Showing posts with label hercules. Show all posts
Showing posts with label hercules. Show all posts
John Beatty's Navy
Labels:
barge,
bgem,
crane,
hercules,
John Beatty's Navy,
minesweepers,
naquillity,
navy,
river graveyard,
ship,
sunken ship,
towboat
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Curiosity finds my outturned feet spitting across creosoted railroad tracks with my daughter close behind. We come to a spot of flatlined green searching for a safe way down to the Ohio river from our side of the banks. We pull our bodies into shade while our eyes are drawn to a listing, half-sunken ship called John Beatty's Navy.
Story goes... an unnamed barge sank in 1992 just off Maysville's shore. In 1994 city of Maysville hired John Beatty, a riverboat captain, from Warsaw to raise the barge. He used two old Navy minesweepers that were hooked together by beam, cradling a crane. His efforts were lost to river mud. The towboat Clare Beatty damaged her engines pulling the minesweepers free. One minesweeper now rests belly up like a beached whale.
The Hercules barge and crane succeeded in pulling original barge free only to have its crane break as the barge broke surface. Hercules now partially pins the barge it was meant to save.
The western shore of Maysville is now known as the Bermuda Triangle of the Ohio River. To some this may be a river junkyard but on this sunny, Sunday afternoon it's a chance for mother and daughter to scavenge the shoreline while taking in a bit of history.
Credit:
"Proud armada rusts in river's graveyard" Monica Dias, Cincinnati Post, 9/16/98
Researching John Beatty's Navy I found that the Clare E. Beatty tugboat was originally called Semet-Solvay (1940) and renamed Semet (1947). In 1971 she was renamed Clare E. Beatty and sank in 2000.
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