Buoy Crazy

OK.

Maybe this isn't the best thing to admit in a post for a contest where the prize is a copy of a book called The Natural Navigator: A Watchful Explorer's Guide to a Nearly Forgotten Skill. Modern aids to navigation might well be part of why we have forgotten so much.

But I'm going to admit it anyways.

I'm buoy-crazy.

Oh, they can be cold sometimes.


And sometimes they'll go astray, they'll tell you sweet lies and break your hull and your heart (or at least leave you aground and awaiting the flood).


But mostly - what an invention.

They'll tell you where you're safe...


and where you need...


to mind your manners.

Goodbye Pelagos

They have other important things to tell you, too, if you have the sense to pay attention -

With a quick glance at a buoy, you can know what the current is doing. Currents don't always do what the tide table says they are going to do.

But if I'm ever unsure, I'll ask a buoy. On that topic, usually, buoys don't lie.


Sometimes they tell you all's well -


Sometimes they'll tell you a story you don't want to hear, like --


"Sorry, lady, I don't care HOW many stars you have. You're not going out of that inlet today. Might as well pull out at the beach under the bridge, OK?".

From 5 Years Around Long Island - 2nd Year Day 1!

Sometimes a good straight answer is just what you need.

Buoys can be great memory-joggers, too. I like to take pictures of buoys on trips - if you got the charts (and I usually do),

- you will always be able to show someone exactly where you were.

They make very good crossing guides and gathering points for kayak tours. Channel crossings can be the most suspenseful moments on a trip - it's so much easier to organize your group if you can wait for a break in the traffic and then just point to good old Number 12 and say "Stay together, keep moving, and paddle to that red buoy over there". Even if you have a couple of hotdoggers who run, they're only going to run so far.



And when you find one where you thought you would when you're actually using your compass for real on a crossing in the fog for the first time in your entire paddling career, well, that's really pretty cool!

From 5 Years Around Long Island - Leg 1, Days 2 & 3

I like the simplicity of the buoy system - the way that a relatively small variety of markers (mostly red and green, with a few special ones sprinkled in here and there) makes floating roads of our coastal and inland waterways. Here's the basic rules from one of my Maptech charts:


Hey, want a good mnemonic for which is which? I got a great one last year, I think it was at a Power Squadron PaddleSmart event. I could usually remember green cans/red nuns, but always mixed up the numbers until I learned this memory device:

It's green, it's a can, and it's odd-numbered. I will never blow that question on a navigation quiz again! Cool, huh?

Kayaking, you don't see that much of the road on the water - just a few "blocks" for most of us. But I used to work on the schooner Adirondack.

After the sails are off

I loved working on that boat. The Adirondack is beautiful, fast, and easy to sail by design. She was built specifically for the business of taking people out for a nice cruise around New York Harbor, and she's great for that - very safe, but with a little cooperation from the wind, we could give our passengers as exciting a sail as they seemed to be up for - or not so exciting, if they weren't. I loved taking people out and introducing them to the harbor - but the trips I think I miss the most are the delivery trips to the Scarano boatyard in the fall. We'd spend the night before on the boat, setting out before sunrise. We'd sail for a while if we could, and then we'd get to work on the first steps of derigging for the winter.

We would take turns driving and keeping watch, and there was always something I just loved about watching for each buoy. The Hudson is marked well, but not extravagantly - it's really kind of cool. I'm a touch nearsighted, but as I remember it, at almost any given point, I could see exactly as many buoys as I needed to see to know where to go. You'd pass one, you'd have at least one in view up ahead - and then just as you were starting to feel a little vague about where you might need to head after you passed the next one, you'd spot the next one after that in the distance.

Rip Van Winkle Bridge at sunset

I especially loved it at night, in the stretch of the river where the buoys were flashing red and green. You'd have this string of little flashing lights, beating away like hearts, showing you the way north. They're all on different times (you match the flashes per second to your chart to know for sure which one you're coming up on - like you would know Green Can 17 up above at night because it would be flashing green every 2.5 seconds) and I liked watching the rhythms they would make together - together for a moment, then syncopated, then evenly spaced, back to syncopated, together again, around and around.


North of a certain point, the buoys weren't lit anymore, and the watch would be up on the bow with a high-powered flashlight, picking out the reflective markings that all the unlit buoys have. That was a little less relaxing, especially the year it was snowing when we got to Albany and we'd cut bow watches down to 10 minutes apiece because it was So Freaking Cold, but still a piece of cake compared to what Henry Hudson (and all the other mariners who plied the Hudson before the days of a deep-dredged, clearly-marked channel) had to do.

Amazing to think about, isn't it?

Winter's Bondage Breaking

Revisiting "Paperless Charts"

BTW - anyone wondering why the woman from Hawai'i didn't jump right in with a fascinating essay about Polynesian wayfinding?

