Back from the North Fork!

Hi, I'm back! We've been off on the North Fork of Long Island on our first vacation for just the two of us in a couple of years. We stayed close to home, heading out to the lovely Sunset Motel in Greenport (totally unsolicited plug, we were just really happy with our stay there). The Sunset was discovered by a couple of Sebago clubmates back when we used to have an annual weekend out there - most of us would tent camp at the Long Island Kampground but not everyone was into that, and a couple of them found this hotel and were quite happy with the place, even inviting the campers over for sunset drinks (the place is appropriately named, and every room has a sun porch that looks out on the sound - spectacular!)

TQ and I booked their Sunday - Thursday special and late Sunday morning, we loaded up our boats and headed out. It ended up being a drizzly day and I have to admit that although I do enjoy camping and have great memories of staying at the Kampground, I didn't have any major regrets that we weren't turning in there as we drove past on our way back to the hotel after a quick dinner in Greenport.

Our first full day out there was gorgeous, but we were both just recovering from colds and we woke up feeling incredibly unambitious and decided to just roll with that. We'd brought some leftovers along that we had for breakfast; TQ went to get a haircut, I hung out on the sun porch with a cup of tea and read until he got back. Our main activity for the day was a walk on the beach, and when we found the barbecue area at the bottom of the first set of steps that you descend to get to the water, we instantly decided to grill instead of going out for dinner. We had our walk (nice) and then we were off to the IGA supermarket for provisions (including sandwich fixings for the next few days) and then a delicious meal followed by a perfect sunset.

The boats may not have been happy with not getting off the car, but I think we both felt a lot better with the rest and quiet. 

Fishing on the Brooklyn VI

Setting Out From Sheepshead Bay

So to borrow a great phrase from my friends of Norwegian descent -

UFF DA!

October has featured all kinds of bloggable fun, but between Inktober and winding things up at work for a vacation nothing's getting posted!

I'm still at work tonight, I had my work all planned out for a reasonable day today and then a bunch more stuff came in (I've said on FB now and then that my job can be like being in a baseball game with too many pitchers, and that's especially true when I'm getting ready for vacation, as I am this week) - I have one more fairly chunky report that's the last item on the to-do list that was on my desk when I started the day, and I'm inclined to just power through that and then have an easy day tomorrow - but I am taking a quick blog break here before I tackle that final item. I have a lovely and not too enormous Flickr album from a fishing trip I went on on Saturday and I figured I would just share that. Click here to view (but read the rest of my trip report here to have the whole story).

A couple of nice folks from the Sebago fishing committee know that I'm interested in fishing and have been trying to get me out - I haven't been able to get out with either of them on Jamaica Bay, but J. also likes to go out on bigger boats. His favorite one in the Sheepshead Bay fleet (which I've eyed with interest for years because it's really easy for me to get there) is the Brooklyn VI, and last Sunday he was taking a neighbor out and invited some of his fishing friends - plus me, woohoo! I was already signed up for whalewatching on Sunday (no whales, but a whole bunch of dolphins came through at the end) and had been thinking of a longer paddle on Sunday, since conditions were looking nice, but it didn't take me too long to decide on the fishing.

Early start, of course - glorious sunrise, as you can see above (the boats all head out around the same time). I'm not a morning person so I don't see a lot of sunrises - the ones I do catch I have to say are pretty nice, though.

This was a full day out, and we headed all the way out to Fire Island. Captain was after striped bass for us and he found some!

Unfortunately, not for me. My spotless record of never having caught a fish in NY waters remains unblemished. I'm ready for a blemish but nope, once again not my day. However, it was still a pretty great day. I did rent a perfectly serviceable rod and reel from the boat and it was fine, but J. had brought along an extra spinning rod. I'd never used one of those so he showed me how to cast with it (not an overhead cast of course, one with the rod held low off the side of the boat), so there was that to practice and get better at (with occasional utter botches), and it was beautiful, and there were monarch butterflies going by, and other people were catching fish, and great big ones, so that was fun to watch, and best of all was that J's friend caught his first striped bass - and it was ENORMOUS. It was in fact one of the 2 biggest fish caught that day and when they both put on the scale that decides the matter for the pool, the mate could BARELY hold them in the air! It was the other fish by a hair, but wow it was close.

