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Welcome to a new cutter
FDNY’s Firefighter II provided a welcome salute The Coast Guard’s newest Fast Response Cutter, the Vincent Danz, arrived on North River Pier 86 by the Intrepid Museum on Wednesday ahead of her commissioning ceremony on Friday. The cutter is named for an NYPD officer and Coast Guard reservist who died in the September 11 World Trade Center attack. The Danz was met at the Narrows by the FDNY’s Firefighter II who provided a water salute on the way up the Upper Bay and North River. While at the pier, the Danz crew took the ship’s 26-foot cutter boat out for a spin. Danz is available for tours daily through Saturday, though only in the afternoon on Friday. Once commissioned, the cutter will head through the Panama Canal to its new homeport in Guam.
The crew took the 26-foot cutter boat out for a spin while at the pier 
A 45-foot response boat from Station New York was on escort duty 
The cutter boat back in its bay 
The North River as seen from the bridge -
Turning into the tide
The B. Franklin Reinauer/ RTC 81 ATB (a 4,000 HP tug built in 2012 paired with an 86,000 barrel barge) spent the early hours of Tuesday morning anchored on the North River off West New York. By 8:30 am she had pulled up her hook, pivoted into the flood tide and headed for the Upper Bay where she anchored on the Bay Ridge Flats.
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Back and forth
Dann Marine tug Coral Coast came down the North River Saturday morning with a cement barge from the plant in Ravenna, NY, passing the Port Imperial ferry terminal in Weehawken. Coral was on the way to the cement distribution terminal in Flushing Bay in Queens. After spending about 24 hours unloading there, she headed back north, arriving back at the Ravenna plant in the early hours of Monday morning.
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Holding the fort
A large FDNY fireboat came up the North River Saturday afternoon, passing the sailboats moored at Pier 40 and Jersey City. At first glance, this appeared to be the North River fireboat, Three Forty Three, returning to her base at Pier 53 near Gansevoort Street. But closer inspection reveals this to be Firefighter II, the nearly identical sister to Three Forty Three which resides at the Homeport Pier on Staten Island. Three Forty Three is I believe actually out of service at this time, having last pinged AIS at the GMD Shipyard in Brooklyn Navy Yard in March, leaving the Marine 1 Pier 53 base unoccupied for now and Firefighter II the only large boat available. On Saturday, Firefighter II traveled up as far as the Harlem Piers at the end of 125th Street before returning to Staten Island.
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Private contractor
The veteran tug Liz Vinik, 64 years old and 3,000 HP, headed up the North River Thursday morning with A&S Transportation sludge barge Maria. The barge would be loading treated residual solid waste at the North River sewage plant and ferrying it to the Passaic Valley plant in Newark for dewatering there. The city normally employs its own fleet of small tankers for this work but for the past six months or so we have seen privately operated barges occasionally servicing the plant, which might perhaps be a result of two of the city’s five tankers being out of service.
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Cooperation at the dam
Work continues at the Gateway Tunnel cofferdam site off Pier 66 on the North River, with funding for the rail tunnel project restored by court order earlier this year. Tug work is spread across a range of locally active towing firms and Thursday morning found Haugland Group towboat Emma Rose maneuvering a crane barge while Stasinos’s Brynn Courtney delivered a deck barge loaded with cement silos.
The cement will be mixed with mud and water and pumped to the bottom inside the cofferdam to reinforce the riverbed so that tunnel boring machines can eventually move through. The work is gradually shifting from last-year’s mid-channel site and is now closer to the Manhattan shoreline.
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Donjon Standby
Wednesday evening found DonJon Marine’s dredging team standing by with the tug Casey Ann and dredge Delaware Bay seemingly spudded down just outside the pier head line off North River Pier 86. Maintenance work at the Manhattan Cruise Terminal appears to perhaps be wrapping up or taking a pause.
Further north, DonJon colleagues on Brian Nicholas were tied up at the Sanitation Department’s Pier 99 transfer station with a green Pratt Industries paper recycling barge nearby.
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Atlantic Coast comes back up the coast
Dann Marine tug Atlantic Coast, which I believe normally works out of the Delaware River or Chesapeake Bay, spent some time on the North River this week with the Vane tank barge Double Skin 51. We also saw her up here back in March with the DS 53 barge. Atlantic left North River anchorage on Monday afternoon and headed for the Upper Bay where she remains as of Tuesday evening.
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Getting takeout
Dann Ocean’s Captain Dann, 53 years old and 2,250 HP, ran light up the North River early Wednesday morning. The Captain was heading for the Feeney shipyard in Kingston where they were likely collecting a barge. Monday morning finds her starting her week at the Vane Brothers dock at the mouth of the Gowanus Canal in Red Hook.
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Passing through at sunset
The bulk ship Sound Pearl, Bahamas-flagged and 615 feet in length, came down the North River at sundown Saturday evening, heading for anchorage in the Upper Bay after discharging a cargo at the Port of Coeymans. She had arrived there from Iskenderun, Turkey and I don’t know her cargo but a guess would be that it could have been gypsum, bauxite or some other input to the cement manufacturing process.
Observations on the Hudson River as it passes through New York City. The section of the Hudson which passes through New York is historically known as the North River, called this by the Dutch to distinguish it from the Delaware River, which they knew as the South River. This stretch of the Hudson is still often referred to as the North River by local mariners today. All photos copyright Daniel Katzive unless otherwise attributed. For more frequent updates, please follow northriverblog on Facebook or Instagram.
North River Notes 