Posts Tagged ‘Kill Van Kull’
present position
- photo by Mitch Waxman
Maritime Sunday is with us once again, happening to coincide with Greek or Eastern Orthodox Easter (known as greester here in Astoria) as well as the 100th anniversary of the well known Titanic disaster. That subject will be explored by everyone else, I suspect, so instead let’s check out the scene on the Kill Van Kull.
from wikipedia
The Bayonne Bridge is the fourth-longest steel arch bridge in the world, and was the longest in the world at the time of its completion. It connects Bayonne, New Jersey with Staten Island, New York, spanning the Kill Van Kull. Despite popular belief, it is not a national landmark.
The bridge was designed by master bridge-builder Othmar Ammann and the architect Cass Gilbert. It was built by the Port of New York Authority and opened on November 15, 1931, after dedication ceremonies were held the previous day.
- photo by Mitch Waxman
These shots were captured while onboard one of the many Working Harbor Committee excursions I attended last summer, and portrays one of those summer days which New York is infamous for. Heavy clouds of humidity dangle, and inescapable temperatures render the entire archipelago in a tropical aspect.
from wikipedia
The Kill Van Kull is a tidal strait between Staten Island, New York and Bayonne, New Jersey in the United States. Approximately 3 miles (4.8 km) long and 1,000 feet (305 m) wide, it connects Newark Bay with Upper New York Bay. The Robbins Reef Light marks the eastern end of the Kill, Bergen Point its western end. Spanned by the Bayonne Bridge, it is one of the most heavily travelled waterways in the Port of New York and New Jersey.
- photo by Mitch Waxman
From this cauldron of wet heat emerged the vermillion hull of a Bouchard tug, the Frederick E Bouchard. It was returning from the gargantuan Port Newark complex, where it’s unknown mission seemed to have been accomplished.
From his first voyage at eleven years of age as a cabin boy on a sailing ship bound for China, Captain Bouchard knew that shipping would be his life. By 1915, he was the youngest tugboat captain in the Port of New York.
On July 30, 1916, while on watch of the tug C. GALLAGHER of the Goodwin, Gallagher Sand Co., Captain Bouchard witnessed the infamous Black Tom Explosion, which detonated $22 Million dollars worth of WW I munitions. Always one to set out to accomplish what few others could, he took his tug from the Long Dock at Erie Basin in Brooklyn and headed for New Jersey. Amongst continuing explosions, which blew the glass panes and lights out of his tug, he worked to rescue the 4,000-ton Brazilian steamer TIJOCA RIO, and the schooner GEORGE W. ELEZY, of Bath, ME. Later the US District Court awarded the Captain a salvage award and an additional award for personal bravery, which totaled $9,000. He quickly invested the salvage award to create his own company, Bouchard Transportation Company, which was incorporated in 1918.
- photo by Mitch Waxman
A fairly large boat, for NY Harbor at least, the tug made good time against the tide. Models like this one are used by the petroleum industry to ferry fuel barges from point to point along the waterfront, ensuring that bulk delivery of “product” to local distribution depots happens in a timely fashion.
Built in 1975, by Halter Marine of New Orleans, Louisiana (hull #437) as the Frederick E. Bouchard for Bouchard Transportation of Melville, New York.
She is a twin screw tug rated rated at 3,900 horsepower.
- photo by Mitch Waxman
Omnivorous, of course, the Frederick E Bouchard has also been personally observed handling non volatile cargos as well. You have to stay busy in the maritime industry, and cargo is cargo. The actual nature of the cargo may change, requiring special handling dictated by custom and regulations, but at the end it’s physics and profit margin that define the mission carried out by maritime professionals.
Law of Gross Tonnage
The law, which is more common sense then explicitly written in the code, goes like this: “The heavier vessel always has the right-of-way.”
This is based on simple Newtonian physics. Newton’s first law talks about objects in motion stay in motion unless another force is acted upon it. In other words, if a boat is moving a 5 mph east and you were in the vacuum of space, it would never stop traveling east at 5 mph. However, we all know when we stop our engine on our boat, we slow down.