Well, it's because the woman from Hawai'i finds Polynesian wayfinding to be a bit of a Big Topic for what is basically a lightweight hobby blog.

Right, enough with the third person. I did think about it for about a split second, but it's really one of those topics that always leaves me feeling a bit overwhelmed.

However, I was, for a bit, thinking to figure out whether I might want to at least refer to the Pacific Triangle angle in the Paddling Blind post. In the end I decided to just focus on the paddling-blind exercise, but I did go back and look at the Marshall Island stick chart post I'd put up last year. That had actually ended up being a surprisingly interesting post for me - I'd really just chucked it out because I was reminded of the stick charts by a lovely little Inuit carved coastal map posted on the Kayak Yak blog. I thought people might find it interesting but I really had no idea just how novel an object this would be. The discussion that ensued was a great one (Tristan Gooley even stopped by!) and although I'm a little shy about tackling a topic as big as Polynesian celestial navigation, somebody asked me a direct question that was enough to get me going about the education of Nainoa Thompson. That comment really wasn't bad, practically could have been a stand-alone post.

The lambs-as-navigational-hazards post that I mentioned as one of the other entries was a repost from Captain JP, and I thoroughly enjoyed it, so if you don't mind, I'm going to follow his lead and send you on another trip in the Wayback Machine.

Paddling Blind

Tillerman's got another Group Writing Project going on, and it's a fun one. In honor of the eagerly anticipated US release of Tristan Gooley's The Natural Navigator: A Watchful Explorer's Guide to a Nearly Forgotten Skill, the topic is, yup, "Navigation", and the directions are simple:

"Your challenge is to write a few lines about any aspect of navigation that interests you."

I've been thoroughly enjoying the entries so far. They run the gamut from odes, to entertaining mishaps, to chillingly close calls, to an explanation of how spring lambs a-gambolling can become a hazard to navigation.

I really hadn't planned to participate.

But that Tillerman is a sly fox, and in the quickest of Facebook exchanges today, I suddenly discovered I'd been buffaloed into beginning to write something that was Maybe, Just Maybe worth continuing. I was still at work, so I cut it short there & promised to continue tonight.

It all started with Carol Anne's entry, which I had originally not recognized as an entry. I thought it was just a very funny/awful chain of puns involving sausages and a little Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon (bacon, sausage, same difference). I hadn't seen her comment on Proper Course that this was her entry, but of course the subtitle, or, how to get from here to there ... says it all. Anyways, she posted a link blaming me on my Facebook wall, and here's what ensued before I realized that I was getting in deeper than I usually like to get when I'm still at work (I'll write at work, but I try to keep it under control).

Carol Anne: Now look what you made me do!

Me: HA HA HA. And the great thing is that it got you into the Tillerman "Navigation" group writing exercise, too.

Tillerman: Navigation is a broad church. Which reminds me, don't kayakers have navigation tales to tell, Bonnie?

Me: Well, kayakers do, but this particular kayaker is honestly a bit boring on that particular front. I'm coastal, I'm conservative (at least in my paddling habits), I spend 99% of the time paddling the same waters, I always carry a compass, and when I go somewhere new I generally carry a chart that I've studied beforehand and take good mental notes so I can get back to where I started from. I'm blessed with a reasonably decent sense of direction and as long as I'm paying attention, I usually have a good idea of where I am and how to get home. All that adds up to no good stories.

Tillerman: I've always thought that the "sense of direction" is a mysterious and marvelous thing. What is it? Just a good memory for how many turns we have made and what angles they were? Or picking up unconsciously some of those "natural navigation" signs? Or something even more strange like an innate magnetic compass? Or all of the above working together? And why do some people have it better than others? Is it genetic?

Me: You're trying to get an entry out of this, aren't you? Well, you might have something there.

It's definitely visual cues for me, although since I started sailing dinghies I've become a lot more aware of the direction of the wind too. Trying to paddle straight with your eyes closed is a fun kayak exercise - couldn't do it much on the Hudson because there's too much going on & if you close your eyes for 50 strokes you could be under a pier or a ferry by the time you open them again, but there's an area just outside the Paerdegat that I like to do this...

aw heck. There IS a post in this, isn't there? I'm still at work. I'll finish this tonight.

So, to continue -

There's an area outside of the Paerdegat where I like to do this. It's well out of the channel and shallow enough that you really don't have to worry about being in somebody's way, no matter how off-course you go, and the lights marking at the boat channel into the basin are a perfect target (I usually find myself doing this on post-work solo paddles in the summertime, when I'm getting back at dusk if not dark). It's a simple exercise. You get yourself going straight towards your target - and then you close your eyes for however many strokes you choose.

I'm a good paddler, and with my eyes open, I can keep my boat on a given heading just fine.

