Tag: photo friday

Current Photo Friday theme: Boat

On the horizon: Just one day shy of six years since I took this photo while we vacationed with family at the Gulf of Mexico. We got some weather thanks to Tropical Storm Cindy but had a great time despite that. I’ve visited the Gulf of Mexico from the Keys, the dividing line between the Atlantic and the Gulf, around the shorelines of Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas, all the way down to South Padre Island. Love the North Atlantic coast and every bit of the Pacific coast I’ve visited, but the Gulf of Mexico is wired into my personal history, hurricanes and floods included.

I asked my go-to source for marine vessels if he could make a guess what this boat is, and here’s what I got (thank you! and OMG, I’m always impressed by people’s knowledge): It’s likely that that tug actually functions here as a type of push boat. There’s some way it’s mated up to the barge it’s pushing, but it could disconnect once it gets the barge to its destination. It appears to be a work barge of some sort. Maybe it lays pipe, or builds/services some sort of facility. It has the slanted bow of a vessel designed to handle rough water, to a greater than usual extent. The tug has its full crew. The barge is probably lightly staffed until it gets to its work site, at which point a full corps of workers are transported to it. The reason the tug is pushing instead of pulling is that by being behind the barge it’s in its lee from rough seas. If towing, it could be at the “mercy” of the seas, which when towing isn’t necessarily a great place to be.

If you have an interest in boats and ships in the Gulf of Mexico, this is a site that tracks that area or, if you zoom out, the whole globe, to show locations of Containers, Tankers, FSO Tankers, Cargo, Car Carriers, Passenger, Military, Tug & Pilot, Fishing, Sailing Ships, Ferries, Autonomous, Submarines, Icebreakers, Tall Ships, and Super Yachts. Just in case you were hoping to run into a billionaire or a spouse in hiding somewhere on the high seas. (Does that make you wonder if at least one of those plot lines could be in the Neverending Saga?)

Back to the Gulf of Mexico, if I ranked my favorite songs by John Mellencamp, “Pink Houses” would definitely be in the Top Five. It also joins the canon of songs misused because people don’t listen to/think about the lyrics. I chose this particular live video because he’s using my favorite of his guitars, a Gibson Dove acoustic (with “Fuck Facism [sic]” scratched onto the body).

Well, there’s people and more people
What do they know, know, know
Go to work in some high rise
And vacation down at the Gulf of Mexico
And there’s winners, and there’s losers
But they ain’t no big deal
Cause the simple man baby pays the thrills
The bills, the pills that kill