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!

Supporting My Local Paddling Chef!

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you:

Steve Heinzerling, the Paddling Chef!

Here are some shots of Steve in action:

Steve with a lobster! Steve with a steak! From 5 Years Around Long Island Year 4 Steve with steak and squash! From Proxigean Paddle! Steve cooking up some delicious Eggs in the Holes before an icy paddle in January From 5 Years Around Long Island, Year 3 Steve choosing corn (supervised by Commodore Emeritus John W.) He's coooookin' in the rain, just cooooookin' in the rain! From 5 Years Around Long Island - Days 2 & 3 You just never know what he's going to pull out of a hatch to share. This was the best pineapple I've ever tasted outside of the Hawaiian Islands. From 5 Years Around Long Island - 2nd Year Day 1! Steve with another lobster Steve with fire From 5 Years Around Long Island Year 4

Steve paddling!

Honest, it's not just the food that makes him one of my favorite paddling companions - that smile you see in every picture except the last one (and you can bet it's there in the last one, he's just a little too far away to see it)? That's just his normal expression. He is one of the most naturally cheerful people I know. His two favorite phrases? "Uff da!" (a Norwegian expression of dismay which is the term he uses at times when crankier folks like myself would be using terms of a far less easy-on-the-ears nature) in 2nd place, and "It's like a dream!" in first, by a mile.

A great guy, and a great chef, and so I was absolutely tickled to see him get a nice little plug in the popular local Ditmas Park Blog. If Steve recommends something it's just GOING to be insanely good, and it happens to be the time of the year when I'm making my favorite green tomato rice recipe to use up the tomatoes that came too late, and I thought a little of this would add a nice flavor.

Here's the ham -


All the ingredients:


The recipe I like is actually something TQ found on line the year a couple of years ago when we had that terrible tomato blight in the Northeast. Click here if you'd like to see it. Ironically, that was probably my best year ever for tomatoes - at the same time as TQ's vines were withering away in Pennsylvania, sending him scrambling for ways to cook green tomatoes, I was picking delicious monsters like this. He served this rice with dinner one night & it's become my favorite way of using up the last tomatoes.

I usually skip the bacon & do the frying in olive oil; the Mangalica ham IS very expenive but it doesn't take much to add a very nice flavor.

Nearly Blue Moon Paddle, 8/20/2013

Or, Summer: It Isn't Over Yet Part 2.

Twilight & Rising Moon in Jamaica Bay, Tuesday, 8/20

I haven't replaced my Optio WP yet, but fortunately my friend Joan got a couple of lovely shots while she was out on the bay on Tuesday night, which was an absolutely perfect summer night. August in NY had started out with some oddly autumnal-feeling weather, the sort that makes the back-to-school ads start feeling a little more reasonable (it's funny how much I still hate seeing back-to-school ads too early in the summer even though it's been years since the days when summer vacation was part of my life), but after a short run of cooler days, August remembered that it was August and warmed back up again. I may be speaking too soon but it's been a nice summer so far, only one heat wave that I recall and as heat waves go it wasn't a bad one, I had to put the chocolate in the 'fridge but I was reasonably comfortable as long as I kept the fans on and had cool drinks (I haven't got A.C.).

I've been wanting to get post-work paddles back into my routine. I don't remember exactly when they fell out. It was definitely easier to get to Pier 63 from my office than it is to get to the Paerdegat, and I have over the years taken on more responsibilities at work -- actually come to think of it, the year that I let my post-work paddles slip may have been during an interim period when I was handling the processing of a certain set of incoming payments. 

That work was slated to eventually be handed off to our Accounts Receivable division, and before that even happened we brought in a very competent temporary employee who took the processing off of my hands, but for a period of a few months I had that on top of my usual duties, it was very cut-and-dry, the money simply had to be entered into the system on a timely basis, that was my job, and I did what I had to to get it done - and that may have been when I lost the paddles. That was several years ago though, the work has long since been transferred to the AR division and although I still have plenty of work and occasional deadlines, it's never been back at that incessant level of grind.

The catch was that once I'd allowed myself to drop habit of packing up my paddling clothes (a matter of a small backpack this time of year) and getting myself out to the club once or twice a week after work, I never got back into it. I'm always thinking I should do that & last Tuesday was a great reminder of how good that would be.

