Upcoming Events - Long Island Paddlesport Symposium and Paddle Smart New Haven

Well, pitchers & catchers have reported, and the Cyclones are trying to sell me tickets, and for all it was a seriously yucky day out today, it must be that Spring is getting close and Summer will eventually be moseying into view as well. Phew. Not that it's been such a horrible winter, it's just that last winter was hardly worth the name at all, and I kinda liked it that way.

Anyways...as Spring approaches, a lot of people start getting the time-to-get-out-in-a-boat itch. March is still a little early, but if you happen to live in my area (OK, I'm taking "my area" in a sort of broad sense), and want to get yourself in the mood and the right frame of mind, there are a couple of really excellent events happening on the weekend of March 7th and 8th! Curious about paddlesports? Gotten a taste of paddling and want to explore where to go next? You'll enjoy either one! Which one to pick? Well, there's the beauty of it, one's in New Haven, Connecticut, the other's in Oakdale, Long Island, so generally, you'll be able to let geography decide. They're both free, and open to the public.

I'll go in date order and start with the Paddle Smart Safety Event in New Haven on Saturday, March 7th. I haven't been to this one, but TQ participated last year and came back with a glowing report, said it was a really good event. Here's the press release for the event, from Coast Guard Auxiliary member, organizer of the AMC CT rolling sessions at the Greenwich Y, and all around very neat person Jean Trapani (I'd have posted this for her even if TQ hadn't enjoyed it so much, that just helps!):

Coast Guard Auxiliary to Participate in Paddle Smart Safety Event

New Haven, CT - The United States Coast Guard Auxiliary and the US Coast Guard in participation with the Connecticut Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) oating Division, the City of New Haven Department of Parks and Recreation, Power Squadron and ConnYak will present an afternoon of safe paddling demonstrations and information sessions on Saturday, March 7th, at the Wilbur Cross High School, 181 Mitchell Drive, New Haven from 10 AM to 4 PM. All demonstrations take place at the indoor pool.

The event is free of charge and will feature in-pool demonstrations and other presentations including self-rescue, life jackets, choosing the right craft and communications.

A variety of representatives from the paddling industry will be on hand to answer any questions. This is a fun filled day of safety and skill building for the whole family.

Inquiries can be directed to Jean Trapani, Coast Guard Auxiliary at

203.606.9459.

DIRECTIONS:

From I-91 South: Take Exit 6
- Take right onto Willow St. at end of ramp
- At second light, take right onto Mitchell Drive
- Pass the Wilbur Cross Athletic Complex on right
- At second set of tennis courts, take right
- Parking in school lot.

From I-95 North: Take Exit 48
- Follow signs for I-91 North
- Take Exit 6 (left exit)
- Follow directions from I-91 South above.

- From I-95 South: Follow signs for I-91 North
- Take Exit 6 (left exit) - Follow directions from I-91 South above.
****************

Then on Sunday, March 8th, we've got the Long Island Paddlesport Symposium. I'll be there with the Sebago gang again, we always have a table there, some of us will be suiting up and soaking our heads in the Connetquot River (still pretty derned chilly, youbetcha!) as one of the afternoon's on-water demos, there'll be all sorts of talks over the course of the day, it's just lots of fun. Full details here, and a gallery "trip report" from last year over here!

Not in the tri-state area? This sort of thing starts happening quite a bit all over the place this time of year - check in with your local canoe & kayak club, outfitter, or Coast Guard Auxiliary Branch to find out what's going on in your area!

Long Island Paddlesports & Safety Symposium, Sunday, March 9th, Oakdale, LI

Look. Outside. Smiling. Woohoo.

Would it spoil it if I told you that grin's half nerves as it was taken just as Minh & Jerry & I were getting ready to do some extensive rolling, for spectators, in some pretty cold water & I'd been questioning my sanity all morning? It's one thing doing a few quick sweep rolls with your friends - but Sebago had signed up to do a DEMO for the 5th Annual Long Island Paddling Safety Symposium & that means you really, really, really don't want to foul things up. Add to that that I'd been a leetle cocky in a couple of emails leading up to the event (when the wisdom of doing a rolling demo in conditions that were at some points looking pretty dubious was being debated) and I was pretty much gonna feel like the biggest knucklehead in Long Island if I ended up getting hypothermic, or getting vertigo, or anything stupid like that!

