birds don't always read the instruction manual

Biltmore Roses (plus a corpse flower cousin)

We paid a visit to the Biltmore gardens while I was visiting my folks in North Carolina. We went to see the Chihuly exhibit there and it was fun seeing some of the same pieces as I'd seen at the New York Botanical Garden with my friend Mandy last Fall, and I will have some photos from that, but first, here are some photos from the rose garden, which must have been just about at peak.

I have notes on two of these photos, everything else is just prettiness:

1. My sister noticed these unusual large blooms and brought me over to see them. The maroon flowers with the central spikes were enormous, over a foot long, and then as I admired them I noticed that there was a rotten smell in the air and that there were flies all over them. I guessed correctly that this is a relative of the world-famous corpse flower, using a similar technique to draw pollinating flies. I got to see a corpse flower a few years ago when the one they have at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden bloomed; it was a seriously impressive thing to see, but by the time I saw it the smell for which the plant is named was gone. Now I have a very good idea! It was actually a little hard to figure out a relative of the corpse flower on the internet, because search terms including "corpse flower" just bring up ten million articles about various corpse flowers blooming at various botanical gardens, but tonight I finally found the name voodoo lily (it has other names too but that was the first one I found).

2. And now I'm wishing that for just one post I could turn on the smell-o-vision feature - if the voodoo lily was one of the worst-smelling plants I've ever smelled, this rose was at the opposite end of the spectrum. There were plenty of roses in this garden that were clearly bred for looks, not scent, but I love a rose that smells like a rose, and I think my favorite part of the garden was the section was the part with the fragrant roses. This may not have been the most glamorous rose in the garden but it just smelled so beautiful! 

And that's it for the sniff notes. All pictures from here, click on any of them for a better view. 

A Paddle on Lake Lure, NC

Especially sad to hear about the NC flooding after such a nice week there last week. Photos here from a paddle on beautiful Lake Lure last week Friday. Hope things clear up for the town of Lake Lure and other affected areas SOON.

TQ's sister lives in the area and she and her kids (who call me Aunt Bonnie, which I love) took us out for a spin. We drove to the lake through some fairly heavy rain, but it was warm and easing off as we were standing in the parking lot discussing, so we went, and I was so glad.

 TQ's sister kept apologizing about the view not coming out to be seen, apparently there are a LOT more mountains back behind the ones we could see, but I loved the Chinese-landscape-painting effects that the low clouds gave. I also suspect that if it had been a bright sunshiny day, there would've been tons more motorboats, being the day before memorial day weekend. As it was it was so peaceful, with only a couple of motorboats and pontoon boats passing us during the first part of the paddle. Around 4 or so lots of other paddlers started appearing from the docks of the lakefront homes but still no motorboats.

No sunset this day either but TQ's sister said that the sunset on the lake is amazing. We may have to go back for that sometime.

BTW the beach in the first photo below is attached to the resort that was the setting for the movie Dirty Dancing. You can read more about the inn and some other neat things in the surrounding area here. Never actually saw that movie myself but I know a lot of people loved it!

All photos after this, click on any picture for a slideshow view (or at least it's supposed to be a slideshow, at the moment it's not quite cooperating - hopefully that sorts itself out soon).

Paddled about 5.5 miles and TQ and I tried out an assisted rescue in the recreational kayak I was using. Always fun to practice in a new boat!

I'm back

Back from NC. Here is possibly the most lovely butterfly I've ever seen, so glad it was nice enough to pose so cooperatively. ID'd by a FB friend as a red-spotted admiral. 

Three Paddle - Island Cruise, saying hello to ospreys

Continuing on with the one paddle, two paddle song -- here's "three paddle", and this one finally brings me up to this month!

May 6th was a very nice day for paddling, maybe not so much for the racers in the spring sailing race series that was underway! Light winds, and very shifty (I asked Patrick, who I'd just passed here, how the racing was and that was what he said).