I didn't actually pick Tuesday night because of the moon. I was going because of the garden. It hadn't rained for a while. I'd thought I would go to the club on Sunday but after 2 long weekends away and a fun day in Manhattan on Saturday, I just ended up taking a lazy day at home. The forecast had had a chance of rain showing for Sunday night/Monday but there was never more than a spritzing, not enough for the garden, so by Tuesday I knew the garden was going to be pretty thirsty.

I usually go do my watering before work but this time I remembered that Steve the Paddling Chef has been leading Tuesday night paddles and I decided that the garden could probably wait until the evening.

It was a great call. I hadn't even been thinking about the moon, just that I was going to the club anyways and might as well get in some time on the water -- but oh, the moon.

I almost gave up, too. I'd decided to try a different way of getting to the club from work. There are a few different ways to do that and none of them are good, and every now and then I'll try something different, just to see if I can magically get there faster. This time, I tried the 5 train to Brooklyn College, then switched to the B103. I thought the 5 would be express in Brooklyn but it turned out it wasn't, and there end up being a LOT of stops on the local track. I left work at 5:45. The Tuesday night paddling crew was meeting at 6:30 and at that point I was still riding a lumbering train in the proverbial hole in the ground. 6:45 or so I got to Brooklyn College and still had a bus to catch and ride. Bus didn't come and didn't come and didn't come. TQ had watered the garden for me (he's at one of the city pools for the summer and his "weekends" are Mondays and Tuesday, and with Tuesday being a lovely day he took the dog for a canoe ride, lucky dog), so getting to the club wasn't a requirement. Home was a 15 minute walk from where I was waiting and it was tempting - but in the end I said to myself "You've missed the crew, but you have a bag of paddling gear and it's a beautiful night. Just go paddle."

I was glad I listened to that voice, not the "awww crap, let's just throw in the towel and go home" voice. I got out there to find a happy garden full of veggies ready for picking. I picked them. There was a note in the clubhouse from Steve the Paddling Chef telling me where they were going so I could try to find them. I left my own note with a cuke and a couple of tomatoes in case I missed them, my garden had produced more than I thought I could finish and I hoped somebody would take them. I hit the water as the sky was going royal blue, and as I paddled down the Paerdegat the moon was rising, looking like a glorious Jersey peach in the sky. Hanging low over this crazy new light-show that marks the channel under the Paerdegat (I was wondering how many motorboats were going to run aground with the pilings that used to mark the channel gone, that is the only spot that a boat with any kind of draft could make it into the basin), it was almost surreal. Here's Joan's picture of the new set-up: 

Passing under the bridge, I made a beeline for Floyd Bennett. I passed one paddler heading back for the club, and saw another single kayak light in closer to the shore - nearly went to see if it was Steve and company but decided they would be better lit than that, so I kept going. That turned out to be Joan and she said she'd hollered but I was a little too far out to hear - I'd hit a good paddling stride and there was actually a constant little swish from my bow as it cut through the smooth water, that and the hum of traffic from the belt may have made it hard to hear a "Halloooo!". Nice to know she was out there though and I'm delighted to have her pictures to share!

A skimmer circled me at one point - was that my first skimmer of the summer? May have been, they're evening and night birds and I've only been out by day.

The sky got darker and the moonlight sparkled on the bay as it does. Beautiful! 

I kept looking for my friend's lights; as I passed the hangar and the police building at Floyd Bennett and saw no more lights I started thinking maybe I'd somehow missed them. But the stress of the workday and the long commute to the club were melting away and I was just happy to be out & moving. I thought about doing my usual old post-work run, to the Marine Park bridge & back, then decided to just go to the seaplane ramp, I hadn't checked the tides for the evening but the water had been VERY high when I launched and I thought I might be heading into the start of the ebb on the trip back - the bus trip home gets longer and longer the later it gets so I didn't want to be out all night.

That was another good call. I came around the last corner and there were a whole flock of little white lights dancing on the water in front of me! Steve and the gang hadn't somehow slipped past me on their way back - it was a pretty solid group of paddlers and they'd gone all the way to the bridge. They'd stopped at the seaplane ramp to do a few moonlight rolls. I joined them and then paddled back to the club with them.

