Thursday, December 11, 2014

Crounse Week, Day 6: Infrequent visitors

Because of the way Crounse Corp. organizes its business and dispatches its towboats, we see the Linda Reed and the Paula Ruble up here in the Greenup pool fairly often, but the other three new boats far less frequently.

One warm morning in the fall of 2010, I got a call from Adam's school saying he was sick and needed to come home. I went and picked him up, but I had to stop along the way so he could open the car door and throw up. When we got home, he went to bed. He got up a little while later, and I told him the Janis R. Brewer had passed through the Greenup Locks and Dam a few hours earlier, and we might be able to see it at Catlettsburg. If he wasn't feeling better before, he was then. We were able to leave before the school bus traffic began, and we got to Catlettsburg in time to see the Brewer at a spot where Crounse parks empty barges and at Boggs Landing.


As you can see, the afternoon sun was bouncing off that white boat pretty good. The company's new boats appear to be painted white with gray trim, while the older ones are an off white, almost a light gray, with green trim. They photograph better in bright light.


A year later, Adam and I got to see the Jackie Englert. You can read some details here, but I went back into my archives and found some additional photos from that day.




That's two of the Reed and one of the Englert, but at the time seeing the Reed and the Nancy Sturgis traveling together was more interesting.

So far we've not seen the Leslie M. Neal. Perhaps you could say that if you've seen one of these boats you've seen them all, but that's not our goal. We want to see them all, but we can be patient.

Next: Some of my favorite photos of Crounse boats.



3 comments:

Anonymous said...

The Leslie Neal hardly ever goes above Ghent or Markland, very seldom. To see it you would have to come closer to Louisville. And have you ever gotten any pictures of the Linda Little, our "Flagship"?

ohio981 said...

I don't know anyone at Crounse on the inside, so what I know about the company's business practices is limited. What I've been told is that the Reed and the Ruble work out of the Maysville office and the other three new boats work out of Paducah, meaning they rarely get up to the Greenup pool. Maybe to Catlettsburg, but rarely above there. As for the Linda Little, I don't know that I've ever seen it.

Anonymous said...

I ride the Linda Little, it is a beautiful boat it was built in 1975. Mississippi Marine in Greenville MS. It was orginally built for Walker Towing out of Paducah and was named the Agnes Mae. Between 1992-2003 a total of 5 different companies owned it and at one point was named the Lauren C. We purchased it in 2004 and renamed it Linda Little, after the wife of our President Steve Little. It very rarely gets above Ghent or Markland though. It's 4300 and 140 ft long 38 ft wide.