Went fine, though, we had a blast, Stevie was sad he was stuck on the dock without a boat, and I'm finally done with the gallery! Look, we're outside!

Actually I have 3 other trip reports I haven't done yet - I mean actual, outside, paddling to get somewhere paddles. 2 great ones over President's Day, and another good'un just last Saturday.

Here's hoping I have time to attend to those before April!

In the meantime, hope you enjoy the pictures - oh, and yes, I think I said it on comments somewhere but assuming the month of April isn't a total meteorological freak of a month, this is the first year that I actually kept rolling outside throughout the "off-season". Oh, quit snickering, you Canadians & assorted midwesterners, I'm happy about it! Although I do have to admit that the most ice I saw all winter was skim ice Sunday morning of President's Day weekend & that had melted by the time we got home!

Faith at Vox Pop - this Saturday! Plus 3 other fun things to do

I was absolutely tickled to get a message from co-worker & friend Felice saying that her band, Faith, is going to be performing this Saturday at my favorite neighborhood leftist/socialist/communist (yet humanely & intelligently capitalist) coffee shop/indy bookstore/performance space Vox Pop!

She works with me at the Really Big Children's Publishing Company - but the music is what she DOES. Know what I mean?

Faith will be rocking Vox Pop acoustically (seriously, the joint wouldn't have enough room for their sound if they plugged in & I mean that in a very very good way) on Saturday at 9 P.M.

Excerpt from Felice's email with further details -

Also on the bill are Courtney Lee Adams Jr and my dear dear friend and comrade deerfrance with her group Extra Virgin Mary. Here's the info:

Saturday March 8th

Courtney Lee Adams Jr. - 8 pm
Faith (acoustic) - 9 pm
Extra Virgin Mary - 10 pm

Vox Pop
1022 Cortelyou Road
Brooklyn, NY
$5.00
www.voxpopnet.net

F train to Ditmas
Q train to Cortelyou

Click here for more on Faith
Click here for more on Courtney Lee
Click here for more on Extra Virgin Mary

A couple of other fun things to do this weekend (and I'm hoping I can work out a way to do all 3) -

Xris, the Flatbush Gardener, has full details on Green It! Grow It! Eat It! at the Brooklyn Botanical Garden, Saturday during the day. With my penchant for growing at least some of my own food, discovered last year thanks to people at Sebago (y'all know who you are!), this sounds interesting.

On Sunday, as I mentioned the other day, me and a few other Sebago folks will be participating in the Long Island Paddlesport Symposium. Day's events including a chilly chilly rolling demo - what were we thinking???!!! - and lots lots more. Personally I'm psyched 'cause I may finally get to see my friend Marcus's Ireland slideshow (unless we're scheduled at the same time, which would be just my luck).

Finally, also on Sunday (once again I can't make it, I do want to one of these days), the monthly Brooklyn Blogade gathering of the bloggers o' Brooklyn is being held in Kensington. This month's event is being hosted by Bad Girl Brooklyn. The theme, Show and Tell - readings or showings of favorite posts. I'm a little bummed I can't make it - the theme sounds like fun, and plus they're serving burek (phyllo dough filled with hot melted goat cheese...yummmmmmmmmy).

Too many fun things to do is not a bad thing, though.

Rosemary Ruth. Bone in teeth. Oh my yes.

This was weekend before last. Wish I'd been there. Wearing one of Richard's nice warm Mustang float coats...wheee! Fortunately somebody had a video camera!

Did not get outside boating this weekend despite noises to that effect on Saturday. Actually started pulling gear together, but then thought about lack of food in 'fridge, and article I'm working on, and lack of clean clothes, and length & intensity of Sunday's activity, and also possibility of getting all the way out to Sebago only to find the basin still iced in (probably wouldn't have negotiated the ice solo) & ditched paddling for a nice long brisk walk. Nice night, it was. Feels like Spring, tra la la!

The symposium was great, I think I only missed about 3 majorly crucial points on my paddle presentation (like I meant to mention that a great way to go about choosing a paddle is to paddle with a club or group of experienced paddlers, ask people how they like their paddles & ask if you can try them - frankly I just think all new paddlers should paddle with groups, the learning curve is SO much kinder when you get to learn from other people's mistakes instead of making every single one of them yourself, y'know?).

More later on the symposium. Already spent too much time responding to a comment from the prior post - there's day-job work to be done before I run off to the meeting tonight.