How long it takes to go from 5 mph to zero, depends on wind, and current. Even if there was no wind or current, we’d still slow down, because the water itself provides friction upon the hull of the boat, and that in itself acts as a brake.
We all have, by observation found that the bigger the object, the longer it takes to slow down. Newton’s second law of physics talks about how the amount of force required to move an object is inversely proportional to the mass of the object.
So, if a tug and barge were traveling down a narrow channel, and you stopped your boat 1,000 feet away, right in front of the tug and barge; and, if the master of the tug saw you immediately; and if the master of the tug immediately began to stop the tug and barge; you’d have less than one minute to move your vessel.
Because if you didn’t move your vessel in less than 60 small seconds, the tug and barge would just run right over you. It would be impossible for the master of the tug to stop, based of the collective mass of both the vessel and the barge, in 1,000 feet.
The law of gross tonnage is un-relenting. It is a fact of life. What also is a fact of life, is that you should not depend on the master of the tug or any other large vessel is able to see you, either visually or on radar.
- photo by Mitch Waxman
As mentioned at the start of this post, today is Easter Sunday to adherents of the Eastern Orthodox church, but oddly enough, it coincides with a decidedly goddess based celebration which the Roman Empire celebrated called Fordicidia.
from wikipedia
In ancient Roman religion, the Fordicidia was a festival of fertility, held April 15, that pertained to animal husbandry. It involved the sacrifice of a pregnant cow to Tellus, or Mother Earth, in proximity to the festival of Ceres (Cerealia) on April 19.
On the Roman religious calendar, the month of April was in general preoccupied with deities who were female or ambiguous in gender, opening with the Feast of Venus on the Kalends. Several other festivals pertaining to farm life were held in April: the Parilia, or feast of shepherds, on April 21; the Robigalia on April 25, to protect crops from blight; and the Vinalia, or one of the two wine festivals on the calendar, at the end of the month. Of these, the Fordicidia and Robigalia are likely to have been of greatest antiquity. William Warde Fowler, whose early 20th-century work on Roman festivals remains a standard reference, asserted that the Fordicidia was “beyond doubt one of the oldest sacrificial rites in Roman religion.”
garret studio
- photo by Mitch Waxman
There’s a whole lot of dredging going on.
It seems that the Harbor of NY itself is desirous of silting up, which would destroy its value as a commercial port. What the Harbor is actually doing is attempting to revert to the shallow estuary it once was, following the methodologies set down by nature, but this would impede navigation and be catastrophic for both the economic and urban activities of man.
When the terrorist is nature incarnate- the Marines, Army, or Air Force can’t help you at all. Forget about Homeland Security, for any problem that involves a whole lot of dredging you send in the United States Army Corps of Engineers!
from nan.usace.army.mil
New York Harbor encompasses approximately two-dozen separately authorized and maintained Federal navigation channels. These projects, whose authorized depths vary from 8 feet to 50 feet, along with the privately operated berthing areas, generate approximately 1 to 2 million cubic yards of sedimentary material annually from maintenance dredging alone. Further, several of these channels are either under construction or in plans for deepening in the upcoming years to accommodate larger vessels calling at the port. The construction of these deeper channels will also generate substantial amounts of dredged material. The DMMP process seeks to identify and implement options to manage the material generated from both the federal and non-federal maintenance and deepening of the Port through the year 2065.
- photo by Mitch Waxman
The USACE has over the course of time reshaped the course of mighty rivers, eradicated tall mountains, and they’ve even bent the Helegaat to its will. The USACE has powers and abilities far beyond those of ordinary men, which they employ in a neverending battle for the American Way. In the case of the modern dredging observed around the Kill Van Kull and Port Newark, the Corps are ensuring that the soft bottom of the waterway will be deep enough to allow an enormous class of cargo ship called “Panamax” to safely navigate the port.
