The Steam Tug Danie Hugo.

These last few days have been in the 90s, no kind of weather to go out Blipping.  So, I have spent some time sifting through my old photographs, taken decades ago in South Africa.  My favorites amongst these, I have scanned from the original negatives or prints, and set up as a rotating gallery on the Lock Screen of my computer. 
One of these special old images from 1972, was taken by my late older brother who was a gifted photographer, and also very skilled in the darkroom.  He was able to produce beautiful prints with lovely tonal gradation.  The subject is one of the tugs, the Danie Hugo, that worked the harbor in Cape Town back then.  She was always my favorite, so my brother went down to the harbor one afternoon to shoot a series of photographs for me.  The only one that survives is this beautiful broadside captured in the Alfred Basin, the very oldest part of Cape Town's harbor.  Whether by intent or not, he used a tele lens which has foreshortened the perspective, and caused 3,500 foot Table Mountain to loom even larger than life over the city.
The Danie Hugo and her twin sister, the F.C. Sturrock, stationed in Durban, were among the last, and arguably the most refined of the steam tugs, built in 1958 at the Ferguson Brothers shipyard in Glasgow for the South African Railways and Harbors administration.  Here's a link to the details. 
To my eye, these tugs represent the perfect melding of form and function: the long, low after-deck providing ample space for the towing aspects of a tug's work, the beautiful curve of the gunwale culminating in the leveled-off prow, the lovely curves of the white-painted upper works, and capped by the fabulous teak wheelhouse.  Even the smokestack is perfectly in proportion.
Sadly, in 1982, the Danie Hugo was cut up for scrap in Walvis Bay, Namibia. But her superstructure and wheelhouse were saved, and in 1993, incorporated into a restaurant called, not surprisingly, The Tug, right on the ocean in Swakopmund, Namibia.  Here's a link to the restaurant's website,  and another which shows how the tug’s superstructure became part of the building.  She lives on!