7/31 - First evening paddle of 2020

Boy, can't believe this was two weeks ago! on the way home I just couldn't wait to do a blog post, but I didn't get to it fast enough, and this is one of those times of year when work gets a little bonkers and I just didn't have the energy to blog after long days of number crunching. Wrapped up the last of the gauntlet of deadline projects today, though! 

I'm just doing a writeup here but of course I took photos - click here to visit my Flickr album from the day. 

So this really wonderful paddle was my first evening paddle of the year. I've been getting out on the water pretty regularly, but since I'm staying off the bus and don't feel like I have enough biking experience in the city to be out at night, evenings haven't really been an option - so when clubmates Etan and Andrea got in touch with me, invited me to join them and one more clubmate, Dan, for a Friday evening paddle, mentioning they had access to a car for the evening and could get me and TQ's bike home after the paddle, I was delighted to take them up on it. 

It was a beautiful evening, nice temperature, very light breeze, high water and a nearly full moon rising. The plan was to paddle to Four Sparrows Marsh for some evening birding, but our first stop was at the "Jeep Marsh", a small marsh partway between the club and Mill Basin, nicknamed by club members after an engine block in the inlet that's visible when the water is lower (that's urban paddling for you). As we were paddling by, Dan or Etan noticed some interesting activity in the marsh, lots of tips of fins breaking the surface of the water, so we went in to see what we could see. Turned out to be a school of rays, probably cow-nosed - very cool to see! TQ had seen a school once a couple of years ago, so I knew they were out there, but I'd never seen them. Unfortunately I wasn't able to get any pictures, the wingtips would only break the surface for a moment, but they were all over the place in the marsh and it was great to encounter a new critter in the bay.  

oof, reminds me I had made a couple of promises about this Inktober drawing from last year that was very popular among the paddling groups with whom I shared it. I had "find a place that can do a really high-quality scan" on my to-do list early in the year - then of course all plans went off the rails. Things are opening up enough now that maybe I can resume that search. We didn't have this many rays, and they were swirling around hunting in the marsh, but still reminded me of drawing this, and I wonder what it would've looked like from above. 

 
We hung out watching the rays for a while, then headed on to Four Sparrows Marsh, where a variety of egrets and herons were settling in for the evening. Etan spotted one very large object in a dead snag at the top of a tree as we were approaching the marsh; I'd brought binoculars along so he asked me to see if I could tell what it was. When I first looked, I thought it might be a very large raptor, but then it wasn't moving, and I couldn't see any details, so I downgraded my guess to Hefty bag or some sort of similar trash, blown up there by the storm earlier in the week. Wish I'd handed the binoculars over to Etan at that point for a second opinion - a moment after I'd said I thought it was just garbage, it turned its big raptorial head and spread its big raptorial wings and flew off to another tree further away from those nosy paddlers.

Still not sure what it was but it looked bigger than our local hawks, and darker then an osprey - really wondering if it was maybe a juvenile bald eagle. A friend and I had seen an adult near Floyd Bennett Field in March, and then during the Breezy Point Light paddle a couple of weeks ago, Dottie had spotted a pair of very large, dark raptors over the Rockaway Inlet (really not too far from Mill Basin, at least as the crow - or eagle - flies); she pointed them out to me and we agreed that they were too big & dark to be ospreys. It's possible we've got some young bald eagles in the area - it would be very cool if that was the case!

Click here for an excellent photo series showing bald eagle plumage from first year juvenile to adult. 

We got well into Four Sparrows, the moon was rising, it was absolutely beautiful and we paddled around in there until we started getting chewed up by hungry little flying things. We paused outside the marsh to put on decklights and then headed for home under a beautiful sunset sky. What a perfect evening! 

Perfect Weekend - Saturday: To The Lighthouse!

OK, circumstances are still far from perfect, but hey, it was a fine, if hot, summer weekend and I absolutely milked it with paddling on Saturday and the greenmarket and my first real swim of the summer on Sunday.

I was absolutely delighted with Saturday's paddle, because in addition to it being a good day to be on the water and a very nice group of folks to paddle with (grateful to the friend who's been pulling so many of these together, I've been utterly disorganized about planning paddles myself, so it's great to have things to jump in on at the last minute), this one finally broke out of this weird 6-mile paddle thing I was complaining about in my last trip report.

Saturday's destination wasn't really clear when we set out, except that because it was hot we knew we wanted to head out to the Gil Hodges Memorial Bridge (aka Marine Park Bridge) to get to some cleaner water to play in. We ended up going pretty close to 14 miles and despite the health issues that have me not feeling quite at 100%, I still felt good all the way through and even had the energy to run after some of the surfable wakes. I was absolutely delighted, I wasn't sure how I would hold up for a longer paddle.