This involves the movement and dispersal of a whole lot of dredging spoils.
from nytimes.com
For more than a decade, workers using giant digging machines have scooped up enormous mounds of rock, clay, sand and silt from the waters around New York to deepen the shipping channels to accommodate giant cargo vessels that will navigate the widened Panama Canal starting in the middle of the decade.
The dredging has produced millions of cubic yards of muck.
- photo by Mitch Waxman
There’s a few different machines which are involved in this sort of thing, and not just the claw bucket derricks which are filling barges in these shots. Lots of private contractors actually do the work, with a few key players getting the lion’s share.
Some effort has been made to find shots of these various devices- photos which a humble narrator clearly remembers shooting- but they are currently lost amongst the nearly 20,000 shots which I’ve obtained and uploaded for usage at Newtown Pentacle in the last few years.
As far as my hard drives go, there’s a whole lot of dredging that needs to be done.
from epa.gov
The Administrator of the EPA and the Secretaries of the Army and of Transportation agreed to close the Mud Dump Site for disposal of dredged material in their 1996 Three Party Letter. This was in response to surveys that had shown that contaminants in the dredged material caused sediment toxicity and bioaccumulation effects in estuarine organisms. For example, worm tissue at the disposal site was found to accumulate dioxins, and both dioxin and polychlorinated biphenyl (PCB) contamination was found in lobsters. Individual elements of the aforementioned data do not prove that sediments within the HARS are imminent hazards to the New York Bight Apex ecosystem, living resources or human health. However, the collective evidence presents cause for concern, and justifies the finding that a need for remediation exists, that the site is Impact Category I (see, 40 CFR 228.10), and that the site should be managed to reduce impacts to acceptable levels.
- photo by Mitch Waxman
There’s little controversy around the idea that the government needs to keep these channels open, and lots of acrimony about what to do with the often toxic materials which are brought up to the surface. According to most sources, the sediment which rests on the floor of the harbor contains a cocktail of industrial leave behinds. Concerns are also voiced about sediments which reenters the water column and proceeds to swirl and shoal in new places.
Which brings us back to “What do you do with a whole lot of dredging spoils?”.
from nan.usace.army.mil
To accommodate the increasing need for the disposal of the assorted material, The Office of Supervisor of New York Harbor was established by an act of Congress in 1888. The Harbor Supervisor, acting through the Office of the Chief of Engineers (of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers), was responsible for the designation of specific disposal sites and for ensuring that ocean disposal would not be detrimental to navigation or pollute adjacent beaches (Williams and Duane, 1974).
Materials including garbage, city refuse, cellar dirt (natural rock and soil excavated during building construction), floatable materials, and sediments derived from dredging during the maintenance, deepening and construction of new channels in New York Harbor, were dumped at specific locations in the New York Bight Apex. Records indicate that approximately six locations were selected to receive this wide range of materials. As the material accumulated at these locations, the sites were relocated farther seaward where increased water depths alleviated concerns of potential navigation threats posed by accumulation of materials.
Hydrographic data spanning the period from 1845 to 1934 revealed that mounds of material were being formed in the general area of the submerged Hudson Shelf Valley (Christiaensen Basin), the Ambrose Light Station (Diamond Hill), and the Scotland Light Buoy. By 1914, shoaling at one of the sites reserved for dredged material and cellar dirt became a critical factor in the decision of the Supervisor of New York Harbor to separate the site usages and thus segregate the material being disposed at each site.
- photo by Mitch Waxman
Were there just some seemingly limitless abyss, an infinity of dark and cold which might just swallow up the sins of the world. Indigo, this ideal dump would boast colossal pressure and unimaginable cold whose combination might vouchsafe whatever poisons you might secret away against future discovery. Some sunken Grand Canyon, which might be neither too far, nor too close.