Folks who've been following the whole Hudson River Park saga might find those comments interesting, btw. My response is pure opinion on my part of course, the frustrating thing about real life is you just never know, sometimes, whether you're right or wrong, all you can do sometimes is say what you think is right & hope for the best.

Although it's easy to read evil motives into a situation where you have one pier that used to be all about boating & ecological education turning into a pier whose main focus is a big restaurant, and another pier where there's boating going on being eyed as a just another permanent venue for entertainment empire Cirque du Soleil (maybe they'll do "O" and call it water-dependent...grrrr...why not Times Square, with the Lion King and Madame Tussaud's? That would be TOTALLY appropriate & quite cool!), the story usually isn't that satisfyingly dramatic. More thoughts in those comments. Back to work for me now.

Tomorrow and Tomorrow

Or more specifically, Sunday, March 11th & Monday, March 12th. Local interest mostly -

Sunday, that's my fun day (she said, promptly aging herself quite nicely)...

Me and some of my Sebago Sebago friends are attending & participating in the 2nd Annual <Long Island Paddlesports Safety Symposium . Should be fun - along with participating in a rolling demo I'll be talking about paddle-picking for beginners at 1:30, and then I'll be sticking around to hear the next presentation in that room, because it is actually the guy who runs my FAVORITE cold-water paddling info site, Chuck Sutherland, Ph.D - missed him at the The Small Boat Shop back in January, so I'm looking forward to listening to his presentation. Never hurts to have a brush-up. BTW, it's March, this is the time when we always hear about somebody taking a boat out on a warm day & not coming back because the water is still cold enough to incapacitate a person very fast if they fall in, so this is a GREAT time to come hear a real expert talk about the dangers of cold shock & hypothermia, how to avoid, and what to do if you suddenly find yourself or a friend showing signs of the "umbles" - the uncharacteristic mumbles, grumbles & fumbles that can signify that a person is sliding into hypothermia & something must be done FAST. Anyways, oops, up on my hobbyhorse again. Pool demos too, and prizes, and lots of valuable information, all free (the poster adds "Please bring a donation of non-perishable food for THE MINISTRIES Paddle Out Hunger campaign").

Monday, back to meetings - this is the one I've sort of been drumming up - the invitation is addressed to a certain group bu the public is welcome to attend, and in fact I think Julie & the task force members would feel good about the show of support that people turning out to listen in indicates. Meeting will be at 6 pm, in the Community Board 1 office at 49-50 Chambers St. Security checkpoint in the lobby, bring photo ID & leave your favorite Swiss Army knife at home!:

Dear Waterfront Committee members and Pier 26 Task Force participants:

On Monday, March 12, we will hold the final Pier 26 Task Force meeting. Due to the need to address Pier 26 issues at the full Community Board meeting on March 20, it will be a joint meeting with the Waterfront Committee (the regularly scheduled Waterfront Committee will still be held on March 26).

Attached are the two reports from the Pier 26 Task Force meetings. (Bonnie's note: click here to read estuarium comments and here to read boathouse comments.)

The two attachments to these documents will be available at the Monday meeting for your files. In this reports, the issues covered in the meetings is documented. In brief, they say:
1) the estuarium should be built, even in temporary or scaled down form, as soon as possible, and the report goes on to describe the qualities and features that the Task Force felt were important in its design, programming and management.
2) the boathouse report reviews the Trust's plans and rejects them as not suitable for their intended purpose. Also, a substantial restaurant appears in the boathouse plans. This restaurant was not reviewed by the Task Force, since its stated purpose was to deal with the boathouse and estuarium problems; however, the community may want to weigh in on this as well.

Please note: Currently, there are no plans and no money for the estuarium, and plans but no money for the boathouse.

I hope to see you on Monday. A resolution is anticipated to be voted on at this meeting, to be based upon the work of the Task Force and the discussion at the meeting.

Julie Nadel


OK, PSA all done, I have this odd thought that I might throw some stuff in a bag & go paddling. Outside. What a novel idea!

The weekend, and why I have said nothing about Andrew

Well, while I'm waiting for this last sales report to run (ok so I got a little obsessed about tracking down a certain number) might as well post a completely disjointed post.