There was a light breeze from the west and I found myself a bit of space tried the closed-eyes paddling exercise I used to like to do on my solo night paddles - when you're nearing the basin following the shore, you get into an area that's too shallow for motorboats, and in that area, when there's a nice non-shifty breeze, I like to close my eyes and see if I can hold my course using the breeze. I had a couple of stints where I got up to a hundred strokes this time - it's actually sort of startling to do that & then open my eyes and still be pointed straight at the Paerdegat lights! Of course I also had a couple where I got to 35 strokes and the feel of the wind was different and I couldn't quite seem to get it back to where it was and then I'd chicken out and open my eyes and of course I'd have wandered sixty degrees off-course - that's why it's so much fun when I get it right, though.

We got back to the club and gobbled up my spare veggies on the spot (I was still trying to give them away and Margaret sensibly suggested that we should just cut them up and eat them, what a good idea).

Gorgeous night. I should try to do this again at least one more time - it's still summer for a little while - the blue moon says so!

Now, about that blue moon -- did anyone else go look at a moon-phase calendar for August and get confused? 

moon phase calendar from isleofwightweather.co.uk

I had always thought that a Blue Moon was always the 2nd full moon in a month. So what was so blue about August's Blue Moon? Well, it turns out that there's another kind of Blue Moon that most people don't know about, and that's the kind that we had this week (actually on Wednesday night). Click here for an excellent explanation.  

July 4th 2017 At Sebago - The Best "I'm Not Promising Any Fireworks" Fireworks Paddle Ever!

Victoria and Steve and a "Fireworks? Who needs fireworks?" sunset. Or at least that's what I said. Little did we know...!

    O
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(frogma kayak smiley, panting pending)

Click here for a Flickr album of this amazing evening on Jamaica Bay.

******************** 
Steve the Paddling Chef, a great Sebago member who I've written about fairly frequently in this blog (search the blog under "Paddling Chef", you'll see, he's great!) runs a popular Tuesday evening paddle and potluck series at Sebago during the summer months. 

I've never been able to attend as much as I'd like to as it's kind of time consuming for me to get to the club from work and I just can't generally be there for the usual 7 pm launch. Unfortunately, Steve recently broke his wrist, so while he's healing, the Tuesday night paddles are on hold unless other trip leaders can take them on.

I'm handling the kayaking portion of the Sebago calendar this year, and last week, I was about to take down the series, to be replaced on a one-by-one basis as folks stepped up to cover, when I realized that the next one was the 4th of July. I had the day off, I'm a trip leader, I was totally up for a Tuesday evening on the water - woo hoo! So instead of taking the series off of the calendar, I sent a notice that the one on the 4th was ON!

 I decided to stick to Steve's usual scheduling, gathering at the club at 6:15ish, launching at 7, back to the club 9/9:30 ish. I'd gone out on the bay on a 4th of July paddle once a few years back, and my recollection was that there were fireworks displays in various directions, but all off in the distance, and that was what I said on my invitation - "There won't be any fireworks particularly close by but there's a chance of multiple displays off in the distance". Folks immediately started signing up (woohoo again) . At some point somebody said they wanted to come on the "fireworks paddle" and I reiterated that I couldn't promise any fireworks.

 Despite all the CMA notes about fireworks, probable lack thereof, I got a nice turnout. The weather was looking great, we've been having a hot and sticky spell here, standard east coat summer weather, but it had mitigated slightly on Tuesday and as the sun sank lower in the west, it got pleasanter and pleasanter. We launched a little after 7.

I'd suggested going around Ruffle Bar, one of the islands in the bay, which is a nice distance for an an energetic evening paddle. Folks were up for that and so we set off. I was trying to keep the group reasonably tight, because on a holiday like the 4th, you do get some extra motorboat traffic. At some point I looked back to see how the folks at the back of the group were doing and - OOOOH. The sunset was beginning to show some major promise. I called to the folks in front to look back, and they all went OOOOH too and we just sat there and gawked for a bit. That just sort of kept repeating itself as we went along and the sunset got better and better.