This would be a great place, a historic one, to dispose of a whole lot of dredging spoils.
from wikipedia
The Hudson Canyon is a submarine canyon that begins from the shallow outlet of the estuary at the mouth of the Hudson River. It extends out over 400 nmi (740 km) seaward across the continental shelf finally connecting to the deep ocean basin at a depth of 3 to 4 km below sea level. It begins as a natural channel of several kilometers width, starting as a 20-40 m depression at Hudson Channel southward from Ambrose Light, then carving through a deep notch of about 1 km depth in the shelf break, and running down the continental rise. Tidally associated flows of about 30 cm/s (1 km/h) up and down the deeper parts of the canyon have been recorded. As silt, sand and mud are carried down the Hudson River, they flow into the canyon and out into the deep sea.
The Hudson Canyon proper is located about 100 miles (160 km) east of the mouth of the Hudson River off the New Jersey coast. Its walls rise three-quarters of a mile from the canyon floor making it comparable to the Grand Canyon, whose cliffs are over a mile deep and 270 miles (430 km) long. It is the largest known ocean canyon off the East Coast of the United States, and one of the largest submarine canyons in the world. The canyon is located near the 100 meter isobath on the continental shelf and is 2,200 m (7,217 ft) deep at the base of the continental slope. Over an 80 km (50 mi) distance, the average slope of the canyon floor is 1.5°. At this point the canyon is as much as 12 km (7.5 mi) wide (from east rim to west rim) and as much as 1,100 m (3,609 ft) deep from canyon rim to canyon floor across the continental slope. The floor of the canyon is less than 0.5 km (1,640 ft) wide across the upper part of the slope and broadens to about 0.9 km (~3,000 feet) at the base of the slope.
- photo by Mitch Waxman
The deeps have been explored a bit, but not enough, by the federal agency NOAA. They report that the canyon is littered with sunken sailing ships, indian canoes, even ocean going diesel freighters of relatively recent vintage. Can you imagine, all there is, that might be down there?
from pubs.usgs.gov
The 150-km-long Hudson Shelf Valley, the largest physiographic feature on the mid-Atlantic continental shelf, bisects the New York Bight region. The Valley is the submerged seaward extension of the ancestral Hudson River drainage system that, unlike other valleys on the Atlantic shelf, has not been filled with sediment. A survey of the topography and backscatter intensity of the valley has been carried out using a Simrad Subsea EM 1000 multibeam sea floor mapping system. The valley head is located in a broad shallow basin and extends offshore 5-40 m below the shelf surface to a seaward terminus at a shelf-edge delta. The valley can be divided into upper, middle, lower and outer sections based on the topography, surficial sediments, and drainage pattern. The middle valley is characterized by 5 local topographic lows along the valley axis that have relief of 3-11 m below the valley floor. The northwestern portion of the study area has been affected by disposal of dredged and other materials since the late 1800′s. Part of this area has been designated as the Historic Area Remediation Site (HARS). The sea floor of the HARS is being remediated by placing at least a one-meter cap of clean dredged material on top of the existing surface sediments that exhibit varying degrees of degradation. A large field of sand waves is located in the lower valley in 70-80 m water depth that cover an area approximately 30 km long and 4 km wide. This sand wave field is hypothesized to be part of a flood deposit that formed as a result of the break-out of glacial lakes in upstate New York approximately 13,500 years BP. In the eastern-most part of the survey area in water depths greater than about 110 m, the sea floor is marked by long narrow northeast-southwest-trending grooves that are interpreted to be iceberg scour marks.
ALSO:
March 5th, as in Monday night:
Riverkeeper and NCA ask: How’s the Water? How’s Newtown Creek?
Join Riverkeeper and the Newtown Creek Alliance for a presentation on water quality in the Hudson River Estuary and its tributaries, focusing on the waters around Manhattan Island and in Brooklyn’s Gowanus Canal and Newtown Creek.
