Labor Day was a day off for many of us on land, but tugboat crews were hard at work, with tanker traffic fairly heavy. Evelyn Cutler began the morning anchored off Edgewater after seemingly loading a barge at Bayonne’s IMTT overnight. Tugs with loaded barges normally do not anchor in the River, but perhaps the holiday meant a delay at the delivery point. Later in the morning, Evelyn left the River and anchored in the Upper Bay, to be replaced by Reinauer’s Haggerty Girls and Kirby’s Lincoln Sea.

Janice Ann Reinauer, one of the newer (if not newest) ATBs of the Reinauer fleet, came down from Albany with her barge looking fully loaded and signaling Providence. This is the third time this summer we have seen this atypical counter-flow of loaded tankers coming south from Albany instead of moving north with cargos loaded in New Jersey. All three ATBs have been Reinauer, and this is most likely ethanol moving to Albany by train and then on to New England by barge. Janice Ann passed the anchored Haggerty Girls on the way down, and the photo below provides a good illustration of the different profiles of two similar barges, one loaded and the other light.

Kirby’s Lincoln Sea arrived on the River with its enormous barge empty and dropped anchor. At 474 feet, Kirby’s barge is over 60 feet longer than those of the Reinauer ATBs seen earlier. I have not seen Lincoln on the River before, though she is based in NY Harbor, and this ATB may be a bit long for River work. In any event, she seems to have spent most of the summer working in Florida and the Gulf and was arriving today from Cape Canaveral.