Finally, as we were having another ooohing and aaahing break just south of Ruffle Bar, one member of the group suggested that we skip the "going around" bit in favor of turning back, which would let us paddle towards the sunset and enjoy it instead of missing some of it while continuing south. "Esthetic considerations" were mentioned, I had already been having second thoughts about telling everybody "OK, now let's turn away from this beautiful show and keep going, because I SAID SO!", everybody else liked the idea too, so that's what we did. And it was grand. 

And then, as the sun went down, the fireworks started going on all around, many of them much closer than I'd expected - like right in Canarsie and Mill Basin and Marine Park! We suspect that a number of them might not have been, uh, city sanctioned, but it was hard to tell the professional public displays from the backyard ones - either way, it made for an utterly and unexpectedly spectacular end of the paddle. I never quite got a final count, but I think there were between fifteen and twenty going on that we could see out in the bay, plus a couple more very close to the Paerdegat.

 Back at the club, we had what turned out to be a completely vegetarian smorgasbord of goodies. This was totally unplanned, I am NOT a vegetarian, and if you suggested a 4th of July feast that didn't involve cheeseburgers or barbecue, I might not jump on that, but the range of dishes people had brought made it absolutely great, and I ended up loving it. There were so many different good flavors -- quinoa salad, greek salad, chickpea salad, fruit salad, potato salad, my own pasta salad made with pesto made from my own Sebago-grown basil (the last of last fall's batch from the freezer, still good), berries with whipped cream, a delicious watermelon, and then we polished off the desserts that were left in the fridge from the safety boat christening over the weekend. It was all so good, and of course I brought a box of wine in honor of our amazing late commodore, Tony. Such a great evening, I'm so glad I decided to do it - it went so much better than I'd expected it would. 

Happy me! (Or, Not Such A Torture Paddle After All)

Bella & Buzz weren't the only ones who enjoyed the J-Bay breezes this weekend!

TQ & I were originally thinking hike Saturday, paddle Sunday, because the forecast was for the wind to be SLIGHTLY less honking, but then he ran into Steve the Paddling Chef during the week & Steve mentioned that he wanted to go paddling but had taken on double holiday cooking duty of a Seder on Friday & Easter dinner on Sunday, so only had Saturday.

TQ & I were so antisocial with our paddling planning this winter (it's not that we don't like paddling with other people, we just like to be lazy sometimes about trip planning, you know, leisurely breakfast, another cup of tea, head to the club whenever we're ready), and I love paddling with Steve, and when I asked what he had in mind & he came back a nice reasonable start time of 11 am and a nice reasonable paddle for a windy day, I was sold.

Although I knew it was gonna be a tough one. Couldn't resist going on Facebook while TQ took the dogs out for one last potty opportunity and saying:

Today: NW wind 15 to 17 kt, with gusts as high as 23 kt. Sunny. Seas around 2 ft.

Wind straight out of the Paerdegat - perfect conditions for a Torture Paddle! Woohoo, let's go!



Windspeeds ended up being even higher than forecast (iWindsurf.com, which offers free forecasts & also actuals as recorded at JFK, right on the shores of J-Bay, gave the actuals as starting out around the forecast, but building to close to 20 steady & gusting to close to 30 in the afternoon). So many ways it could've been a day we all wished we'd just stayed home. If Steve had planned a longer trip. If it had been colder. If it had been raining. If my shoulder had chosen the middle of the slog back to decide that it wasn't as fine as I've been assuming it is (well, that's why you go with friends).

Fortunately none of those things happened, and in fact we started with a nice surprise when Pete (another person who's great to paddle with) turned up out of the blue - he'd been planning a cautious solo trip along the shore & was happy to join us as we headed for Ruffle Bar. We had a totally awesome (duuude!) high-speed surf run out. We stopped for a nice break on the south shore of Ruffle Bar; Steve brought chili chocolate (yum) to share, I'd brought a thermos of green tea with honey that TQ and I found hit the spot and we all had a bit of food to fuel the long paddle back. Steve found us a nice spot for our break that offered a little shelter from the wind, but even so there was still a wind-chill factor - base-temperature-wise you would've thought this would've been a day when a drysuit was suffocating, but you would think wrong, a drysuit with a light layer underneath was perfect and the hot tea, which I'd thought was probably going to be total overkill, actually tasted delicious.


