Here is proof of my dedication to this project. I go out in all weather to find the ships! There was a layer of low-lying fog on the lake this morning. It reminded me of some smoking horror movie that takes place on the moors in some English countryside.
The scaffold arm that is shown in this picture, I discovered, has two purposes. I mentioned before that it counterbalances the ship while it's loading, but it's primary purpose is a conveyor belt for unloading the ore. In other articles on this Blog I show ships that are unloading into the long yellow conveyor building on the south side of the Marquette and Ishpeming Upper Harbor dock. They are using this same scaffolding arm to convey the ore or coal up and into the shoot at the end of the yellow conveyor building and then the conveyor takes it across the road to the storage yards and shoot the coal out into the yard so that it doesn't build up too high in one area. This holding yard has an arm also the can redirect the coal to go to different areas of the yard. These ships and the machinery that surrounds them are truly self loading and unloading. Amazing!
The James L. Kuber, a.k.a. Victory, is 807 feet long, 70 feet at the beam, can carry 28,560 tons per trip and has a Capacity per foot of draft of 1,272 tons.
I headed over to the Island after photographing this ship close up to see if I could get rid of some of the haze. It wasn't haze it was fog and there was no avoiding it, but I did get this picture of the Kuber with it's arm up. You can tell how long the arm is in this photo. The entire front of the ship is cut off in this picture so you can't see the entire length. Truly an amazing ship!
No comments:
Post a Comment