the harbor whore

Today starts the sixth and final week of this voyage for me. I went ashore last night for a little R&R (Sushi, and some expensive cheese from Fairway market) and to load up again on groceries for another week's voyage. This week I've been taken down a peg, filling in as tankerman on someone else's barge, but it's all the same to me, cash for my impending trip to Brazil. I've been harbor whoring - making myself available on my off-time, since New Years', and it's starting to tell. I'm pretty beat. This is my last time "working over" for a few months. The bags under my eyes are getting bags under their eyes, I think.

This week has brought some monkey business to New York harbor. The weekend started off on the wrong foot when some dink dumped a bunch of containers off a ship and onto the bunker barge alongside it- no injuries, thank God, which is a miracle, considering. This wasn't one of my employer's pieces of gear, so I don't know anything first hand, but check it out:


Amazing, really, that no one was hurt.

In other news here, the Blue Marlin is here to carry a passel of tugboats to Nigeria for a second life. This type of heavy-lift ship ballasts down until her decks are deep under water, whereupon her cargo is floated over the deck, and then the ship pumps ballast and rises up under the cargo before securing it for sea. I snapped a couple of pics this morning. The thing is huge- well over 200-foot of beam. Check it:



This is a forward house design- the thing's so wide that it looks odd from this angle- at the port and starboard end of the stern are the stern castles- seen better from a stern view:


Bear in mind that you could place a whole NBA regulation basketball court between those two structures on the stern.



She's since been repainted, but if the name sounds familiar, it's because you've seen the Blue Marlin before, after the USS Cole tragedy.

Using the rhetoric "You can fit a boat on a ship, but you can't fit a ship on a boat" no longer applies.