Somewhere in here there was another one of those proxigean tides I always get such a kick out of - don't know if it was Saturday or maybe a day before or after, but we landed on an unusually wide beach for Ruffle Bar & sat there watching the water recede further & further. It was actually funny paddling home, there was one point when I swear I was half a mile from any of the islands but the water was still about 2 feet deep. There was a Sebago foliage trip on the Hudson that went a bit wrong one time when the wind against the current kicked up heavier chop than some of the paddlers could handle - I wasn't on that trip but Pete was on it, and he totally cracked me up when he said "We forget how spoiled we are here in Jamaica Bay - most of where we paddle, if anything goes wrong, you just stand up!". I think that was my first year at Sebago, but I still think of him saying that on these days when you practically have to go to the dredged channel to find even enough water for a kayak!

The trip home was indeed a lot slower - but this was where the mindblowing gorgeousness that Steve had been kind enough to arrange came into play.

The Manhattan skyline was about as clear as I'd ever seen it (click on this one for a full-size view)-


and with the wind & the sun, everything was just so sparkly...


Yes, it was much longer trip home that out - but on a day that nice it just wasn't the torture paddle I was expecting - turned out to be a fine spring day on the water.

Salty, though! Not that I'd thought twice about it, but I really was glad I was wearing my drysuit, I wasn't noticing the spray that much but the caked salt says that it could've been a very damp & chilly paddle home without it!

Last 2 Paddles of 2009

From December '09 Paddling & Hiking

"Staycations" were apparently all the rage this year, so being the trendy person I am, naturally I just had to make my Christmas/New Year break a non-travelling one!

No, actually I just felt like I could use some time at home - and it's worked out really well. Of course TQ made it better than I ever expected by coming to Brooklyn - I knew he was planning to visit his parents so figured I'd meet him up there, but then he decided to add a Brooklyn stop to his travels & that was great.

This week was free for catching up on the household stuff - Tuesday was the high point of the staycation, as I had a handyman stop by in the morning & fix the bathtub faucet that's been leaking for a couple of months now (boy is it nice to not have to go under the sink to turn the hot water on), and then in the afternoon I I took the subway to Yesterday's News, a very nice little secondhand shop, and they had EXACTLY the kind of little bookcase I'd hoped they might have, fits perfectly in a certain corner where I'd wanted to put a little bookcase - I'd started to have little piles of books all over the place because I had completely run out of bookshelf space & this took care of a few of those. Also finally gave me a good place to put TQ's '08 Christmas gift, a digital picture frame, so last night I spent a very enjoyable evening sorting through my digital pictures files & loading my favorite pictures onto a chip, which is now plugged into the digital picture frame sitting on the inexpensive but attractive (real wood, not Ikea particleboard!) secondhand bookshelf that's filled with books that were formerly living in little random piles on the floor. These are ALL the sorts of things that I've been wanting to do for ages, just never seem to have the time or energy to do. I am missing TQ tonight, wish we could be together for New Year's, but it does make me very happy that I've actually managed to do a lot of the stuff I'd hoped to get done with this "Staycaytion".

Of course, I'd also hoped to do a little PADDLING!!! And I did! :D

The weather's been pretty wild here in the last two weeks of 2009 - we've really run the gamut! My vacation started with a blizzard, of course, and then this week started with gale-force winds (way over my personal limits for winter paddling, no matter how itchy I am for a paddle, checking NOAA & seeing GALE WARNING always makes me decide to skip it)- but there's been some fantastically beautiful days in there too and counting tomorrow's Frostbite Regatta (even though that tends to be a relatively short paddle), I will have gotten in at least 4 paddles over the 2 weeks. Not bad for winter!

The first of the staycation paddles was, of course, that tour of Mill Basin I wrote up earlier this week.

The second was at the instigation of Steve H, the Paddling Chef, who looked at the forecast on Sunday, saw conditions like you see in the picture on top (the dredger Padre Island, moored just outside the Paerdegat, possibly deepening the channel in preparation for bringing in the equipment for replacing our bridge) & called for a paddle. Great call. Milton & I took him up on that. I had the radio on on Sunday morning as I was collecting my kit & did an aural double-take when I heard the announcer say it was 46 degrees - but I heard him right!

Steve picked me up at 9:30; naturally we stopped for tamales again (yay). Martin was waiting for us at the club & we were out on the water as soon after that as we could manage.

