Perfect Weekend Part 3 - Swimming!

Part 3 of the perfect weekend (now 2 weeks ago) was finally getting in a swim at Brighton Beach! I'd been craving a swim all July and probably going back into June, finally got my act together and went on the 19th. 

Subway was somewhat worrisome; most of my subway ventures have been to midtown for doctors' appointments, and on those trips, the subways weren't crowded and almost everybody was wearing masks. The Q to the beach had a lot more riders and I think the festive air of being beach-bound on a hot day seemed to make people a little loosey-goosey about masks - people still had 'em but there were a lot of under-the-nose masks, chin masks, or just held in the hand masks. I was unfortunately just wearing one of the surgical masks I wear for day to day errands - I actually have a couple of N95's, one of which a friend who's a nurse gave me specifically for doctor visits. I have no idea why I didn't think to wear that on the subway but when I posted about this on FB, another friend who's a nurse (thanks Laura!) suggested getting an N95 to make beachgoing a little safer for myself. My response was something along the lines of "Oh, derp. I have one." So that'll help.  

Would also probably help if I went earlier - I'd been on the fence between a swim and a lazy day at home, didn't decide until I think 2:00 or so, and then of course it took me longer than I thought to get my gear together. 

The beach threw me for a bit of a loop, too - the groups I've been paddling with at Sebago, which have tended to max out at maybe 15, and usually less, have been the biggest crowds I've been in since March. Now, if you know Coney Island and Brighton Beach at all, and you look at these photos,  you'll see that this is a very thin crowd compared to normal years - but after all that self-isolation this just felt like THRONGS. I was a little bit freaked out and thinking of maybe going home when one of the CIBBOWS  crew happened by and talked me down (ok, it wasn't that hard, but he saw me and said hello at a really good time to get me back into "gotta swim" mindset). 

So I joined the CIBBOWS group and went for a fun short swim. It was breezy, and a little bit bouncy, and the current was running pretty hard towards Jamaica Bay, so it was a little bit like swimming on a treadmill, but I had dinner plans involving some greenmarket goodness I'd picked up in the morning, and wanted to be home by a certain time to get going on that, so knowing that I would be swept back to my starting point at Grimaldo's Chair tout de suite when I turned around was actually helpful. 

And it just felt great to be back in the ocean for even a short swim, as you'll be able to see from my three releasing-my-inner-mermaid selfies! 

In fact so good that I did pretty much an exact repeat, right down to what the current was doing, yesterday. Conditions yesterday were much quieter, I did more crawl and less breast stroke (my fallback stroke when I'm feeling a little challenged) and even some backstroke, enjoying looking up at beautiful fishscale clouds in the blue sky. Sorry, no pix from yesterday, I'd once again taken some time to decide to go, and once again had some cooking plans, so I left the camera home so I would swim instead of float around taking pictures. It was a short swim again but going against the current made it a good workout. I renewed my CIBBOWS membership yesterday too as swimming feels great.

And there was a paddle this weekend too - only thing missing from perfection this time was the peaches, the offerings at the greenmarket really just didn't look ready. But I'm trying plums instead! 

That's it for the verbiage - click any photo for a slideshow view.

End of August swim at Coney Island

Labor Day weekend came in with some beautiful weather, and I decided to take advantage of it with another swim at Coney Island. I set out with the idea that I would swim a mile; end up swimming a one and a third as I'd gotten there early enough that I could just keep swimming as long as I felt like it, and I kept deciding to go one more jetty. Found these cormorants who were posing so nicely with the Parachute Jump as I made my turn to head back to my starting point at Grimaldo's Chair, where the Coney Island Brighton Beach Open Water Swimmers gather through the swimming season.

I rewarded myself with a couple of corn dogs and a lemonade at Paul's Daughter, then stopped to grab a picture of the modern Steeplechase rollercoaster. Sometime I want to go back with my Lumix and see if I can get one where you can make out the horses better, but I just loved the swishy clouds today and had to at least try.

My final stop as I meandered to the train was at the Coney Island History Project booth. They have a really interesting exhibit there right now, Salvation by the Sea: Coney Island's 19th Century Fresh Air Cure and Immigrant Aid Societies, talking about places that were set up for the poor to be able to come spend some time by the sea. I've read a good bit of Coney Island history but this was new to me, so I'm glad I dropped in. Also the cyclops is weirdly adorable, isn't he?

