Pier 63 Maritime on a warm summer night
Pier 63 Maritime on a rainy Saturday in fall -
And so the season is drawing to a close. Soon it'll just be the hardy paddlers with the river all to ourselves (and the nice warm Half-King will start to be the place for our post-paddle pints) again.
A couple of other shots I took upon finding myself at the piers on a stormy afternoon - I was scheduled to work on the schooner but both afternoon sails were cancelled. I was glad, too - it was a good day for a walk and some pictures (I'd brought my camera knowing that it was not unlikely that the sails for the day would be a washout), but see those darker patches on the water in the piershed picture? That's where strong gusts are sweeping up the river (the weather reports indicated gusts to 34 knots) & those aren't much fun to deal with on a sailboat. It's not so bad that we wouldn't have gone, although without a lot of sails, if we'd had some madly adventurous passengers who were gung ho - but we didn't, they cancelled, and I expect that the captain probably didn't try to do any arm-twisting - this kind of gusty, shifty stuff makes for some kind of headachey sailing. A nice steady wind is much more fun.
The old Pier 64 piershed in the rain -
The pilot house of the retired (and abandoned, sunken and salvaged) lightship Frying Pan (named after the Frying Pan Shoals off Cape Fear, NC, of which she warned other vessels with lights & horn from 1930 to 1965) -
Of course my idea of "a good day for a walk" may not be everyone's idea of "a good day for a walk" - as long as I'm dressed for it & it's warm, I'm happy - sort of like the quiet you get on the river on days like this one.
This is the Christopher Street Pier - I have gone past this pier a hundred times this summer if I've gone past it once - this is part of the developing Hudson River Park & I've been meaning to go see it by land for ages!
I actually set up a new Buzznet gallery with more of the barge - I also added a couple more to my Schooner Adirondack gallery - note on the first one, if you happen to remember the picture I posted of the Adirondack's battered bow, this is what her bow is supposed to look like. The cable that runs from the tip of the bowsprit down to a fitting right at the waterline is the bobstay - that's what broke on the Adirondack in our unfortunate incident with the Pioneer.
And speaking of the Pioneer, the captain of that boat is a real gentleman - not only did he speak to Captain Sarah afterwards out of concern that there not be bad blood between our boats (even though he wasn't even on board when it happened, he is their primary captain and felt strongly that he needed to talk to here - he'd seen my Adirondack shirt at the Mayor's Cup post-race party & asked me to let her know that after I told him that she'd just left) - he actually invited the entire crew of the Adirondack to the Pioneer's year-end volunteer party. I actually really thought of going but in the end...well, I've been so busy lately, and I'd just had this image in my mind of how much I'd like there to be a nice, rainy weekend day to stay home curled up on the couch reading a book while a big pot of homemade split pea soup simmered away on the stove, and after wandering the riverside in the rain for hours, that just became irresistable. But I thought that was awfully nice of him to do that.
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