Ask the Dispatch: What was that unusual ship spotted on the Hudson River?

If you looked toward the Hudson River last week, you might have seen an unusual vessel that wasn’t a tugboat or a cruise ship, and that seemed to be anchored, but was moving — very slowly. 

The ship was the Ariadne, and she (in traditional nautical culture ships are given the pronoun “she”) is a cable-laying vessel built in Norway in 2009 and acquired in 2017 by the Asso Ariadne Navigation Co., Ltd., in Cypress, Greece. She’s 130 meters long and 25 meters wide and can accommodate up to 106 people. 

The Ariadne is named after a character from Greek mythology, the daughter of King Minos of Crete. As the story goes, Ariadne helped Theseus defeat the Minotaur by providing him with a ball of string so he could retrace his way out of the Minotaur’s labyrinth. It’s an appropriate name for a ship that is laying down a long line of cable.