Just a few more pictures after this - click on any of them for a slideshow view Don't forget to see the cormorants in full screen - it was a little tricky to get while treading water, and with the bright sun making it hard to see the screen, but I took a bunch and hoped for the best. I was pretty happy with how it came out!

Kayak Support for the 15th Annual Grimaldo's Mile

From what I've seen, the Mayor's Cup in Hoboken on Saturday went great. Meanwhile, I was helping out with the Coney Island Brighton Beach Open Water Swimmers'  (CIBBOWS) 15th annual Grimaldo's Mile swim race.

Grimaldo's Mile is named after a lifeguard who was really instrumental in turning Coney Island and Brighton Beach into the popular open water training ground it's become for NYC area aquatic athletes. It's funny - if somebody just stumbled across this blog today and just poked around in the last couple of years, they would think that recreational water access is just a normal thing here in NYC. That's getting to be the case now, and certainly was the case historically, but there was a rather large hiatus when the city's waterways got to be too polluted to play in.

The passage of the Clean Water Act in 1972 (thank you Pete Seeger & friends!) mostly stopped the river from being used as a legal dumping ground for industry, and the local waterways began a long, slow recovery, setting the stage for a renewed interest in recreational use.

That wasn't as much of a no-brainer as you might think, though. Perceptions of the water quality stayed bad for a long time -- when I started paddling in the late 90's, people's reactions when I told them about my new hobby generally involved cracks about how I must glow in the dark; I get a lot less of that and a lot more "That must be fun!" these days, which is really neat. Also, the impression I have is that NYC had lost the recreational traditions that naturally grow up in port cities, and with no recent history, and deep concerns about liability, the higher-up powers that be weren't entirely sure that opening up access was a really good idea.

It took people who were actually there on the waterfront and in a position to vouch for the idea to make it happen. There were a number of people and organizations to whom I would give credit for opening the waterways to the level of paddling and rowing we have here today, and I owe a lot to all of them.

Lifeguard Grimaldo Medrano was the guy who did that for the open-water swimmers. Before he took up their case, Coney Island and Brighton Beach lifeguards didn't let anyone swim outside of the jetties, which are spaced maybe 500 to 600 feet apart.

I started swimming at Coney Island far too late to meet him, but the love that my swimmer friends have for him is profound, and every Grimaldo's Mile is a tribute to him.

You can read more about him in a moving NY Times article I always like to share when I talk about this race - it tells his story way better than I could. Click here to read.

It was a beautiful morning at Coney Island and I had a wonderful time helping out. I always enjoy doing kayak support for CIBBOWS races - and this year was extra fun because my friend Steve the Paddling Chef has been doing some lap swimming and decided to give open water a try. Grimaldo's is a fantastic intro - my first open-water swim was in the Hudson, where just going to the beach isn't an option, and it was a little intimidating. I'd never swum any serious distance in water where I couldn't see, and the green murk of the Hudson was enough to freak me out a bit. Fortunately one of my paddling friends was doing swim support that day and came paddling up just as I stopped to tread water and think for a minute. Couldn't whuss out in front of Harry!

Steve did report a similar reaction (his open water experience had also been somewhere with tropical fish and coral), but he carried on just fine. The last few shots here are him finishing the race - I took about a million of him but I think these ones show the sequence pretty well, right down to the high-five with one of the Swim Angels (experienced swimmers who are there to encourage less experienced swimmers as necessary) as he left the water. There were a number of other Sebago Canoe Club folks paddling and we were all so excited to see him pull this off!

And then afterwards I joined another friend who'd volunteered in a roughly 3/4 mile swim. The water temperature was perfect for swimming. All in all, just a great day.

Photos from the day - click on any photo for a better view. 

Early morning in the Coney Island Aquarium's Education Hall

Registration underway

Buoys heading out

Marker buoys awaiting pickup

Education Hall filling up!

Paddling to the start - such a calm morning!

Starting Line - at Grimaldo's Chair in Brighton Beach

Swim Angels are ready!

Into the water

And they're off!

Heading for Stilwell

Paddlers gather to cheer on Steve the Paddling Chef

who is now also Steve the Swimming Chef! 

Approaching the finish

High-five with Eric the Swim Angel before the run to the finish.

My post-swim look. Beach hair, don't care!

FUNKRUST!

