May 31st 2020 - Paddling with the Sebago crew!

Sunday was looking like the best paddling day last weekend, and when one of the regulars suggested a noon launch, I jumped in on it.

This paddle featured a first for me - I actually biked to the club for this one! I'd done a dry run on Memorial Day and was VERY annoyed with myself for not taking a camera along. When I say dry run I meant that literally, I just wanted to find out how long it took, so I just rode there, and then I rode on out to Canarsie Park just to see what I could see. It turns out that of course there's access to the Brooklyn Greenway biking and walking trail from the park, and I suddenly found myself riding over the bridge that I've paddled under about ten million times. And of course the view was glorious, and one of the Sebago fisherfolk was just on her way out, and there I was without a camera, sigh. Have to go back to get the view at least sometime.

Anyways, biking to the club works great, it takes me about half an hour to get there riding at a moderate pace (pretty much the only pace this inexperienced biker can manage at this point), which is actually less time than it takes on the bus unless my timing is absolutely perfect, which it never, never is. As far as I know, public transportation is still technically reserved for essential travel (not enforced but I've stayed off the buses and subways except for my essential doctor visits), and biking is also excellent cross-training with kayaking, so as long as the traffic stays unintimidating, I'm looking forward to doing this more.

This was the first time I'd actually biked and paddled, and it took me a ridiculous amount of time to sort out the bag, gear, and keys to do both (I came awfully close to leaving without my Sebago keys) but it doesn't take me too long to get ready to get on the water, so I didn't hold things up too badly.

Getting ready!

The forecast was for pretty gusty conditions, so Lori, our trip leader du jour, decided on Four Sparrows Marsh in Mill Basin. That would keep us mostly out of the wind, and that's a nice destination with opportunities for good birdwatching. It's actually named for four species of sparrow who nest there, Sharptailed, Seaside, Swamp, and Song Sparrows. Didn't see sparrows but there were red winged blackbirds a-plenty, a hawk of some sort (possibly a harrier, aka marsh hawk) being harassed by some smaller birds, a great blue heron, and an osprey, all good to see. 

Entering Four Sparrow Marsh

We went as far into the marsh as we could, then headed back out of Mill Basin, where we stopped for a socially distanced lunch.

After lunch, we headed back to the club; at around 6 miles, this is actually a pretty short paddle for this crew, but the wind really kicked up right in our faces as we turned the corner from Mill Basin and headed back for the Paerdegat, so we got some good exercise - Chris and I got a bit out ahead and we were howling with glee as the endorphins got going from the workout! Plus the bike ride ends up being about 7.25 miles, and I had a headwind for that, too - I slept so well that night!

BTW, this was such a pretty day that I took about a million pictures; I shared a few here, but there were lots more and so I've put together a Flickr album with 2 dozen.

Now one of the things I was trying to get a good picture of was Steve the Paddling Chef's new boat! He ran a boatbuilding workshop last year and his came out beautiful - he likes to decorate his boats and this one features black skimmers and terns, some of his favorite Jamaica Bay birds. He did a lovely job on them and the boat itself practically glows as the sun shines through the translucent skin. The Flickr album includes details of the art - really a thing of beauty. Also fun - we had 4 Romanys out and we all happened to park side by side for our lunch break. There's something so photogenic about a row of Romanys, so of course there's a picture of that over on Flickr, too. Just couldn't have asked for a prettier day! 

Oh, and one more fun thing from the paddle - clubmate Dotty took some photos of me in the marsh! I'm usually the one behind the camera, but I loved these -  aside from looking as happy as I was to be out there with my friends, I like my spring plumage of blue and gold, after spending the winter looking like a banana all in yellow. In fact, I liked the photos so much that if we're Facebook friends, you'll recognize this as being from the same series as my new profile shot.

I've got another 2-week furlough coming up at the end of June - fingers crossed that the weather is nice and I can get in some good biking and boating!

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!

Return to the Graveyard of Ships, 7/7/2019

Me and trusty Romany with Hila (ex ATR-89). Thanks to clubmate Frank Favia for the spectacular photo! Click for a better view. Flickr album links at the end of the post. 

The poor blog has been being neglected as I've been busy with other things, and maybe had a touch of blogger's block, but a weekend of being lazy and hiding at home from the heat wave has let me do some catching-up. So hello, here I am!

City of Water day (my last post was a plug for that) was fantastic - we had beautiful weather, I helped out with our beautifully refurbished war canoe and did well enough to get promoted from bow to steerer by my last trip of the day, and I was on a break at the right time to catch the Billion Oyster Project demonstration. Not a lot of pictures from on the water but I definitely will share some photos of the oyster folks, that was very cool!

