Bottom Of The Bay

What’s In A Name? It Depends Upon What’s On The Menu

- Peter Bass

Ah, summer. Back in my Maine days, we treasured the high season be-cause we could, on most days, act as if it were warm and wear things such as shorts and T-shirts. Here at the bottom of the Bay, we have already had more days with temperatures in the 90s than we would during a whole summer in Maine.

This year’s Norfolk Harborfest was memorable from several standpoints: the biggest collection of tall ships since OpSail 2012, a reopened Waterside dining and entertainment complex on the Norfolk side and a fireworks display bigger than the customary bang-up affair. I wandered the piers by Waterside in a forest of square-rigged spars, an experience that took me back to the Age of Sail. I am lucky that the news headline the next day didn’t read, “Balding man with beer wanders off pier while looking upward with mouth open.”

Tugboat Choreography

An article in our local daily newspaper, The Virginian-Pilot, alerted us to the arrival in Hampton Roads of a Chinese heavy-lift ship carrying a 500-by-140-foot floating dry dock built in Turkey for Colonna’s Shipyard in Norfolk. After semisubmerging to float off the ship, the dock was towed and nudged across the Bay, essentially to my front window on the southern branch of the Elizabeth River. From there it was guided through the Berkley Bridge on the eastern branch of the river to Colonna’s. A quick look in my chart book showed a horizontal clearance of 150 feet at the Berkley Bridge, a space that, according to my advanced mathematical training, left 5 feet on each side.

A marvelous photo of the transit, taken from a helicopter, was on the Virginian-Pilot