Oh, yeah - and we saw a whale! We went by it pretty fast but I saw it come up and spout very clearly. So I did get to see a whale this weekend!

And then the best part was that when J. organizes a trip like this, one of his rules to keep people happy is that the group shares the catch. He'd tried to explain this to me early in the day, but I somehow was picturing that only working if there were multiple fish. Watching the fish being cleaned, I got my heart just set on eating fresh fish for dinner, I'd started asking the crew if there was a chance of buying one of the fish they'd caught (and that was looking like a possibility although other people had asked earlier so it was a matter of whether they had any left) - fortunately J. re-explained, while they were cleaning the fish, that when he said we share the fish, that meant even if it was just one. And at that point it was finally dawning on me how much meat there is on a fish that size.

So, yeah, I ended up coming home with this enormous filet, which I cut up into 5 pieces, each suitable for a meal for 2. First 2 I cooked this week, the other 3 went straight into the freezer. AWESOME.

winnah winnah fish fo dinner!

Maybe next time I'll catch my 1st fish in NY waters - but this was pretty darned good.

me and Mrs. Holcomb. a long long time ago on a lake in Texas. Old friend of my Texas aunt and uncle - took me under her wing one week during a summer when we spent some time visiting in Houston, and oh my did we catch some fish. I was thinking of her on Sunday. Wonderful woman.

Dawn fisherman, Breezy Point jetty

Inktober!

I found out about Inktober when I got a group of friends together to go see Margaret Atwood at Town Hall. It was a great evening, Samantha Bee interviewed her, and their conversation was fascinating and thoroughly leavened with dry Canadian wit. Before the show, of course, everyone was pulling out their cell phones to take photos of the stage -- everyone, that is, except me (I'm still resisting the smartphone) and my friend Shari B, who pulled out a small sketchpad and a pen and proceeded to draw it!

I thought that was rather delightful and I said so - I liked her drawing, too, it was simple and clear and did a good job of showing the stage. She told me she'd been taking a drawing class that was specifically aimed at those who consider themselves artistically uninclined, and it sounded pretty interesting.

She also told me about Inktober, invented by illustrator Jake Parker. It started out as something he came up with for himself "as a challenge to improve my inking skills and develop positive drawing habits", and then people wanted to join in. I've joined a Facebook group and a Flickr group for Inktober, and I'm really enjoying it - the group participants range from people like me up to professional artists, there are doodles, there are comics, there's a woman who's doing a gorgeous noir graphic-novel presentation, there's Chicken Month, there's an alternative set of horror prompts called Shocktober, there are drawings that are silly, gorgeous, simple, elaborate - and so far I haven't seen ANYBODY say anything negative. Is it that possible this is the one set of spaces on the internet where if somebody doesn't like something they just scroll on by? Even the FB admin mentioned that today. Pretty nice, I hope I haven't just cursed it.

Anyways, so far so good, I did fall one day behind during a weekend at Lake Sebago where we ate and paddled and then ate some more and then talked on into the evening all of the sudden I was just ready for bed - but I caught up tonight by reining in my tendency to throw in everything but the kitchen sink (almost literally on Day 2 when I drew a wave of trash where there are even legible labels on some of the things) and doing something simple for Frail.

No great masterpieces so far and I but I'm having fun with it and I'll be curious to see if I notice any difference in my drawing by the end of the month. If you've been following this blog for any length of time at all, you'll know that I like to art every now and then, but it's sporadic - I'm doodling all the time but this idea of sitting down and Drawing A Thing every day for 31 days is new.

That's it for the write-up - click on any photo for a slideshow view of what I've drawn

post post

Running off to the woods for a day. Here are some posts to tide you over. OK actually they're pilings. Anyways, just thought they were kind of cool. 

River Day!

