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Friday, February 26, 2021
I spent a couple of hours today, trying to learn about the tugboat graveyard I had heard of. It is called Arthur Kill and it is part of the waterway that separates Staten Island and New Jersey. My hope was to somehow obtain find a list of all of the various vessels that were dumped there. I should have not that it would not be so simple as to just perform a duckduckgo search.
I found myself veering off into different directions but I did find one photographer who specializes in maritime photography and had some shots of one of the McAllister tugs that Lenny photographed. I am contemplating whether to contact him and if so, what exactly I am going to communicate. I do not want to toss out too much fishing lines at once.
I am not sure what to do with the information I obtained. It did not give me any answers that I was looking for , no specifics. Other than the McAllister name and a reference to a tugboat named Crow (no pics of it) that participated in a tugboat “parade” a few years back, there were no tugboats that I recognized. And I could not get a sense of what happened to the tugboats from the 80’s (and earlier). It looks like I will have to go back to the Tugboats of New York by George Matteson that I had started to read. It was slow going when I first opened it up and I soon felt that there were other project-related tasks that I needed to tend to. But now that I am “sitting and watching”, why not read? But I’ll be honest: I will most likely skip to the last couple of chapters, as I want to get a sense of what has happened to the tugs by the end of the twentieth century.
In any event, here is a list (yeah, you knew it was coming) of what I discovered today as I surfed the internet, rather randomly. The waters of the world wide web were a bit choppy, I have to say. Okay - my little list:
And as I was reading, I could not help but notice that writers used the pronoun “she” for all of the tugboats, even those with recognizably “male” names like Michael or John. Hmmm.
