A Dazzling Gig for Bowsprite, and Mothership Found!

Bowsprite's offline and away for a while, and doubtless having a wonderful time, but I found myself wishing she was with me for a moment at City of Water Day on Saturday when I spotted this dazzle-patterned gig.

King Tide one of the handsome fleet of handmade Whitehall gigs built and rowed by the Village Community Boathouse. These are a traditional small craft here in New York Harbor; in the days of sail they were used to shuttle all sorts of goods & people about and according to one person who was once telling me about the history of the boats, nobody knows whether Whitehall Street was named after the boats, or whether the boats were named after the street. Don't know if there's any more truth to that than there is to the story that Buttermilk Channel got it's name because back in the Nieu Amsterdam days, farmers used to swim their cows across the channel to pasture and the water was so rough that the milk would turn to butter in the udder, but it's similarly entertaining to repeat, so, I do! Ha!

Anyways...King Tide is a highly eyecatching boat anyways - but a few weeks ago I might have just figured the paint job to some particularly jazzy op-art thing (after all, the titular Village of this Community Boathouse happens to be the historically jazzy & artistic Greenwich Village). Seeing it when I did, though? I knew it for the Dazzle-inspired pattern that it is, because I'd quite recently read Bowsprite's fascinating overview of this WWI-era camouflage pattern.

Certainly seems to be working on this young man!


Oh, and p.s. - as long as I'm giving shoutouts to blogging friends...a big "Thank you" to Tugster, who has spotted the long-lost Sebago kayak mothership down in Key West (no, no, not the first one, scroll down a bit). Lost how long? So long we didn't even know we had it. That's OK, I'm sure I can drum up a posse to go down & reclaim that which is clearly rightfully ours - especially if I schedule the mission for November, when it starts to get cold and dark again! Chaaaaaarge!