 Hooray, Hooray, It's River Day! Elisha Cooper's lovely new picture book is in bookstores today, and he'll be making a number of appearances in the Northeast, with several in NYC, over the next few weeks.

 I've been saving this video for today - he shares a number of scenes from the book (you'll see why I'm so ridiculously over the moon about this one) and in a very sweet moment, he also talks a bit about the models for his main character. When I first got my hands on the book, one of my first reactions (naturally) was that it was really interesting and nice that the book was about a woman doing a solo paddle, when it would've been just as easy to have it be a guy, but being someone who tends to accept things at face value, I didn't really think to wonder why, but it's neat.

 Elisha's events are listed here

 And it sounds like his pre-release Sunday special event in Rhinebeck, where book sales for the day appropriately benefited Riverkeeper, was a success.

 Note: I am an employee of Scholastic, the company that is publishing this book, but this is not my job (I'm in finance in fact) - I'm just delighted with the book and want to tell everyone in the world about it!

River - Book Signing in Rhinebeck, Sunday, 9/29/19

Further to yesterday's post about this new Scholastic title that I'm so excited about - if anyone from the Rhinebeck area happens to stumble across this within the next 2 days, and you're interested in getting a signed copy of the book, meeting the author, AND supporting Riverkeeper, all at the same time, Oblong Books has got you covered. Click here for details and to RSVP. Wish I could go!

note: I am a Scholastic employee but this blog is purely a personal hobby - I'm sharing this here because I just love the book.

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River, by Elisha Cooper

Well, how perfect that I have been in a Hudson River vein for the last couple of posts - because today I'm going to stay in that vein to tell you about an absolutely gorgeous book about a woman's solo paddle down the Hudson that's coming out next week. Here's Elisha Cooper's cover for River. 

And here's Trusty Romany looking south on the Hudson River back in August 2014, when I was able to make a long-held pipe dream of a solo paddle down the Hudson into reality.

I've worked for Scholastic for 18 years now and of all the books we've published in that time, this may be the one that gives me the most personal delight.

I found out about it from Nikki Mutch, a lovely Scholastic sales rep with whom I'm Facebook friends. I'm in finance, and not high up in finance, which means that I don't really hear much about books we're publishing. Nikki shared it on Facebook back in April as she was getting ready to sell our Fall 2019 list. I saw the cover and her description and just about fell off my chair - she told me who I could talk to about getting an F&G (Folded and Gathered, an unbound preliminary print run allowing for adjustments before the final version) and when I read it - oh, it just gave me chicken skin. Here's what I had to say after the first reading:

ok I might be just a tiny tiny tiny bit excited about a book that Orchard Books is publishing this Fall. 

It's a story about a woman doing a solo paddle down the Hudson River. Friends will understand exactly why this just makes me smile from ear to ear just saying that! No, no, no, it's not actually about me, but reading the F&G of Elisha Cooper's book and seeing the glorious watercolors with which he's illustrated it just brought memories of my own voyage flooding back!

Fall seemed so far away then - but now here we are, and it comes out next week, and check out this great review from Kirkus!

This book would give a kid some great paddling dreams of their own to dream -- and it definitely gives this grownup an itch to go do it again - and maybe take more time this time, I only did a part of the trip described in the book.

Glorious. Elisha Cooper truly captures the river that I (and so many other boaters) love.

PS - for trip reports from my 2014 paddle, click on the "My Hudson Voyage" link below. 

Back to the Hudson, 9/7/2019

So what's nicer than a beautiful weekend day getting back on the Hudson? Another beautiful weekend day back on the Hudson the next weekend!

This was a Sebago trip that my friend Laurie B. planned. I help out with the Sebago calendar and when she asked me to put the trip on there I emailed her right back saying "OK, and sign me up!"