March 5, 2012, 7:30PM to 9:30PM
Brooklyn Brewery, 79 North 11th Street, NY map
and March 6th, as in Tuesday
Like this:
average specimens
- photo by Mitch Waxman
Captain Zeke is an 88 ton tug owned and operated by the White Near Coastal Towing Corp. of Syosset, and was built as the Lady Ora for Falgout Marine at Houma Shipbuilding in Louisiana back in 1980. Unfortunately, neither the company nor the tug have much information available about them, so there’s little more that can be said beyond its size- which is 30 m x 8 m, and its maximum recorded speed of 6.4 knots versus its average of 5.5 knots.
- photo by Mitch Waxman
Captain Zeke ran into a bit of trouble just a few years ago, on the Hudson River.
Spontaneous combustion involving paint rags in a fidley opening may have been the origin of the Aug. 31, 2008, fire aboard the Capt. Zeke, a Coast Guard investigator said. When their fire extinguishers proved inadequate, the tug crew fled to one of the barges.
- photo by Mitch Waxman
Speaking from a position of strictly deductive reasoning at this point, due to a lack of available information about this tug and its owners- Captain Zeke has been personally observed about the harbor moving small loads of a decidedly non volatile nature, as in the previous shot wherein the cargo seems to be sand.
It would be logical to assume that this role is well suited to the relatively small tug, which can most likely get into narrower spaces than the mated tug and barge gargantua which are employed by large players like Reinauer, Moran, or K-Sea (whose vessels specialize in the handling of volatiles) for the transport of various fuels and the handling of cargo vessels.
This theory is contradicted though, by this posting at the blog tuglife, which shows Captain Zeke tethered “on the hip” to a fuel barge.
- photo by Mitch Waxman
In the shots above and below, which were captured on the Kill Van Kull, Captain Zeke is tied to the sort of barge one regularly observes at Newtown Creek handling the SimsMetal trade in bulk metal. It is damnably odd, in the opinion of this humble narrator, that so little information is available online about this vessel. Normally, commercial maritime activity is copiously documented by a variety of private and government entities.
Regardless of this information vacuum, Newtown Pentacle’s “Maritime Sunday” nevertheless recognizes and sends a hearty greeting to Captain Zeke and its crew.
wild dances
- photo by Mitch Waxman
It’s Maritime Sunday again, here at your Newtown Pentacle, a weekly post which focuses in on and examines some aspect of NY Harbor- or the Sixth Borough as our friends from Tugster call it.
As many of you know, your humble narrator is quite the enthusiast for such matters, and serves as a Steering Committee member for the Working Harbor Committee. This role and set of interests often puts me in a position to witness and photograph interesting circumstance around the harbor, which these “Maritime Sunday” postings endeavor to share.
Today’s spotlight is cast upon the Moran Towing Tug “Kimberly Turecamo”.
- photo by Mitch Waxman
There are quite a few tugs with the surname Turecamo that are operated by Moran Towing, the result of a merger between two towing companies in the age of corporate expansion and conglomeration. The founder of Turecamo Coastal was born on an island in the Tyrrhenian Sea called Isola Lipari, part of the Aeolian Archipelago that straddles the distance between Mount Vesuvius and Mount Etna in fabled Italy. Lipari has a long and sordid history, a story which stretches back in time to the Estruscans, Greeks, and the Romans. The Island was once conquered by Arab Pirates, after all.
This of course, has nothing to do with the Tugboat Kimberly Turecamo, its just nice to know where certain folks hail from. The guy from Cake Boss on the TLC Channel, and Natalie Imbruglia- their dads come from Isola Lipari as well.
Turecamo Coastal and Harbor Towing Corporation was foundeded by Bartholdi Turecamo, who immigrated from Isola Lipari, a small island between the northern coast of Sicily and the southern tip of Italy. As an immigrant Turecamo found work in road construction around New York.
- photo by Mitch Waxman
Kimberly Turecamo, the tug, is from Louisiana. She also was one of the ships which assisted in the evacuation of lower Manhattan on September 11, 2001. One of the great stories from that day, it’s only the persistent modesty of those sailors who managed to move more than a quarter million people out of harms way that prevents this story from pervading the popular imagination.
