2022 Tug Talks

The 2022 Tugboat Roundup will feature four tug talks and the Mariners’ Roundtable. All Tug Talks take place inside, upstairs, in the Hurst Harbor Center. The full schedule is below.

Boomland: 140+ years of commercial vessels on NYS Canals

Saturday, 9/10/22, 10 AM

Speaker: Will Van Dorp

Using vintage photos from the New York Canal Society archives, Will’s lecture will portray a time when tugboats & barges were ubiquitous on New York’s inland waterways, particularly on the Barge Canal, which opened as the Erie Canal’s third iteration in 1918.  His talk will examine the different types of cargo vessels that passed through Waterford and other Barge Canal towns during a time the canal was primarily a commercial waterway.

Will Van Dorp is an independent writer/photographer based in NYC.  He grew up near the Barge Canal in Wayne County NY.  His stories/photos have appeared in Professional Mariner, Pacific Maritime, The New York Times, and other publications. Since 2006, he has documented/photographed tug/ship traffic in NYC and elsewhere on the maritime blog at this URL: https://tugster.wordpress.com. He has posted over 5300 times, with tens of thousands of photos, which have been seen/read more than 2.9 million times. He taught English in US, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Cameroon, and Congo, where he first rode on a tugboat four days and four nights non-stop up the Congo River to get to his first professional job. He was director/writer for the documentary "Graves of Arthur Kill," a study of a marine scrapyard in the Arthur Kill between Staten Island and Carteret NJ. From 2016 until 2019, he was onboard lecturer on Blount Small Ship Cruises vessels Grande Mariner and Grand Caribe, the only overnight passenger vessels using the NYS Canals between New York City and the Great Lakes/Saint Lawrence River. And most important of all, he worked as deckhand on Urger in the 2014 navigation season.

The Seneca Lake Deep-Water Survey: A Project to Discover Forgotten Canal History

Saturday, 9/10/2022, 11:30 AM

Speaker: Art Cohn

Through underwater exploration, the Seneca Lake Deep-Water Survey aims to preserve the history of New York’s Canals by using state-of-the-art equipment to capture never before seen images of intact Canal shipwrecks from the early 19th century discovered in the deepest parts of the lake. Art Cohn, the project’s principal investigator and scholar, will present on his team’s incredible findings over just two years of survey work, including the identification of the only known intact “Clinton’s Ditch” era packet boat on the bottom of Seneca Lake. The project is a collaboration between the New York Power Authority, NYS Canal Corporation, NYS Office of Parks, Recreation, and Historical Preservation, NYS Department of Environmental Conservation, NYS Museum, the Lake Champlain Maritime Museum, Middlebury College, the Erie Canalway National Heritage Corridor, and the Finger Lakes Boating Museum.

Art Cohn, an underwater archaeologist, professional diver, historian, educator and advocate, is co-founder and former director of the Lake Champlain Maritime Museum and Research Institute. Cohn has coordinated and participated in Lake Champlain’s archaeological projects for the past thirty years. Cohn has a B.A. in sociology from the University of Cincinnati in Cincinnati, OH, and a J.D. from Boston College Law School. In 2000 and 2001 Cohn was a Member of the U.S. Delegation to the United Nations Educational, Science and Cultural Organization’s convention for the protection of underwater cultural heritage. Cohn is an Adjunct Assistant Professor in Maritime History and Nautical Archaeology at both the University of Vermont and Texas A&M University, as well as a member of the Ferrisburgh Volunteer Fire Department, a chaplain and a tugboat captain.

I Was There and Survived: Free Time with Wunder

Saturday, 9/10/2022, 1 PM

Speaker: Captain Steven R. Wunder

Capt. Wunder will take attendees of this talk on a voyage of discovery through the people, vessels, places and stories that mark his long and storied career on New York’s Canal System.  Some material may not be suitable for younger audiences.

Captain Steve Wunder is a lifelong canal and tugboat enthusiast. He is a 32-year veteran of the NYS Canal Corp and long-time captain of the Tug Urger. Captain Wunder was integral to the development of the Urger’s educational program brought the story of the Erie Canal and to thousands of people all along New York’s waterways.

Mariner’s Roundtable

Saturday, 9/10/2022, 2:30 PM

Professional mariners, retired and working, gather to swap stories, tell tales, and take questions.

J. Arnold Witte: A New Tugboat for a Storied Waterway

 Saturday, 9/10/2022, 4:30 PM

Speaker: Bill Sullivan

Bill Sullivan will discuss the design and construction of Donjon’s newest build and the 2022 boat of the year: J. Arnold Witte.  He will discuss why Donjon chose to invest in a vessel capable of transiting the dimensions of the NYS Canal System at a time when commercial utilization is thought by some to be diminishing, but is really seeing a resurgence.

Bill Sullivan, Manager of Regulatory Compliance and Vessel Repair at Donjon Marine. Donjon Marine was founded in 1964 by J. Arnold Witte as a marine salvage and transportation company. Today Donjon operates the largest shipyard of its kind on the Great Lakes and has dredging, recycling, heavy lift marine operations spanning the globe.