We put in at Englewood and paddled up to Alpine, just under 5 miles north (and directly across from Yonkers, the location of the prior week's festivities), looking up at the magnificent cliffs of the Palisades. The link goes to the website of the Palisades Interstate Park Commission; this park, running from just south of the George Washington Bridge to just north of the border between Bergen County in New Jersey and New York's Rockland County, is a real local treasure, with the amazing cliffs, beautiful woods, a couple of marinas, a number of nice little picnic and recreation areas, and then a spectacular hiking trail from end to end (mostly easy, level hiking with one challenging scramble area at the "Giant's Stairs" section).

Englewood used to be a favorite day trip destination for the crew back in my Pier 63 days - it's about a 10 mile paddle but timed correctly you had a strong current assist both ways. I always loved setting out from our seriously urban rusty barge launch and then paddling up and having a leisurely lunch in all the natural beauty. Alpine has good memories too - there's a grand old stone pavilion there (it's in the picture of us on the beach at Alpine), and back in the days when Irish music and dance was my main hobby, one of the highlights of the summer was always the Alpine Ceili, which was put on by Manhattan's Irish Arts Center and always featured great local musicians. I don't think that happens any more, but there was an overlap between my taking up kayaking in 1998 and the end of the ceili, and there was one year when the ceili just happened to be on a weekend when the tides were perfect - and I threw some dancing clothes and shoes in a drybag, jumped in my shiny red Seda Glider (a faster boat that I used to own), and paddled to the ceili! Oh, the looks on people's faces when I turned up that way - priceless! Such a great day.

So it was so nice to get back to this much-loved stretch of the river for a day. It was a much grayer day, and a bit breezier, but the Hudson is beautiful in all sorts of moods. With the wind and current at our backs, we absolutely flew from Englewood to Alpine; we took a nice long leisurely lunch break there and then had a good strong current sending us home. It did get choppy enough from the wind against the current that if we'd had less experienced paddlers along, they might not have enjoyed the trip back as much as the trip up, but we had a small and solid enough group that the conditions were just good fun. And just the first hints of fall foliage!

And speaking of playful conditions - as soon as I wrap this up I'm off to play in some small surf with Kayak Dov and my fellow June IDW participants. I haven't gotten around to a writeup for that, but I will at some point - it was great and a really good next step in my continuing progress of getting my paddling act re-built after cancer (as mentioned in the last post). We were supposed to have a surf day during the workshop but it got thunderstormed out - Dov and Dale Williams (Georgia based instructor, great teacher) came up with some solid alternatives, but Dov went above and beyond what most instructors would do and offered us a makeup day later in the year. That's today! This will actually be my first time out in surf since my surgery. Surf report according to Surfline.com: "The surf is small and inconsistent but enough for the bigger boards if you are motivated to get wet" - well, sea kayaks can count as "bigger boards", so I'm hoping that this ends up being the perfect re-introduction. Fingers crossed, knocking wood, wish me luck!

All pictures after this - click on any for a slide show view. 

9/7/19 - Yonkers leg of the Joe Glickman Cup, plus the Yonkers Mayor's Cup

Playing catch-up a little bit today! The weekend before last was an absolutely gorgeous day for the Yonkers leg of the Joe Glickman Cup.

Sebago had too many fun things going on that day. There was this, and then there were two camping weekends, one in Greenport and one on Staten Island. Both of those sounded like fun (although it was very windy on the Friday as Hurricane Dorian was passing offshore), but I decided to stick with the races.

Joe Glickman, also known as Glicker, was a much-loved member of Sebago and the paddling community at large, especially the surfski racing world. He was a kayak racer and a very good author. If you're a paddler, there's a pretty chance you've heard of him - and even if you don't know his name specifically, you've probably heard of what I suspect is his most popular work, Fearless: One Woman, One Kayak, One Continent, his excellent book about Freya Hoffmeister's circumnavigation of Australia. An amazing feat by an amazing woman, and Joe did a wonderful job of retelling her story.