The guys were both paddling their beautiful hand-made Greenland-style skin-on-frames. I wish I'd taken a picture of the three of 'em side by side, I would've captioned it "How to make a Romany feel fat".

The water was just mirror-smooth as we set out.


It was a little bit breezy out on the bay - here we are approaching Ruffle Bar. We stopped on this side for a tea break.


Steve suggested lunch here. I was a bit chilly in the breeze & asked if we could nip around to the other side of the island. We did, and Steve found a lovely camel (neither dromedary nor bactrian, but the wooden variety* that serves as a sort of permanent fender around some docks) in the lee of some brush. We had our picnic there, the tamales were as delicious as they were on Tamale Paddle I, and I think we were all half-tempted to lie down & take a little post-tamale nap. It's a rare Northeast winter day when you want to take a nap in the sun on an island in the middle of Jamaica Bay, even with full winter paddling gear on - it felt positively luxurious!

Instead of napping, we did a little beachcombing (although the water was getting pretty high by that point - if we had dozed off, we would've first needed to make sure we had our boats pulled up far enough to keep the rising tide from floating them away) and then set off.


As we rounded the end of Ruffle Bar and the towers of Manhattan came into view, I was blown away by the clarity of the air. I don't think I've ever seen the city quite so clearly defined - there's almost always at least a little haze.


When we got back near the dredger, we stopped to do a few rolls. Warming up (so to speak) for the Frostbite Regatta!

We got back to the clubhouse to find that Stevie, who had been a little under the weather for paddling, had come to hang out for a bit. More luxury, he already had the fire going! Dennis was puttering around the grounds & he came in & joined us too & I think we just all hung out shooting the breeze for at least another hour.

My third paddle of the vacation - and last of 2009 - was yesterday. At one point, conditions yesterday (the 30th) and today (the 31st) were looking pretty OK. Wednesday was supposed to be right around freezing & still a bit on the breezy side, although nothing like Tuesday's icy blast, but pretty and sunny; today, the winds were supposed to die down & there was supposed to be snow turning to rain. I checked to see if anybody else wanted to go. No answers except from Stevie with an outside possibility of joining me if I went on Thursday. Wednesday morning, I checked the forecast against. Wind in the afternoon had settled down to 5-10 kts. Sunny. Thursday? "Ice pellets".

That settled it. I took my last paddle of 2009 yesterday & it was truly stunning. I'd initially thought I'd just do another shortish one over to Mill Basin & back, but it was so beautiful that I ended up putting in around 10 miles, out around the islands & through the marshes. Never got out of my boat, only stopped to take pictures & eventually put on lights. The last leg of my roughly triangular course, returning to the Paerdegat, was amazing - to my left, mother-of-pearl sunset in the sky and on the water - to my right, the nearly full moon rising & reflecting in a silver trail - in front of me, the city, with the lights just beginning to go on...now this is incredibly corny but I found a song I know running through my head, and it goes -

Now I walk in beauty
Beauty lies before me
Beauty is behind me
Above and below me

So. A good finish to my paddling year. Enough talking about it,

Heading down the Paerdegat.


Buoy 12, well rimed from the gales of the preceding days.


Rainbow around the sun (at Elder's Point Marsh).


J-Bay goes golden


Frosted marsh


In the shallow, quiet marsh areas I was paddling through heading for Ruffle Bar, ice was beginning to form in the water, too, from the slush that salt water becomes when it first begins to freeze up to very soft plates on the surface. I stayed right-side up for this trip!


Approaching sunset near Ruffle Bar. Just me and the birds out there.


Moon rising over Ruffle Bar


And that is the last of my 2009 paddling photos.

Next post, Sebago's Frostbite Regatta 2010!

Hauoli Makahiki Hou to all!

*About that camel? That's just one of a number of the interesting animal names you'll find attached to things in a harbor. Earlier this month, the marvelous Bowsprite charmed & delighted all of her readers with a post entitled A Nautical Bestiary - you'll find camels there, and all sorts of other sea-beasties from bees to zinc fish. Oh, and if you happen to be dabbler in traditional music, like me, or even an actual musician, I think you'll get a giggle out of the post about sea chanteys that's the prior post linked to at the end of the Bestiary post.