I previously published an article featuring photos from an early-morning walk across the Brooklyn Bridge on September 12, 2022. The fog was heavy that morning and my photos showed the Freedom Tower gradually becoming more and more obscured by the haze. We have had a number of foggy mornings since September 12. One of these mornings was on October 5. Shortly before I photographed a falcon in Brooklyn Bridge Park (see regular photos and RetroBoy app photos), I stopped to take a shot of the Manhattan skyline from the park. However, the star of the photograph was not the Freedom Tower, which was again almost entirely consumed by the fog, but instead a small white and powder blue tugboat pulling a large barge up the East River.
The tugboat’s nose is just about lined up with the outer edge of the South Street Seaport (the current iteration of the Seaport is much less aesthetic than the per-Hurricane Sandy version, alas). Meanwhile, the stern of the barge had only just passed the southern tip of Manhattan. Big barge. Big rope. Small tugboat.
The tugboat did have a name, but I was not able to read it and my Teracube 2e camera does not zoom well enough for me to have taken a closer picture. But even though we cannot put a name to the brave little tugboat, we can give the boat its due here in the online pages of The New Leaf Journal.