Sailors are a different breed, and immodest only amongst themselves.
from morantug.com
It is reported that as many as 300,000 people were evacuated from lower Manhattan during an eight hour period following the attacks. When the evacuation first began, Moran had 11 tugs on the scene, each taking as many as 100 people to designated sites around the port, and to New Jersey. “After the initial surge of evacuation, we went down to about five boats on the scene, still working around the clock, and after four or five days we still had two boats working there at the end,” said Keyes. “As soon as the people were taken off, the boats were used for moving emergency crews, equipment and supplies.”
Moran tugs logged a total of 256 hours during the operation, according to Keyes. The tug Turecamo Boys was on the scene longest, with 84 hours logged, followed by Marie J. Turecamo with 51 hours and Margaret Moran with 49 hours. Other tugs involved with the evacuation were Nancy Moran, Brendan Turecamo, Kathleen Turecamo, Diana Moran, Kimberly Turecamo, Miriam Moran, Turecamo Girls and Catherine Turecamo.
- photo by Mitch Waxman
The iconic white “M” on their black stacks, coupled with the scarlet hull and white detailing, make Moran tugs the easiest craft to spot in NY Harbor. As mentioned in the past, there is just something iconic about them, and if you were to ask someone to describe a tugboat blindly- they would probably craft an image of something not unlike the Kimberly Turecamo.
Built in 1980, by McDermott Shipyard of Morgan City, Louisiana (hull #255) as the Rebecca P.
The tug was later acquired by Turecamo Maritime where she was renamed as the Kimberly Turecamo .
In 1998, Turecamo Maritime was acquired by the Moran Towing Corporation where the tug retained her name.
- photo by Mitch Waxman
Kimberly Turecamo is at work in the shot above, guiding a fuel tanker through the narrow Kill Van Kull waterway. The Kill Van Kull at it’s narrowest point, between New Jersey and Staten Island, is a scant thousand feet wide and might boast a depth of merely 40-45 feet above the soft bottom. The cargo ships which come here in pursuit of trade are ocean going vessels whose titan engines would provide a lack of subtlety in handing such conditions.
The Kill Van Kull is a tidal straight, incidentally.
from morantug.com
Moran commenced operations in 1860 when founder Michael Moran opened a towing brokerage, Moran Towing and Transportation Company, in New York Harbor. The company was transformed from a brokerage into an owner-operator of tugboats in 1863, when it purchased a one-half interest in the tugboat Ida Miller for $2,700.
At the time, the Harbor was alive with ships – many of them still sail-powered – and Moran’s enterprise soon grew into a fleet of tugboats. It was Michael Moran himself who painted the first white “M” on a Moran tugboat stack, reportedly around 1880.
- photo by Mitch Waxman
An interesting bit of trivia about the harbor of New York is that its natural depth is a mere 17 feet, but was deepened by the actions of dredging to 24 feet before the end of the 19th century. The large ships of modernity utilize shipping channels which are deeper than the surrounding area, in particular the Ambrose Channel- a 1914 construct.
Ambrose leads the way in from a spectacular natural formation, a depression on the continental shelf called the New York Bight.
The Bight is clove by the terrifying depths of the Hudson Canyon.
from wikipedia
The western edge of Newark Bay was originally shallow tidal wetlands covering approximately 12 square miles (31 km2). In 1910s the City of Newark began excavating an angled shipping channel in the northeastern quadrant of the wetland which formed the basis of Port Newark. Work on the channel and terminal facilities on its north side accelerated during World War I, when the federal government took control of Port Newark. During the war there were close to 25,000 troops stationed at the Newark Bay Shipyard.
Like this:
crooked boughs
- photo by Mitch Waxman
This Tug, the Gramma Lee T. Moran, was mentioned in a Newtown Pentacle posting of November 26- “loose and displaced“. As it’s one of my favorite tugs in New York Harbor to shoot, I felt a little bad that the starring role in that posting had gone to a cargo ship- and that Gramma Lee T. Moran had to share the second banana position with another Moran Tug- the estimable Marion Moran.
