I found a kayak!

Decided to go out for a short paddle & strokes practice tonight & tomorrow night, to get warmed up for the Hudson Valley Symposium. Tonight's was decidedly enlivened by finding a stray double kayak partially beached, partially wedged in some pilings. First thing I did was ascertain it was just one of Manhattan Kayak Company's that had gone astray - if I hadn't recognized it, I had my VHF with me & I would have reported it & just waited there until somebody came. There were other people out & about & at first I thought about getting help, but conditions were pretty quiet so I decided to get it myself & see if I could have it out & in tow before anybody else happened by (which I knew was only going to be a little while). Seemed like good practice. Once I decided to do that I got a rather ridiculous amount of entertainment out of jockeying my Romany into a good spot, keeping an eye out for wakes, figuring out how I could best extricate the double from the pilings that it was wedged between without putting myself in an overly awkward situation(I ended up cheating a bit & jumping out of my boat for a minute to get it started, it was shallow & unusually good footing for the Hudson River - most of the river bottom is soft mud, but here it was nice solid gravel & small stones, as you can see!), getting it away from the beach & clear of all the pilings, then trying to empty it out (it is HARD to do a "curl" on a swamped double full of rocks) and then towing my stray back to it's home. I did get a little help getting it up on the dock - turning it up on one gunwale, we were able to slowly empty it of water. I left the rocks for MKC to deal with, that part isn't going to be NEARLY as amusing. Hee hee.