Our paddle was a pretty straighforward one, TQ is off work on Sundays so we'd decided to go when we saw a decent forecast - nice temperatures, light winds, potential for drizzle but hey, it's a water sport - and when a new club member asked if anyone was willing to take him out paddling, we invited him to join us. We hadn't met him before, but he'd said on his request that he was an experienced paddler; now, people have different ideas about what constitutes "experienced" and and we were ready to keep the paddle slow and short if that's what was appropriate, but it turns out R. was most recently from Alaska and really does know what he's doing. We set out at 3:00 and I'd suggested about 3 hours on the water. I'd first proposed just a loop around Canarsie Pol, clockwise, say hi to the ospreys, on around the island and back, but we were zipping along quite nicely as we passed the nest platform and I suggested maybe extending our course to around Ruffle Bar, too. TQ and R. were both very happy with that idea, so off we went.

The Canarsie Pol ospreys haven't got much of a nest going, in fact we weren't sure they were there at all as we approached (ospreys add to old nests every year and the things can get massive, but we had some pretty bad storms this winter and last year's sticks must've blown away), except that there weren't any cormorants. The old pier structure here is a favorite perch for the local cormorants until the ospreys get back from their wintering grounds - the ospreys are very territorial and won't let anybody else perch on their pier when they are in residence. Ospreys generally return to Jamaica Bay in March, with the males returning first, with older males reclaiming their nesting sites and unestablished males finding a territory. The females join the males a little later. There was a great project that ran for a while a while back, where one of the established males was fitted with a tracker and you could follow his travels on a website - it was so fascinating watching the bird fly all the way back from I think it was Chile and settle in with his mate back at their usual nest in the bay. The tracking was supplemented by direct observations by project scientists including our baykeeper, Don Riepe, and they did a great job of telling the story. There was drama - there was a 2nd bird with a tracker, and all of us who were following the site were so sad when his course showed that he'd most likely been blown out to sea in a storm and lost, and then there was soap opera - like one year where one established male got held up en route, and another male decided to take over that tempting unoccupied platform, and when the female came back & found the new guy, it seemed like she was going to be OK with that, and the original guy got back just as this was going on - total Days of Our Lives, only with feathers and fish. :D

Anyways, there was indeed a nest on the Canarsie Pier platform and as we went by we could just see an osprey watching us paddle by, just her head - no pictures, sorry, the guys were moving along well and I didn't want to hold them up. We also saw a pair of ospreys when we got over to Ruffle Bar, plus the usual spring mix of gulls, terns, brants, and oystercatchers. R. enjoyed hearing the oystercatchers, turns out those guys make it up to Alaska in the summertime and it's always fun to hear a familiar bird in a new place.

Also some very cool clouds - looked to me a bit like "mammatus" clouds, same root as "mammal" and "mammary" where it looks like breasts hanging down from the sky. You can google "mammatus" to see some really cool pictures - we had a suggestion of that, you can see it in the first photo below, but sometimes it can much more pronounced. Also excellent views of Manhattan, especially for a cloudy day.

I ran out of steam a bit as we paddled into the ebb current on the return home, with R. & TQ pulling away from me depressingly fast. Now this is partly established paddling habits for me and TQ - when we get into a headwind or an adverse current, I do best going into a low gear and then just chugging away, while he does better if he sprints, so when we get into that kind of situation is I'll tell him if I'm feeling comfortable and am OK with him running while I plod, and then he goes (keeping a good eye on me as he goes) - but it's also a matter of conditioning. This is something I'm hoping to work on this year, it's been two and a half years since my mastectomy and I'm still nowhere near in the shape I was before I went my round with breast cancer; last summer got away from me in the worst way, but I'm really going to try to get more water time this year.

We did get back to the club in a nice amount of time, and R. was very happy with his first real intro to the bay, and we were happy with having given that to him!

8.5 miles according to Google. Here's hoping I can get back into a good habit of doing trips like that regularly this summer!

More photos, no more writing. Click any photo for a slideshow view.

An Oyster Reef in Canarsie!