We launched at 9:30 am and had a fine ebb-assisted paddle to the bridge. We took a nice leisurely snack break with much floating in the water without our boats at Riis Landing, just past the bridge on the Queens side (Rockaway Peninsula). We got back on the water around noon. Flood was going to start around 1 so we decided to paddle a little further down towards Breezy Point.

At one point the paddle nearly turned into a restaurant paddle when one of our group recognized Kennedy's, a waterfront establishment where he'd had some really good mussels. He suggested stopping and getting a couple of orders to share. I'd actually packed myself an unusually good box lunch of fruit, cheese, crackers, and prosciutto, and had grazed pretty heavily at Riis Landing, and there were a couple of others who were also not ready for more food. It also turned out that one of the latter group was really interested in paddling on down to the "lighthouse" - she's a strong paddler and has been a club member for years, so I was surprised she'd never been, but that sounded like a perfect destination! So we agreed to skip the mussels, go on to the tower (just a little ways further on), and then come back and meet the others for the paddle home. I went in to let the diners know what our plans were -- just in time to see a resident walk up to them to let them know that this was a private beach.

That wasn't really surprising. The Breezy Point communities are protective of their beaches - no problem with paddling by, people in boats will say hi (oh, and everybody out in boats yesterday was SO happy to be out in boats that the greetings were even more friendly than usual - we all agreed that on the water was the only place to be and we wished we could stay there all week), but they don't want non-residents landing there, even if it's just to run up to Kennedy's for a couple of orders of mussels. So the disappointed diners rejoined us, we went on down to the "lighthouse", got there right at slack water, and then turned around for a good flood-assisted ride back to the club. We couldn't have timed it better if we'd actually planned it - darned good winging it!

The "lighthouse" is an interesting piece of local history. It was actually built as a fire control tower for the Fort Tilden gun emplacements - click here to learn more about it. That's an old, old, archived web page and doesn't look very pretty but it's the most informative thing I've found about the tower.

All pictures after this, more than I would usually post but it was fun getting out of the bay, and it was another really photogenic day. BTW the thing that looks like the top of a clay pot is actually a "sand collar", which is a thing that a certain type of snail (moon snails) make to protect their eggs, which are embedded in the sand/mucus construction. Interesting thing to find!

And although I didn't get any photos, we may have seen two young bald eagles flying over the inlet - they were bigger and much darker than the distinctively-marked osprey that we see on almost every summer paddle. Oh - and the fishing chatter on the VHF channel we were using said that there were sharks, dolphins, and a whale in the area! Busy waters out there!

OK, now on to the photos - click on the first one for a slideshow view. Enjoy! 

7/12/2020 - After Fay

Tropical Storm Fay hit town on Friday, giving us a thorough drenching and high winds. One of the Sebago "usual suspects" crew had hoped to have a birthday paddle on Saturday, but that and the all-level paddle also planned for the day both got shifted to Sunday, as Saturday's weather was still pretty skittish.

Sunday was beautiful but still pretty breezy - in fact breezier than the forecast had shown. I think the forecast had been for 10 to 13 mph and the actuals (I just looked at the 3-day history to make sure I wasn't imagining this) got up to 18 or so while we were out, 20 after we got off the water. It was also supposed to get pretty warm, with a high of 89 in the afternoon.

I'm honestly not sure I would've gone if I'd known about the extra wind. I'm not feeling quite at 100% right now, and a hot day gets me huffing and puffing pretty fast, and with all the rain we'd had, a cooling roll or high brace or a bit of a swim during a shore break wasn't an option. The NYC water treatment - including sewage - system dumps straight into the waterways when overwhelmed by heavy rains, things get pretty gross after a storm; you can still paddle but you want to keep your contact with the water to a minimum. So I'd been looking at that high of 89 and feeling a little bit on the fence about going.

I'm glad I did go, though, because it ended up being a really nice paddle - in fact the only problem with it was that it was kind of short, there were time constraints for the group and we kept it to around 6.5 miles. I'm starting to feel like  the 6 Mile Paddle Princess these days and one of these days I would really like to see how I hold up to a longer distance -- but this was a lovely little jaunt on the bay.

