Sunday, March 01, 2009

Boat blogger's gathering, 2/27/09

Boatbloggers 030

Alright, I've stayed up late putting up a set of Flickr photos from the boat blogger gathering on Friday, so I might as well link here (half the other attendees already have really nice posts about it, I'm feeling slow).

The get-together came about through a bit of serendipity.

Brian & Will & me are all schooner people. Although I am (somewhat regretfully, but necessarily) retired from "schooning" for now, I worked as crew on the schooner Adirondack for 5 years. Brian & Will both volunteer on the Pioneer (I'll link all these up at some point, too late right now) at the South Street Seaport Museum, and Brian actually started working for the folks who run the Adirondack a year or two ago. I think I actually met both Will and Brian in person sailing on the Rosemary Ruth. As happens with busy people in NY, though, we don't actually see each other much. We ran into each other (and Brian's girlfried Karen, who coincidentally freelances for the publishing house I work for, small world) briefly at the Mary Whalen's birthday party, but that possible opportunity for catching-up got wrecked because I got invited to go on a tugboat ride. Anyways, to get to the point, recently we'd been seriously saying "We have got to get together for dinner", I wanted to meet new blogger Bowsprite, who's friends with Will & Elizabeth, so we were in serious discussions about a late February get-together.

In the meantime, Adam of Messing About in Boats and Peconic Puffin Michael have been enjoying the occasional lunch & beer & thought it would be fun to invite me. And since the 2 proposed dinners were about a week apart, I suggested that we combine them. And then various people invited various other people and we ended up with I think it was 13 people there. We had a lot of fun, drank a lot of beer, and at least 3 of us have admitted to having hangovers this morning. Mine was particularly ironic since the discussion I was having with Will, Elizabeth & Joe revolved around the topic "Isn't it nice to be old enough to know how much beer is enough?", as we passed sodden & sad-looking club kids who were being poured into cabs by their friends, or gently lowered to a sitting position on the sidewalk.

My Optio doesn't do that well at night. I don't mind that as it's a brilliant little toy for daytime outdoor photos, which is mostly why I have it, but I sometimes just don't bother bringing it at night. I did this time, though, and I get about 15 pictures which were either passable or seemed to help illustrate last night's fun!

Attendees and their blogs:

Will Van Dorp - Tugster
Will's partner Elizabeth - Sex in the Public Square
the Bowsprite
Brian & Karen - A Movable Bridge
Joel Towmasters (btw this post got delayed for half an hour because I went over there & couldn't stop reading)
John Summit to Shore - and Vicky, his wife (they were on that first fabulous Jones Beach sealwatching paddle, the one with snow)
Michael http://www.peconicpuffin.com
Peconic Jeff Peconic Windsurfer (again, got stuck watching ice sailing videos...)
Adam Turinas Messing About in Boats/
John Huntington Control Geek

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