Photo by Sebago clubmate Jeff Krause

I'm taking a break from my slow meander through my spring trip reports (I've done one paddle, two paddle, and then there will be a three paddle and maybe a four to take me home, although the last may fall by the wayside due to other good stuffs going on) to share something very cool that went on at the club this week - the installation of Canarsie's very own Community Oyster Reef!

We've had various little test cages of oysters hanging from our dock for a while, and evidently they did OK, because on Tuesday, club members and neighbors gathered at the club and a van from NYC's Billion Oyster Project pulled up loaded with oyster shells, which the volunteers loaded into wire cages and anchored in the muck of the Paedergat. Baby oysters need certain surfaces to grow on, and oyster shells are one of their favorites, so the installation of this reef should encourage the establishment of a healthy population right there in the Paedergat, where they'll help to clean the water, which is WAY cleaner since the new sewage holding plant was opened (the old one was woefully inadequate to the size of the neighborhood, and on rainy days, and sometimes on other days too, you could smell the basin from the street, it was just foul) but still could use some help. NYC used to be famous for oysters, but between overfishing and pollution, they were pretty much gone - with the water being so much cleaner now, the Billion Oyster Project and the various community groups with whom they work are doing everything they can to bring this key part of the harbor ecology back from the brink. Here's hoping for the success of the Canarsie reef!

I'm very sorry that I couldn't play hooky from work to go help out, but there was some good reporting from the club, and there's some good general info on the internet, so here are some links:

Channel 11 was there, here's their report;

Jeff Krause, one of the coordinators for the day, who took the photo above and who probably knows about as much about Jamaica Bay's wildlife as anyone at the club, is featured in the news report and also put up a very nice set of photos on Flickr.  

Here is the Billion Oyster Project's website

And here is a well written story of the history of NY Harbor's oysters on Untapped Cities.

One Paddle, Two Paddle...one week later, much better, trying to find a WHALE!

NOT MY PICTURE! Photo taken by Captain Frank of the American Princess, that's a whale RIGHT OFF RIIS LANDING!!! 

2nd trip report (pix at the end of the post)- As mentioned, the paddle on April 8th (trip report on last post) was way too short when I was craving a long one, and the meeting that brought us off the water too soon was just the first one in a string of 3. The next weekend's meeting was actually one that ordinarily I would have wanted to attend, a gathering of some of the club's more experienced paddlers plus a couple of board members to discuss clarifying certification requirements for the independent use of club boats. Getting more members "safety certified" is something I've been very interested in; I just remember it as being so great and so freeing to get to that point where instead of waiting for other people to take you out, you can start planning your own trips, and my thought is that it would make for a better and livelier club if more members are shooting for that instead of just being stuck waiting for the club's volunteer trip leaders to organize things.

So ordinarily, a meeting to discuss just that was a meeting I would've liked to attend. But work was still crazy and the 3-mile teaser on the 8th may've just made me want to get out even more. TQ had been there for my post-paddle pre-meeting meltdown so he did have an idea of how stressed out I was getting over having all of these meetings right when I was literally crying for a nice long paddle, and he offered to go to the meeting while I paddled and fill me in afterwards. This was a very tempting offer. He and I have very similar views of the desirability of getting people to graduate to being able to paddle on their own, and he was a professional kayak guy for years and knows about as much as anybody I know about getting people onto the water safely. I was still thinking it might be good for me to be there, though; he would make the same points I would just fine, but I think the two of us back each other up really well, I was a professional for less time than he was but I did have that experience that I could share if others were looking for confirmation beyond his say-so.

But then on April 13th, still on the fence about the meeting, I checked Facebook at work (as I do entirely too often), and there on my wall I found a video post from Gotham Whale that was absolutely jaw-dropping to me! It was a whale - that's what Gotham Whale is all about, of course, check out their website if you haven't heard of them. It wasn't the most spectacular whale video you've ever seen, the whale wasn't indulging in any of the (literally) splashy acrobatics for which humpbacks are famous, just quietly swimming around, surfacing for breath every now and then - but it was jaw-dropping for me, and for anybody else who paddles Jamaica Bay, because it was swimming around RIGHT OFF OF RIIS LANDING, where the American Princess is docked. Riis Landing is on the bay side of the Rockaway Peninsula, just outside of the Marine Park Bridge. The whale was right there in the Jamaica Bay inlet! If you're on Facebook, watch it here! Photo above was taken during the same sighting.