Stevie took this picture during the Saturday paddle that he, Kayak Boy and I went out for. I never knuckle-walked my kayak across ice before. I joke from time to time, when it gets cold, about how I need to get my screwdrivers (I read somewhere once that people who paddle in places where ice is a regular obstacle sometimes carry a pair of those to assist in crossing ice). I don't think I'll be joking any more. Might even get some. As it was, at LEAST I'd had the foresight, temps hovering around freezing, to bring my heavy Stearns gloves. Kept my hands nice and warm. We paddled out with no specific destination - ended up heading towards Ruffle Bar - thought we'd circumnavigate but halfway around, we ran into this giant saltwater Slushee - with way more ice than we wanted to knuckle-walk beyond. Seems the northwest wind had pushed all the ice (except the band across the mouth of the Paerdegat) over to the southeast corner of the bay. Stevie had been talking about pizza in Broad Channel - think we would've needed skates to get there.

More pictures, uh, sometime this week. It was a lot more of a workout than any of us had planned on, but I had fun...

Went to a rolling session on Sunday, 3 hours long so LOTS of time to get loosened up. This session is put on by Elizabeth O'Connor of Sea Kayaking Skills and Adventures of Long Island. One very cool thing about it was that there were canoes rolling there - now I knew that that was possible but I'd never actually seen it done. Sebago's participating in her the Long Island Paddlesports Symposium - I'm actually, er, giving a presentation, I'll be talking about some of the questions a person should ask when buying a paddle so that they have the best chance of ending up with the right one. Remember "Of Paddles & Planes"? Won't get that esoteric but some of the same ideas may come out. Then we all jump in the pool and roll for the nice people - YAY!

Speaking of rolls - Stevie has a friend who'd never been in a kayak before a couple of weeks ago - that was when D. had gone to his first pool session out of curiousity. Strictly as a spectator. Went home fascinated, watched some videos. Stevie put him in a boat the next weekend & started teaching.

D. got his first, second, third, and so on rolls this weekend. Dont'cha hate people like that?

Nah, actually I just love getting to be around when somebody gets their first roll. Don't care how disgustingly fast they got it, it just rocks. The Yonkers sessions there's a bit of a tradition of everybody drumming on their boats when somebody hits their first one. Just part of what makes that such a cool session. Doesn't work quite as well in the bigger pool at Sarah Lawrence - the YMCA pool was so small everybody knew what happened - but a first roll is always worth making a little noise about!

Speaking of rolls, there are a lot more over on my Yahoo videos now. I did more for Adele than I realized! Lots more Sebago-ites a-rolling at BrooklynKayak.com, too - plus a few from Jack Gilman, my Cirque du Soleil tryout partner.

Cripes - and speaking of Cirque du Soleil - Nancy, the metropolitan coordinator for the Hudson River Watertrail Association, sent an email to the NYCKayaker mailing list with a description of 2 proposals for Pier 40. Where Randy's New York Kayak Co. is based. You can read them (and see renderings) on the here on the Hudson River Park Trust's website. You'll notice that the word "kayak" doesn't appear once. The Cirque du Soleil is an anchor tenant for one of the two.

Hard to say what's going on behind the scenes but it's really too bad that neither of those proposals seems to involve the kayaking aspect of the current uses at Pier 40. That could explain why Randy all the sudden wants to move to Chelsea. Pier 40 is a big pier. Why isn't there room for a couple of human-powered boating groups?

Well - I think I'm giving up on this report. Maybe it'll run itself by tomorrow morning. NO! It just rang. It's done. So am I. Busy tomorrow, busy Valentine's Day (if the snow doesn't keep TQ from coming down - I told him I'd rather have him stay in CT in one piece than put himself at risk driving down if the promised snow hits)...probably post again on Wednesday. If I'm not such a big ol' mushball that I'm embarrassed to inflict myself on the blogosphere, that is.

OK - hate to close on a sad note - but if you're wondering why I've been heartless enough to not say one word about Andrew McAuley...well, it's because it's too sad for words. Or at least for my words. I have a lot of thoughts about it but none that I would consider sharing right now. Most of them involve brilliant stuff about how very, very big the ocean is.

Not worth the electrons it would take to put it on a screen.

For those of you who aren't kayakers - Andrew McAuley was an Australian adventurer who decided to make the first ever solo kayak crossing of the Tasmanian Sea. The crazy, sad thing is that he was a day from finishing and had survived days of stuff that most of us would have vanished into within hours.

For a rational & caring response, please go visit Kayak Quixotica.