road terminal (1889), also known as Communipaw Terminal is one of the most beautiful buildings of New York Harbor. Twenty tracks and four ferry slips provided the terminal with streams of cargo, supplies, passengers, workers. The palatial waiting room has a gabled ceiling three stories high and the most grand view of Upper Bay and the Manhattan and Brooklyn skylines; it now houses Liberty State Park’s Visitor Center. Statue of Liberty ferries leave from the slips.

However, the treasure lies behind this elegantly proportioned and well-maintained edifice:

the old tracks are overrun by a jungle of native flora, Nature come to reclaim her domain. Twenty tracks of young trees, tall grasses and weeds flourish, the dark old steel structures are lost amid the riotous green, the sidewalk cracks are colored in by little grasses and sprouts. A beautiful light filters evenly through the open trestles. It is dramatic in full sun, and magical on grey days:

(if it weren’t foggy, you’d have seen lower manhattan when the camera turned west at 0:25, looking out the building)

Nature’s indefatigable force is inspiring. Nothing we make–with all our might!–is going to last. No better proof exists than in the photographs of shipbreaking captured by Edward Burtynsky and Andrew Bell. Or, in the quieter photographs our own Tugster, closer to home, in the Kill van Kull.

What will last? Nature. Of which we can still claim to be a part, despite all our efforts.

“Nature is not a place to visit, it is home…” Gary Snyder, The Practice of the Wild