Today goes a little farther back than that, though. Sebago has not done a trip to Witte Marine Salvage, aka the Staten Island Graveyard of Ships, in several years - in fact the last trip report I can find from there was in 2010. I'd been making noises about getting back there and had been planning on looking for a good day in the fall, and then early in the first week of July, I got an email from Steve the Paddling Chef saying that Sunday the 7th looked perfect tidewise and did I want to assist?

Well, he took care of all the coordinating, all I had to do was join a lovely bunch of clubmates and a couple of guests from other clubs on a very nice paddle from Conference House up to Witte and back, with a lunch break on a little beach at the base of the Fresh Kills landfill. And everybody thanking me for helping Steve with the trip when he did all the work. Yeah, life was indeed good!

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frogma kayak smiley, patent pending

I did find I had one little bit of concern when visiting Witte's for the first time in a while - there are always rumors that there just isn't anything left there, so as one of the organizers (not that I did any organizing) I did kind of find myself thinking "What if we drag everybody out there and there's nothing to see?". Of course I've been hearing rumors like that pretty much since I started my NYC kayaking career with a paddling lesson at Manhattan Kayak Company back in (yikes) the late 90's. I know I missed the heyday of the place, and it's true that there aren't as many boats there as there used to be, even since my first visit; Witte's is a salvage yard, not a museum, and with NYC's construction industry booming they're selling all the scrap metal they can. In addition, the Army Corps of Engineers has been doing some clearing out to keep pieces of the boats from coming loose and becoming hazards to navigation as they float off into the shipping channels. Folks who have been visiting for a while may find old favorites gone, but there's still enough there for first-time visitors to be impressed.

Here are a couple of old favorites of mine that I didn't see this time. This old Astoria ferry was not actually at Witte's, it was off by itself a little ways south. I did hear a rumor that this one got cleared out because a development went in and the developers didn't think condo buyers would want to look at a junky old boat. Personally I think it would be cool to have a condo with a view of a sunken ship, but I'm guess I'm probably not representative of your average Staten Island condo buyer.

And I think this tugboat is gone. Kind of sad as it was fun to see these old wooden tugs, even rotting away in the mud like this - but here, I think you can see pretty well how if pieces of this old vessel were to break loose and get out into the shipping channels, they really could be a hazard. The paddler disappearing behind the bow gives you a little sense of scale, this was a good sized boat and constructed of some big, solid timbers. It's also possible that we just missed it somehow, but at any rate, I'm glad I took the photos I did. 

So yes, there are some that are gone, but it's still a fascinating place to visit by kayak. And of course I came back and put together a new Flickr album - actually two Flickr albums. For the "blog version", click here. This one is 25 of my favorite photos from the day. If you were on the trip, or are just some kind of glutton for photographic punishment,click here for the extended version (39 photos, with most of the additional photos being pictures of the paddlers on the trip).

Want to learn more about the Staten Island Graveyard of Ships? Get yourself a copy of the short documentary Graves of Arthur Kill, produced by Gary Kane and directed by my good boatblogging friend, "Tugster" Will Van Dorp.  

All-Club Invitational at the Sebago Canoe Club

Just realized that the SD card with photos from last weekend is still here in my work computer, so here are some photos from Saturday's All-Club Invitational at Sebago. Another fine day at the club, with 3 different lengths of trips to go on (planned so well that all 3 groups were converging on the Paerdegat at the same time as we returned, which was fun), racing, and then FOOD SO MUCH FOOD by Steve the Paddling Chef.

I was pretty happy, I've kind of been using the Joe Glickman Cup racing series as one of my opportunities to see how I'm coming along in getting back to where I was before my breast cancer episode and this year I really feel like I'm getting somewhere! Dealing with that took from Fall 2015 (I found it in late August but heavy-duty medical stuff didn't really start going down until the fall) through Spring 2016. Took the wind out of my sails and getting myself back up to speed has taken much longer than I hoped. But I've been getting out on the water pretty often this year and my stamina for the 800 yard race (the longest of the 3 races that each club hosts for the Cup) felt noticeably better than it did last year at Yonkers, when I just didn't feel like I could hold any kind of a pace.

