Enormous, fully loaded container ship deftly spins 180 degrees in place using bow thrusters and the aid of a single tug.
Southbound in the Buttermilk Channel
Buttermilk Channel: the large and the small of it. Current had just turned to southbound so in addition to the container ship leaving the Red Hook Container Port, there was a parade of tug & barge units coming down the East River - and then Carolina spotted something odd up to the north.
What is it? A seal? A dolphin? A piling with a seagull flapping on it? Nope, it was a guy laying on a surfboard paddling with his hands. We asked if he was OK, thinking maybe he was a standup paddler who'd lost his paddle. He said he was fine & paddled on.
All I can say is, "Whoa, dude. Long way to the break."
More on why I ended up in Red Hook, instead of helping out with spring dinghy prep at the Sebago club work day on Saturday, tonight, or sometime this week outside of work hours, but I happen to have the chip I was using over the weekend with me and I just couldn't resist popping these up now. Never quite got the stand-up paddleboard as a means of travelling distances on flat water (although they look absolutely awesome for surfing), so this I thought this was just wild.
15 comments:
At least the tugboat and ferry captains will now think of us kayakers as relatively sane and safe, in comparison with this guy! :-)
No kidding, right? Safe & sane & relatively easy to spot. Carolina spotted him first - we were actually driving around the end of the dock & we stopped because she saw him. I really thought he was a piling or a railroad tie at first. We actually got out of the van because we wanted to make sure he wasn't a SUP-er in trouble - we were in a pretty good spot to help if he had been.
As it was, we were really wishing we had a VHF - we expect that those tug captains were probably turning the airwaves blue. We tried to tell the guy that he was a little far out in the channel but he felt like he was OK & we didn't see much point in arguing with him.
Weird thing to see out there!
Hi,
That was me you saw paddling.I'm training to paddle from the East Village to Rockaway Beach. I've been kayaking in Manhattan for over 15yrs in folding kayaks (Manhattan circumnavigations, paddling out to the LI sound, paddling to and around Staten Island) so I'm pretty comfortable in the waterways. You couldn't see it but I had a marine radio on my back in case of emergencies and my dry bag is bright orange. Here's the full route of the paddle you saw:
http://runkeeper.com/user/hippophagy/activity/81710178
I was just getting started. Not sure if you called the Coast Guard but they came out and said someone saw me and said I'd been paddling for awhile and I "looked like I was struggling". I skipped a week of paddling so I was taking breaks as I went. I'd like to think I wasn't "struggling" but I guess that's how it looked. Got to keep training.
Thanks for your warning about the channel. I appreciated your concern. When you are paddling that far it's nice to get out where the water's moving and to cut out some of the turns of the shoreline a bit.
Matt
If barge captains refer to kayaks as "speed bumps" (per Susan Fox Rogers in My Reach), I wonder what they call lie-down paddlers? Roadkill, maybe?
Hi, Matt! Good luck with the paddle, and thanks for the explanation - I thought we were seeing the birth of the latest fad! That was not us who called the Coast Guard about you. We could see that you were wearing a wetsuit, that you had a drybag of gear, and you looked like you were chugging along just fine when we saw you. We figured we'd ask if you were OK just to be on the safe side, 'cause we'd never seen anything like you.
We were a little worried about how far out you were because it was tug parade time - when the current changes at Hell Gate, they all come down in a string, and they really need the entire channel to operate, and Carolina thought there might be more on the way.
Harry, I suspect that the words a tug captain would use to describe a lie-down paddler would be entertainingly colorful and strong enough to be entirely unsuitable for use in this blog (I get enough hits from elementary school libraries that I'm pretty conscious about keeping it clean.
Matt does carry a VHF - maybe he can tell you!
The more 'odd things' there are on the water the more commercial boats will look out for 'odd things' It's just that transition period where a few of us will be part of their learning - I wish he would - curve.
It may be nice "to get out where the water's moving and to cut out some of the turns of the shoreline a bit," but you're surely hard to see from the wheelhouse of a tug pushing a light fuel barge. Someone could easily run over you from behind; and where you were is where a tug and barge would have been had they had to pass traffic coming from the other direction.
I'm amazed that the Coast Guard allowed Matt to keep going. It's the waterborne equivalent of lying down on a skateboard and coasting down the middle of 10th Avenue. Sure, there might not be much traffic at the moment, but when there is...you're in mortal danger. Don't want to be reading your obit in the Times, Matt...
He did mention he was cutting the corner there. Maybe he'd gotten back over to the side when they came.
The Coast Guard's reluctance to play nanny to the recreational boaters around here has actually been a blessing - representatives of the commercial shipping industry have from time to time asked for restrictions on recreational craft (frequently using "you can't ride a horse on the highway" as an argument). The Coast Guard has just never seemed terribly interested in something like that - as long as the recreational set are properly equipped, following the rules of the road, and not making a hazard to navigation of ourselves, they leave us alone.
I bet this one had some heads shaking on the CG boat too but if they'd thought the guy was endangering himself or others, they would've terminated his voyage without thinking twice about it. I trust them to make the right call - if they didn't stop him, he was probably OK where he was when they found him.
That being said, I do hope that the hipsters of Brooklyn don't see him out there and decide that that surfing miles from the nearest break is sufficiently ironic to be cool...
The potential for ironically pre-worn "Williamsburg Surf Club" t-shirts alone may be irresistable...
Maybe they could just have the t-shirts & not go in the water. That would be even more ironic, right?
:D
Seriously, though...I shouldn't joke too much. The visibility issues here are real - as I posted on NYCKayaker last night, when we originally spotted Matt, we couldn't figure out what he was. We could see the orange, but with the black wetsuit, we initially thought we were looking at a large piece of timber with a ball buoy or maybe some dock flotation attached. He was almost within hailing distance when we figured out what he was. Forward sightlines from the wheelhouse of a tug pushing a barge being quite restricted, there's a good chance that from an approaching tug, he would've been gone from view before anyone on board would have figured out what he was - and even if they did figure him out, it would be too late to do anything about it.
That's true of kayaks, too, though. Maybe a little less so than of a person lying down on a surfboard, but a smart kayaker paddling NY Harbor will always asssume that they are invisible - because a lot of the time, it's possible that for all practical purposes, they are.
For the record I normally stay about 10-20 feet from the shoreline. I'm well out of the channel 99% of the time I'm paddling.
The Coast Guard didn't ask me to get out because I wasn't doing anything wrong. They even called in to HQ to get word from the folks in charge and I was allowed to continue my paddle.
Matt
Thanks for the clarification again - I'd figured that was the case; before I got up onto my safety soapbox I had started out by saying "if they'd thought the guy was endangering himself or others, they would've terminated his voyage without thinking twice about it."
I actually winced a bit at the "like a skateboard on 10th avenue" analogy 'cause it's entirely too close to the "horse on a highway" thing that the commercial guys like to use as an argument that NONE of us little guys belong out there.
Know this is what we see,and encounter...intelligence at its best!!!
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