Joe had a great gift for making anyone he ran into feel like a rock star, though. The last time I saw him was at the club - with Oscar Chalupsky. I'm a solid sea kayaker, but Joe did things like the Molokai Hoe, an annual race from Molokai to Oahu, and Oscar is a surfski god. So I am nowhere up with these guys. And yet Glicker, introducing me to Oscar, came up with a story about the day he ran into me out in Jamaica Bay during a tropical storm. "So I'm out there, blasting around, having a great time, and I'm thinking I've got to be the only person crazy enough to be out there, but then I see another boat and I paddle over to see who it is and it's Bonnie, and she's bobbing around in the waves -- taking pictures!"
 
A similarly experienced friend and I had gone out together to test ourselves out; conditions were at the lower end of tropical storm levels, the day and the water were warm, and the wind was from the south so if anything went awry we would blow towards home while we sorted things out. We actually had a great time out there and just cracked up when Glicker went tearing past us on his surfski, throwing a shaka as he went by. He was flying and went considerably farther than John and I, but we all ended up getting back to the dock at the same time, which was just as things were starting to get a bit feisty out there.  

So the story was true, but that he chose that as the story to tell when introducing me to one of the best surfski racers in the world was just so very, very, very Glicker.

Tragically, he passed away from cancer in 2015, far too young. But I think he squeezed more living and joy into his too-short life than some people do into much longer lives.

The Joe Glickman Cup was begun between the 3 oldest paddling clubs in NYC - the Sebago Canoe Club, the Yonkers Paddling and Rowing Club, and the oldest of all, the Inwood Canoe Club to remember Joe in that spirit of friendly competition and fun at which he excelled. All three clubs have a history as serious racing clubs, and all three have some serious racers who participate, but it's also fun for anyone else who might want to give it a try. The way the Cup works is that over the course of the summer, each club hosts a day. We start out with group paddles, then there are 6 races: 100 meter, 400 meters, and 800 meters, women and men. The first 3 finishers score points for their club, and at the end of the season, the club with the most points takes the cup home.

At Yonkers, the 800 meter races are also the Yonkers Mayor's Cup, with Mayor Mike Spano making the awards. I'm afraid I have no pictures of the award ceremony -- because I was in it!

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Then we feast!

The event has been going on for 4 years now. The first 2 years Sebago got the cup; last year Yonkers won. The mens' races are always pretty exciting - Sebago has some veteran racers, Yonkers has some enthusiastic young men. The first year I think the veterans pretty much mopped up, if I'm recalling correctly - then the young men really got to work on their training, and these days, you just don't know who's going to win. Especially on the longer races - the Yonkers guys have powerful sprints, but on the longer races the experience comes into play. Adding to the fun, one of Sebago's racers, Yossi, loves coaching, and loves seeing people have fun racing, and he started helping to train the Yonkers guys!

Glicker would've loved that part especially.

The women's races are not always as competitive - in fact I try to attend these partly because I have picked up a point or two for Sebago by coming in 3rd out of a field of 3 - all I had to do was find my way across the finish line. Sebago and Inwood each have a serious racer who go to as many of the events as they can; Yonkers also has some great women racers, they don't come out to the other clubs as much but they do turn out for the Yonkers races, and that can really change the outcome. So what can end up happening with the women's races, that's way more fun than the 3 person field, is a setup where there are 2 serious racers and then us more touring-type sea kayakers fighting it out for 3rd.

I did actually manage to take 3rd place in the 400 and 800 at Yonkers with that setup, with some very good competition, and was quite delighted as another reason I've been attending and racing regularly is that I've realized that doing these races is a really good way to gauge my recovery after my own bout with cancer back in the fall, winter, and spring of 2015-16. That took a good bit of the wind out of my sails. I was back on the water one month after my mastectomy in October 2015, and kept paddling all the way through chemo, but I still remember one of the first Sebago group paddles I went on in 2016 - I stopped to take pictures as the group went by, then tried to do my usual "photographer's sprint" to catch up, only to discover that high gear was simply gone! That was a bit jarring.

I haven't been super disciplined about getting back in shape, I always seem to have too much going on to just get myself out on the water for workout paddles with anything approaching regularity, but each summer I've tried to push myself a little bit farther. It's working, I'm making slow but steady progress, and doing these 3 set distances 3 times a year gives me a really good sense of that where I might otherwise be getting really aggravated with myself because I'm not getting faster fast enough to actually tell.