The wind ended up being a plus instead of a problem because although it was pretty shifty, for a good part of our paddle it was out of the southwest, asnd we decided to paddle against the incoming current down towards the inlet, following the western shore of the bay. That gave us enough protection from the breeze to keep boat handling from being annoying, but we still had enough of it to provide some good cooling. A hot and windless day where you can't get in the water can be some of the hardest paddling - this turned out to be quite delightful. We paddled down to just before you turn the corner into the inlet, pulling out for leisurely snack/leg stretching break at a nice quiet beach where TQ and I have stopped for lunch a few times, then we had a nice ride back to the Paerdegat Basin on the incoming tide.

Definitely could've kept going, but I'm not going to pretend that a shower and a nap in the air conditioning didn't feel good when I got home, either.

It was a photogenic day out there too - all pix after this, click on any of them for a slideshow view. 

Sebago Dawn

sebago dawn from Bonnie on Vimeo.

Here is something peaceful for you. Dawn at the Sebago Canoe Club. I am not an early riser as a usual thing, but I got an invitation to try kayak fishing yesterday. I got a ride to the club with TQ, who leaves for work at 5 am.

There was this big peachy nearly full moon setting (sadly no pix, I just glimpsed it as it went down behind some trees across the basin) and a mockingbird performing his Concert To Greet The New Day. 

 My NYC fishing record continues to be "has yet to harm any fish" but I did get to bring home some good fresh fluke - one of the experienced fishers who took me out caught a great big one and was leaving town today. So at least I got a lesson in fish cleaning - and a delicious dinner of fresh fluke and fluke roe sauteed in butter with rice and steamed zucchini. More filets in the freezer, too.

Not many pix from the day because I had my hands full with fishing gear - but it was another beautiful day out on the bay.

Skywatch Friday - Sebago Paddle to Fresh Creek, with float break!

Skywatch Friday again - look at that dramatic sky and gently sparkling slate water in Jamaica Bay today. Looks a little ominous but it was actually a very placid morning out there. As usual, click on the photo for a better view.

And what a nice surprise it was to find myself leading a full-on Sebago paddle today! As I've mentioned before, we're pretty limited on what we are able to do at the club right now - but I'm so glad the board (and especially our Commodore Beth, seen masked and pointing out our dock regulations in the photo below - "MAX CAPACITY 4" is one of our coronavirus customizations & allows for proper distancing on the dock) was at least able to work out arrangements with the NYC Parks (of whom we are a tenant) allowing for use of club boats. The original arrangement was "No shared equipment", which meant only of us with our own boats could go, which was nice for us but sucked for the rest of the members; the new arrangement is better for a lot more of the gang.

I'm still on a 12-day furlough from my job and have gotten a couple of nice paddles in; got to feeling like getting out on the water again yesterday and asked a few friends if anyone wanted to paddle either late in the afternoon or fairly early this morning, to beat both the heat and the 50% chance of thunderstorms today's forecast had starting at noon. Beth was up for this morning, and with the forecast looking pretty placid as long as we got of the water before the thunderstorms, we decided to go ahead and open it up to the rest of the members.

I didn't actually think it was going to fly because I didn't get the invitation out until after 6 pm, and usually people need a little more time to plan - but we ended up with a crew of 11 paddlers, including me and Beth!

And it was a lovely paddle. I'd specifically billed it as a "Friday Morning Relaxed Paddle" because of the need to be off the water by noon and because it's just too darned hot for distance or speed shenanigans right now. I'd promised 6 to 8 miles and we did just over 6 and a half, paddling to the Fresh Creek Nature Preserve and back. Fresh Creek was FULL of herons, egrets and gulls, so that was fun. I hadn't really planned on a break for such a short paddle, but it seemed like folks were ready for a leg stretch once we came back out into the bay, so we found a nice quiet stretch of beach where we weren't going to be invading other people's space and took out there.

I'd pictured this as just being a quick stop and a chance to touch base and see if any of the more experienced paddlers wanted to break off and keep going instead of just going back to the club. The forecast had changed overnight with the thunderstorm risk being pushed back to 4 pm, and this was a generally experienced group with several trip leaders, so I was thinking some might want to stay out longer -- but it was really pleasant there on the beach and next thing I knew people were pulling out sandwiches and Laurie B was floating in the water (she does that, that's just one of the things I love about her!) - and then as soon as I saw Laurie floating in the water, I had to float too, and then all of the sudden half of the group was floating around while the other half ate their socially distanced sandwiches on the beach. This wasn't what I had planned but it was so nice - why fight it? This was the perfect thing to be doing.

And with the temperature going up and the wind dying down, by the time we were ready to move on, my unambitious little trip was enough for everyone, so we all went back to the club together.

What an excellent morning.

All pix after this, click for a slideshow view.

And thanks again to my ramblin' friend Am for the intro to Skywatch!