Can’t tell you why I like the esthetics of this ship so much, nor can I say why exactly it always reminds me of the Millennium Falcon (from the Star Wars movies) as it slides along the Kill Van Kull.
from wikipedia
The Kill Van Kull is a tidal strait approximately 3 miles (4.8 km) long and 1,000 feet (305 m) wide separating Staten Island and Bayonne, New Jersey, USA. The name kill comes from the Middle Dutch word kille, meaning “riverbed” or “water channel.”
Kill Van Kull connects Newark Bay with Upper New York Bay. The Robbins Reef Light marks the eastern end. Historically it has been one of the most important channels for the commerce of the region, providing a passage for marine traffic between Manhattan and the industrial towns of New Jersey. Since the final third of the 20th century, it has provided the principal access for ocean-going container ships to Port Newark-Elizabeth Marine Terminal, the busiest port facility in the eastern United States and the principal marine terminal for New York Harbor.
- photo by Mitch Waxman
These two shots are from just a few months ago, captured in the fall of 2011. It’s always odd seeing a tugboat operating without a barge, or tending a larger vessel which can be hundreds of times larger than itself. The majesty of these ships, and their crews, come alive when they are tasked with bearing such sisyphean burdens.
Can you imagine what it must be like guiding a fuel tanker into the narrow Kill Van Kull or down the East River? It must take nerves of steel to muster the confidence needed to Captain such tasks.
from tugboatenthusiastsociety.org
Tugs are “displacement” hull vessels, the hull is designed so water flows around it, there is no consideration for having the vessel “plane”. Because of this the hull form is limited to a maximum speed when running “free” that is about 1.5 times the square root of the waterline length. As the tug approaches this speed when running “free” it is perched between the bow wave and the stern wave. Since the hull cannot plane, application of additional power when approaching maximum hull speed only results in a larger bow wave, with the tug “squatting” further into the trough.
- photo by Mitch Waxman
The shot above, and the one below are from earlier in 2011- April to be exact.
Moran is a well established company which operates tugs all over North America. A century and a half old, the company’s fleet can be found on the USA’s Pacific and Atlantic coasts and within the Great Lakes, both along the west coast of- and in the Gulf of- Mexico, and within the inland waters of the eastern United States. They’ve been known to operate periodically as far away as the Caribbean Sea and South American waters.
from morantug.com
The LEE T. MORAN is an expression of brute power and utility that belies the refinements of technical engineering below her waterline. There, twin ports are cut into the steel hull to make room for the tug’s Z-drive units. On the floor of the shop they look like the lower units of giant outboard engines. Made by Ulstein, a subsidiary of Rolls-Royce, the Z-drive functions much like an outboard. Imagine two outboards extending straight down through the hull, each having the ability to rotate 360 degrees. That makes even a heavy, 92-foot tug with a 450-ton displacement very maneuverable. “It can turn on a dime,” says Doughty. “The hull bottom is slightly flatter to adjust to the two drive units. By turning each drive out 90 degrees, the captain can go from full-ahead (14 knots) to a dead stop in no time.”
- photo by Mitch Waxman
Perhaps it’s the low slung aspect of the wheelhouse, or the gentle curves observed in its hull… I can’t say, but there is just something pleasing about the design of this boat. A big toot goes out from this, your Newtown Pentacle, to one of my favorite citizens of the NY Harbor- the Gramma Lee T. Moran.
Moran Towing began operations in 1860 when founder Michael Moran opened a towing brokerage, Moran Towing and Transportation Company, in New York Harbor. In 1863, the company was transformed from a brokerage into an owner-operator of tugboats when it purchased a one-half interest in the tugboat Ida Miller for $2,700. Over time Moran acquires a fleet of tugboats. It was Michael Moran who painted the first white “M” on a Moran tugboat stack, in 1880.