Well. Meeting, shmeeting, that knocked me right off the fence. Since I've gotten so enthusiastic about the Gotham Whale/American Princess whalewatching cruises (full details there if you'd like to go, unsolicited plug/link), people frequently ask me if I think we could paddle out to see the whales. I always say no, it's really better to go on the American Princess if you really want to see whales - the NY Bight, where most of the sightings happen, is a big place, and the AP is a big, fast boat that can and does cover a whole lot of territory during one of their whalewatching trips. Highly unlikely that a paddler going out from Jamaica Bay at 3 kts (average cruising speed of a trained kayaker) is going to find a whale. It's possible that they could be super, super lucky and have a whale find them, but from our location, at least, I don't think a whalewatching paddle is a very practical thing.

With that video, though, I decided that for all that, I was still going to give it a try. Maybe the whale would still be hanging around in the inlet. And what I really wanted was a good long paddle - so this was perfect, I would go out to where the whale had been, that would be the kind of good long paddle I'd been craving, so that would be a fine thing, and if I saw the whale, well, holy cow that would be the whipped cream, cherries, rainbow sprinkles and hot fudge sauce (and I mean a really good rich yummy truly fudgy hot fudge sauce, not a little drizzle of Hershey's syrup that somebody stuck in the microwave for a few seconds) on top. Win-win.

And that was just the right attitude to take out there. Because no, I did not find the whale, it had apparently moved back out into more open water somewhere. But it was just the paddle I'd been daydreaming about during the busy days at work. Beautiful weather. Light winds - got down to pretty close to mirror-calm at one point as I was paddling out. Lots of birds - cormorants, oystercatchers, brants, ducks, and a couple of loons, and one of the loons was in that dashing black-and-white checkerboard breeding plumage that they put on for their summers at the lake instead of the soft grays they wear for wintering in coastal environments. I'd never seen one in summer plumage before so that was pretty cool - maybe not as cool as seeing the whale would've been but still a lovely first. Sorry no picture, I just looked for a bit and then just when I started fumbling for my camera, the bird dove.

I made it out to the Breezy Point "Light" - really an old WWII fire control station where observations and calculations were made to direct the guns in the batteries at the forts that protected NY harbor. Today it makes a good Thing To Paddle To - I tend to be something of a landmark-driven paddler, I like to paddle to things or around things. It would've been tempting to keep going but I'd kind of whooshed out there, the currents weren't really right for what I doing, the ebb had not been going for too long when I launched; it was most helpful going out but would be against me going back. Currents in Jamaica Bay proper are pretty light but strong enough in the inlet that I knew it was going to be a bit of a slog going back, so I made the tower the turnaround point of the trip and headed back for the club.

Paddling back to the club against the ebb, the tops of the old metal bulkhead along Floyd Bennett Field started reminding me of highly stylized Greek theatrical masks, so I stopped for a bit to take some pictures of those for a "Found Art" Facebook page I'm on where people share photos of things that aren't meant to be art but look like they are anyways. One nice thing about a solo paddle is that you can stop and futz around with something like that if you want to, which I frequently do.

Also paused here and there to pick plastic bags out of the bay. Malama honua!

And the final nice thing about this paddle was that I went back to the club because I was ready to, not because I had a certain time. Oh, ok, I was ready to go back because a blister, but that was OK. Otherwise I would've gone to see the ospreys - but this was 13 good miles and I was very, very happy with the day.

And the meeting went just fine without me.

Here are a dozen photos from the trip, and a bonus forsythia picture - we were still in the early spring flowering at the club and the forsytha was so festive, I couldn't resist it. Click on any photo for a slideshow view.