Karen from Yonkers and I had a good fight for 3rd place in this year's women's 800, Julie from Inwood and Julia from Sebago are both great racers in fast boats and they were just gone like that, but Karen and I were well matched (that's her in the Wilderness Systems partway down, and with my Romany temporarily out of commission, I was in a Chatham 17, which I'd picked for the extra length, most of our non-racer club boats are 16" so a little bit slower) and the race basically came down to my getting the inside track - I'd chased her all the way up the basin and only got ahead after pulling off a nice tight turn at the buoy. I was so pleased to NOT just run out of gas halfway back - it's taken forever 'cause I'm not wildly disciplined about getting back into shape, but this year I'm finally feeling like I'm getting somewhere with the getting back in shape and I am quite happy about that! 

Sebago Canoe Club Opening Day, May 4, 2019

Setting out for the pre-meeting paddle. Click on any photo for a better view.

So yeah, it's been drizzling on NYC for the entire week, but the club's Opening Day goes down rain or shine! And what a good turnout of all different sorts of club members. 

New thing at the club this year - Steve the Paddling Chef is leading a skin-on-frame kayak building workshop. Saturday was their very first gathering and as i arrived, they were just completing their paper patterns for the first rib of their future boats. Wish I could do this but it's a serious time commitment and I have my own goals (well, not entirely defined yet but I'm working on it) for the season that involve lots of time on the water. More on that another time. Still, very cool to see this this going on at Sebago and I'm looking forward to seeing the boats take shape. 

The rowers were getting back from their morning row just as the paddlers were gathering to launch.

Lori and Frank had organized the Opening Day paddle for the sea kayakers. Nothing super ambitious as we did need to get back to the club for eating and meeting, but a good crowd assembled for a paddle around Canarsie Pol. It was one of those amazing mirror-calm days out on the bay. The fishing committee was out there too, I could hear them chatting on the radio about who'd caught what where. Lots of motorboats out fishing too - most of them were just anchored with their motors off so it was still nice and quiet out there, but we're clearly past the time of year when a paddler gets to have the whole bay to herself. 

So smooth - I love it when you can see the sky perfectly reflected in the water!

Mirror paddle turned to rain paddle as we approached the old pier with the osprey platform at the eastern end of Canarsie Pol. It actually felt wonderful; we're in a tricky time of year when there tend to be a lot of accidents because people get fooled by a warm day, go out dressed for the air temperature instead of the water, and get in trouble very fast if they go in. Sebago paddlers are mostly still wearing drysuits this time of year, although the water's just about up to where a wetsuit will do. I was on the fence as far as what to wear but had ended up taking my drysuit, and with temperatures getting up to 60 during the day, drysuit wearers were actually feeling overheated before the rain started. Usually cooling down is not a problem but it had rained a lot through the week, and poured the night before, and in NYC the water quality gets seriously sketchy after a lot of rain (google "cso" and then scroll past the Chicago Symphony Orchestra results if you're curious), so a dunk was not a good idea. The rain starting up when it did was perfect! 

No photos of the ospreys this time, but the pair at the pier is back and somebody said they had heard that there were chicks this year. Or at least eggs - we gave the nest a wide berth but I could just make out an adult's head peeking over the edge of the nest at us, and as we paddled by the other one flew in and they switched out.

We got back to the pier at about 12:10 when we'd planned to get back at 12:30 - I made a joke about how we needed to keep going because we were early, then looked up the basin and saw Ilene heading up towards the end, and decided my joke was a good idea. The racing folks were out in their K-1's and surfskis - the basin's always calm but they had true flatwater conditions and were just flying along!

With the extra leg up the basin, came to around 7.5 miles, and that puts me at around 63 and a half miles paddled so far in 2019. Hoping to pick up the pace as the weather warms up! 

The sailors were the only ones who got shortchanged - the total absence of wind that made for such nice paddling and rowing of course meant it wasn't worth rigging the dinghies. But they STILL got a work day in doing whatever fixing of boats can be done in light rain, so hats off to them. Oh, and a group had gathered early in the day to get Canarsian onto her launching trailer, she'll be on the water soon. 

And here's Nancy from the fishing committee with her beautiful first day of fluke season fluke. 

Then it was time to eat and meet - another great Sebago potluck, and a pretty good meeting with a lot of fun info about the plans for the season. 

The gardening committee even had a little bit of a gathering afterwards - maintaining the grounds is a task that had been really falling on the shoulders of too small of a group of people, so those of us who have gardens plot have been asked to start doing a little more towards that by supervising weeding days. I'm good with that and was happy to have another review of this is a weed, this is a weed, 

this is not a weed! This is a bleeding heart - one of my favorite mainland flowers, so pretty.

So there we are, all set for another good season on the Paerdegat shore.