The first 800 meter I did, I think I just did it because it was one of those 3-racer setups. Julie and Julia dwindled into specks in the distance while I came whimpering along behind - still no high gear.

This year, high gear is definitely coming back. I'm still not racing for 1st or 2nd - but I'm also not seeing them disappear in the distance the way they did back in 2016, and I'm able to set what feels like a respectable pace and hold it steady without running out of steam.

I'm pretty happy about that.

Here are a few more pictures from the day, click on the first for a slideshow view. Want to see more, with better quality? visit Flickr.  

Sept. 11 - Dust to Deliverance and my own story

I have been doing a 7 book covers in 7 days challenge over on Facebook, invited by my wonderful Aunt Kathy. She challenged me last week and I realized that my 7th day would be September 11th, and I knew what cover I would be sharing today.

In doing so, I ended up sharing a short version of my own story, so I thought I would just share that here today.

 Jessica DuLong is an old friend from my Pier 63 days. She's an engineer on the Fireboat John J. Harvey, which, although retired, served so well at the WTC site. She is also an author, and after untold hours of collecting stories from so many of us who were there on the waterfront that day, she crafted an amazing retelling of the story of the maritime evacuation that went on that day.

I had fled the WTC during the attacks and ended up at Pier 63. I was a partner at the Manhattan Kayak Company at that time, and we were based at Pier 63. I was in the subway station when the 2nd plane hit and managed to get onto a train that pulled in moments after the boom. I didn't care where it was going, it just seemed like the safest way out. It was northbound, so I got off at 23rd street, still not really knowing what had happened. I had been going into the WTC's ground-level mall from outdoors when the first plane hit, fled into the building for shelter without looking up to see what had exploded above my head, and gone into the subway station when the police began evacuating the mall and stopped me from going out the same way I came in - so all I knew was the sound of screaming engines ending in a noise like a gigantic firework, and then, a few minutes later, another boom that set everyone in the subway station running again.

I'd ducked into a turnstile to get out of the stampede, saw the train pulling in downstairs, and made a run for it. When I got off the train at 23rd street, I first stopped at the Moonstruck Diner, where I would often stop for breakfast on my way to a day of teaching or guiding at MKC. Everyone there was looking at the television and that was when I saw what had happened.

 In those days Pier 63 was like my 2nd home so that is where I went next. John Krevey, the owner, saw what was needed and called some of the party boats that would use Pier 63 as a boarding location. The funny thing there is that I didn't actually know how we ended up running a ferry to Weehawken that day until Jessica interviewed me - I think I was still a little bit in shock and just didn't even think to wonder where the boats came from - there they were and that's what we were doing. And to this day I am so grateful that I was there. It was so good to be given a purpose on a terrible day.

Full version of my own story, as written for my family that evening: Link

Unintentional Neil Simon Tribute Weekend

Saturday - Yonkers

Sunday - Brighton Beach

Actually made for a wonderful weekend. I was in Yonkers yesterday for the 3rd leg of the annual set of races for the Joe Glickman Cup (of which the longest is also the Mayor's Cup) - the Yonkers Paddling and Rowing Club are great hosts and ran a great day of racing and paddling. It's always so nice to see old friends at the YPRC, and this year I was very happy with how I did in the races, too, taking 3rd place in the 400 and 800 meter -- and this time not because there were 3 of us in the race and all I had to do was find the finish line - that's happened more than once.

I have to say that I am getting quite a collection of 3rd place medals. OK, I did have to throw in my 1st from Empire Kayak's old May Day on the Bay race That was a fun one.

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The Neil Simon connection just hit me as I was on the train to Brighton Beach to go swimming today. We had another beautiful day and I thought about going for a paddle, but the end is in sight for my 2019 outdoor swimming season as the water is cooling down fast. I once again got there early enough to swim as long as I wanted to, and that turned out to be 1.2 miles.

More pix from Yonkers coming soon!