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Friday, 3rd March 2006 by Alex Turnbull
Perhaps the captain of this barge on the Mississippi has had a little too much to drink, as he appears to have crashed into the river bank. Whoops!
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Nahhh — even in his most lubricated state Capt. Haddock would never plow into a riverbank – he is far too professional for such shenanigans. Now, if Snowy were at the wheel …
It’s not as bad as this: http://koti.mbnet.fi/~soldier/towboat.htm (someone posted this in an earlier thread here, so I am NOT taking credit!).
What’s creepy is that this appears to have just happened, judging from the visible wake.
This actually pretty common. There was a good article in the New Yorker in the last couple of years written by a guy who spent a week on a tug shoving barges up the Ohio (I think) river and he described this maneuver.
The navigable portions of the waterways are much narrower than the river in general. They are divided into segments. As a tug enters and leaves each segment he negotiates with other tugs approaching or in that segment as to who will have right of way based on size and direction of travel. If the channel is too narrow for both boats one will nose-in to the bank and hold there while the other passes.
Hunt up and down these rivers and you’ll find other tugs nosed in / Google Earth. In this case I don’t see the ‘other’ boat but usually you’ll see another tug very close either approaching or just past.
You can see the captain there, at the wheel, but he is looking up….his log entry says: “Just spotted something directly overhead, appears to be a lens looking down at us…what the devil?” …. WHAM!
Gotta disagree with you there, DBerkowitz. Snowy could win the frickin’ America Cup, and he’d be sailing this in it too. It would take the Thompson twins to do that.
There’s another waiting to beach here:
View Placemark / Google Earth
And here is one that looks as though he is moving out after a passing move:
View Placemark / Google Earth
I’m amazed at how close to the riverbanks a lot of these tugs get.
Ya got me there Tim – but what if Snowy spotted a bone on the shore?
Hey, Papapenguin, is it me, or in your second link is there another shot of the same barge just a few hundred meters up the river?
lol good eyes. yeah it looks like the same one
They also do this in order to re-tension their lines. It’s fairly normal to see them nosed-in.
Barges are also “parked” this way fairly commonly in order to wait for their turn in locks. We see this just outside the locks at Louisville, KY all the time.