Yeeaaahhhhh BROOKLYN! Who's ready for SUMMER???

Just a quick post today to share this FABULOUSNESS from my sister. She lives in Austin and here's what she had to say about 'em: 

"From Brooklyn, playing in Austin this weekend at the HONK! TX Festival of Community Street Bands, it's gonna be GREAT!"

Dang. Cracks me up that I learned about 'em via Texas. But Austin and my sister are cool that way.

Funkrust.com

  HONK! Texas

HONK! NYC (happens in the fall, not yet updated for 2019)

Last Post of 2018 - Aquarium Links (with A BABY WALRUS!)

Happy New Year's Eve Day, and best wishes to all for a very happy New Year!

I had a lot fun writing the post about visiting the new Ocean Wonders: Sharks exhibit at the New York Aquarium. I enjoy it when I need to do research for a post, I like tracking information down, and for that post I did a little digging because I knew Sandy had set everything back by a couple of years, and I wanted to talk about things like how long the facility was closed to the public and how the construction timeline had been affected.

I ran across some pretty interesting articles in the process and though I would share those here, including this video, created for the 2018 conference of the American Zoological Association. It offers a glimpse of the downstairs area of the Sea Cliffs exhibit, where I used to go play with the scarf-chasing fur seal, with a couple of feet of sea water in the exhibit area, plus a pretty complete walk-through of the new exhibit. I see that I really did zip by a lot of information. Unfortunately the one I really did notice was with the types of shark teeth, it was quite interesting but I say "unfortunately" because what really caught my eye was that knuckleheads have already broken off most of the teeth and the entire lower jaw set of the seal-catching teeth was missing entirely. Maybe the exhibit was designed that way so that they can replace the teeth, not the whole head, when too many get broken, but it looked like poor Grandpa Shark lost half his dentures. Why must knuckleheads be such knuckleheads? Sigh.

On a cheerfuller note, it was fun to see an aerial view of the beach grass plots that I'd mentioned in my boardwalk stroll post as being planted by some of my swimmer friends and lots of other volunteers from the Coney Island community. You can see those really well in the flyover shots in the 2nd minute of the video.

Anyways, I also found some good articles that I wanted to share. I started with Wikipedia, of course (just donated to them as I do use that site a lot!), and they have a pretty solid article about the aquarium. That's where I got the bit about staff actually staying on-site and being able to save an impressive 90% of the animals who lived there, and fortunately the authors of that article did a really solid job with their references -- you know how I said "speaking of terrifying, I can't even imagine what the scene there must have been like as the Atlantic's cold October water came washing through the facility"? Turns out that I don't have to imagine it, the director told the whole story to the Times not long after Sandy. Click here to read that article, and then there was an interesting follow-up on the repairs and new construction in May of 2017. The Times of course also did an extensive review of the opening, but that repeats a good bit of the info from the older articles, so here's a shorter review from Curbed NY.

Will be watching for what comes next (maybe repairs to downstairs in the Sea Cliffs?), and just can't resist closing with a video that was not part of my low-key research, but is linked to in the first Times article after Sandy, and I just had to share. Enjoy! 

Christmas Eve Day 2018 Part 2 - Sharks!

OMG AAAAGHH LOOK AT THE TERRIFYING...

oh, wait, that's a penguin, only terrifying if you're a herring.

      O

 :D />
O

Bring on the sharks!

The boardwalk stroll was a beautiful bonus, but the main reason for my Christmas Eve Day trip to Coney Island was to go see the New York Aquarium's new exhibit, Ocean Wonders: Sharks. 

The aquarium got absolutely wrecked by Hurricane Sandy back in 2012 and a lot of the exhibits are still being repaired, like the inside portion of the Sea Cliffs exhibit, where I used to love playing with one of the fur seals. I figured out that this seal was up for a play session after I waved my scarf for some reason while in front of the underwater window one day and the seal saw it and came zooming down and hung there looking exactly like a dog waiting for a human to throw a stick. I rolled with it and for a couple of visits before Sandy, a good game of chase-the-scarf was one of my favorite things to do at the aquarium. Ideally you run back and forth and play hide-and-seek with the seal behind the tank supports; these folks didn't get quite as into it as the seal might have liked, but you get the general idea:

 

But I digress from the sharks! The aquarium had gotten funding for this new exhibit not too long before Sandy, and it was originally scheduled to open in 2015, but of course the hurricane delayed everything. According to the Wikipedia entry for the aquarium, "A small group of WCS staff who remained onsite during the hurricane were able to save 90 percent of the animals in the collection" - speaking of terrifying, I can't even imagine what the scene there must have been like as the Atlantic's cold October water came washing through the facility. They reopened in the spring of the following year, with (if I recall correctly) signs posted at the entrance that a good deal remained closed due to hurricane damage.

