Vessels: Year Two A Tale of Tugs of Two Cities
It's been a year since MarineNews linked the dual tugmeets of the first week of September, one in New York City, the other upstate, at Waterford. Coupled, they make an interesting study, for their differences as much as their similarities. The tugs of New York City come in all sizes, but are typically large. Just as New York is a city of (many) skyscrapers, so it's a city of (many) monster tugboats, as harbor craft go. Waterford, a few miles north of Albany, is the gateway to the Erie Canal - is actually on the canal. While New York State's canals have renewed potential for commercial service, they're known most widely as recreational attractions for people who drive (many) large and pricey boats.
Royal Caribbean's Adventure of the Seas Arrives in N.Y. Harbor
A clear, sunny Saturday afternoon of November 10, set the stage for the arrival of the first passenger ship into New York Harbor following the September 11 terrorist attacks. The vessel, Royal Caribbean's Adventure of the Seas, sailed into New York for a two-day tribute cruise for the families of the fallen firemen and police officers who were victim to the devastation at the World Trade Center. Royal Caribbean also plans to donate $50,000 to the Twin Towers Relief Fund. The 142,000-ton Adventure of the Seas - sister ship to Voyager and Explorer of the Seas - was christened at Pier 88 and named by representatives of the New York Police Department and New York Fire Department.
On Tugboats
There have been plenty of books published on the subject of tugboats in the past few years, sharing a cookie-cutter similarity - they're large, handsome, colorful, well-produced coffee-table volumes, which pretty much cover the same introductory material in the same glancing way. In all those regards and quite a few more, Virginia Thorndike's On Tugboats is a different sort of book. For starters, it's not large nor particularly handsome, and not all that well-produced - a standard paperback printed in black-and-white on paper that will probably not last for centuries. But then, it is a book crying out to be read, where coffee-table books ask merely to be seen.