Groundbreaking on the shark exhibit finally happened in January 2014, and construction went steadily from that point on to when it opened in June of this year. The aquarium invited the public with half-price admission up until Labor Day; I managed to miss that but I thought that Christmas Eve Day might be the perfect day to go - it was, as shown, a beautiful day, and I thought that there was a pretty good chance that a lot of people would be too tied up with holiday preparations to go. I think I was right about that, the crowds were small and also really, really into what they were seeing.

And it's pretty spectacular. The heart(s) of the exhibit are three large aquariums, each with a sort of a special effect all its own. 

You enter the exhibit through the first, this spectacular tunnel through a coral reef, with sharks and other fish swimming right over your head. The exhibit mostly focuses on out local waters. This is a really cool thing about it - it's mostly about what's going on in the waters right here around NYC, which a lot of people still think are horrible and radioactive and "ewww, how can you kayak there, do you glow in the dark?". I do have to say I get that a lot less often than I did back when I started paddling in the area back in 1999 (or was it '98?), but there's still a lack of awareness among a significant number of residents about how well our waterways are doing these days, and it's great to see the aquarium working on that.

I don't think this first tank is representative of a local environment (OK, I have to admit that I rushed through a little bit because TQ was working and I'd told him I was making duck soup for Christmas eve dinner, so I had to be home in time to make the stock, which just takes a certain amount of simmering time, and then I'd cut into my aquarium time with my boardwalk stroll - I'll go back one of these weekends and this time actually read the signs that tell you what things are!) but it sure does make you go "wow". Click on the picture above - this couple was really loving pointing out the fish to their baby!

The second large tank is bringing you into NYC, with the cityscape along the wall that curves around the big cylindrical tank full of creatures you'd find in local waters. 

Hello, flounder, I see you!

And this big what's-out-there-in-NYC-waters aquarium has a special surprise for kids as you walk further along the curved glass of the tank - there's another tunnel here, this one letting youngsters (and adventurous adults) crawl right into the aquarium for a sharks'-eye view!

I would totally have crawled through but was just a couple of days past throwing out my back and wasn't sure that was a really good idea just yet. The kids (and some of their grownups) were absolutely loving it, though. 

The next thing you walk into is a simulated shipwreck, showing how the many sunken vessels in the NY area become habitats. 

And then you walk out of the shipwreck room into what I would like to nominate as the most soothing room in NYC. 

This is the Canyon's Edge display. There's peaceful music and underwater ocean sounds playing quietly in the background, and shafts of light illuminate the water as a variety of sharks and other fish swim by. The back of the tank is lost in darkness, as though you were actually looking out into the endless sea. There is at least one sea turtle in here, I caught a glimpse of it swimming towards the darkness at the back when I came in, then it was lost to view - perhaps it had had enough being looked at for a while and went to take a nap. 

If I didn't have duck soup to make I could've just sat in here for an hour. Some children came in yelling with excitement - even they quieted down almost instantly, and I didn't hear their parents hushing them, I think it was just the calming effect of the space.

Did you know that there are sharks that like to snuggle? These are nurse sharks, first there were two lying nose to nose, then the third one came swimming down and joined them, cuddling up like puppies at naptime. 

Sharkshadows - something really neat about seeing the shadows on the sand as the sharks passed through the light.

So that was a quick dash through the new Ocean Wonders: Sharks exhibit at the New York Aquarium. There are a lot of educational displays that I'll have to go back to look at sometime when I haven't promised someone duck soup that night and haven't made the stock yet - but here's one I did have a moment to look at! That's right, even the bathroom is educational.

one last look back at the Canyon's Edge (aaah)

And then it was time to head for home. Coneyscape from the Q train platform.

BTW I actually did a bit of research for this post and found some really interesting stuff, including shots of the downstairs area in the Sea Cliffs exhibit showing the extreme damage. This post was already long enough as is but my next post will have links to those.