Eyes closed, and it's a different matter. As I said, I have a reasonable sense of direction - but I know it's mostly visual. I have just about laughed out loud when I've opened my eyes after some of these blind paddling runs. I've found myself so far off-course that I had to turn my head to find my target. Ninety degrees or more!

Dinghy sailing has actually improved my blind paddling because it's made me much more aware of the wind as a directional clue. I'm pretty awful at reading wind shifts and such - it's why I'm one of the worst dinghy racers at the club - but I'm trying to learn to do it better. At some point it dawned on me that the blind paddling exercise would be a great one for reading the wind, too. It was a lovely warm night with a steady, light west wind blowing when I first tried it, perfect for the experiment. I got myself going along nicely, eyes open. I started paying attention to where the wind was falling on my face - and then I closed my eyes and instead of getting all caught up in trying to produce mechanically perfect equal strokes, I just paid attention to keeping the feel of the wind on my face the same.

I still had my eyes shut - but I didn't feel anywhere near as blind, and desire to open them wasn't nearly as strong as it had been when I'd done the exercise in the past. Even in this perfectly safe area, even on a warm, quiet night, my gut was always insisting that I needed to see, and it took some willpower to not have my eyelids start sneaking open. Paying close attention to a gentle, cooperative wind, the compulsion to at least sneak peeks was suddenly much less; I was able to relax and paddle much more naturally, and when I did open my eyes, after however many strokes I'd set myself as a goal(probably 20 or 25 for the first try), there were the lights of the basin almost exactly in front of me.

First time EVER.

I'll have to keep trying that this summer.

SIX!

Frogma is

SIX!

And about a month or so. Oops. Yes, the main reason I had to get to six was because I totally missed my bloggiversary. Time flew, I must've been having fun.

Sausage set swiped from a sad sad saga - of sausage separation.

So much silliness, so little time.

Link 5

Sausagegate!

Oh, and if you're wondering if that's actually OK, I would say no. An ordinarily reliable source informs me that a sausage and battery is a crime.

One More, That's Four

Sausages and chips courtesy of Sam Breach's Flickr page.

Almost forgot, I had been meaning to link over to Trawlers and Tugs, where you can read what an actual artist has to say about Duke Riley. Much more coherent writeup than mine was!

Oh, and btw, the other incident that I vividly recall being discussed among my boating friends here in NYC that turned out to be a Duke Riley performance was the boarding of the Robert Smithson island.



I don't think anyone I knew would've actually tried it, but I think just about anyone who saw this out there would've at least had a momentary fantasy of getting to ride around on the barge as it was being towed around Manhattan. Can you imagine? Pack a nice picnic lunch, drinks, a camera, maybe a trashy beach-read of a book? What a day! Leave it to a couple of crazy estuarine performance artists to try to actually DO it. I don't think the kayak forums went QUITE as a-buzz over the boarding as we did over the guy who was trying to plant a mini Christo Gate, but there was some chitchat.

Oh, and btw - he had collaborators on this one. One, I never heard of - Lan Tuazon? Anyone heard of her? - but the other one is a name that I bet someone will be able to identify before I get home tonight.

Marie Lorenz?

Anyone? Anyone? Tugster?

Link Three

Link Three - from my friend Scott Keller via NYCKayaker:

Vote for the Hudson River Valley Greenway Trail
2011 Heart of Green Best New Trail Nominee!

The Hudson River Valley Greenway Land and Water Trail have been nominated for the 2011 Heart of Green Awards at The Daily Green!

Please consider voting for the Greenway Trail to be recognized for helping to bring trails and river access to the Hudson Valley! It's well deserved recognition for this truly grassroots project to create regional trails connections, on both land and water, and improve public access to the Hudson river and its surrounding landscape. While the Greenway has been the shepherd of the trail for years, it is the commitment to implementation by state agencies, local and county governments, numerous not for profit partners and passionate volunteers throughout the valley that has made the Hudson River Valley Greenway Trail system what it is today.

You can vote for the Hudson River Valley Greenway at the link above.
***************

And that's it for my lunch break links. Reapplying nose to grindstone now. Ciao!

Link Two

Link Two was sent to me by Amy at NewYorkOlogy.com, with a note saying I might like. She was right, I did. Beautiful photos and a video of some Connecticut paddlers taking advantage of last week's thaw to get in some lovely, low-key whitewater playtime.

Thanks, Amy!

Lunch Break Fun Link 1

First of a few quick lunch break post before launching into a project that will probably keep me at work long enough that I won't be posting tonight - just links I liked.

Fun link ibe:
We Love You Hipsters.

Thanks, David at Never Sea Land, for this one.

Reminds me of a story a friend told me once about her husband looking at an outfit she was wearing & saying that she was wearing "every color in the hipster rainbow". Loved it, I can just picture it too. Burnt orange, mustard yellow, puce, turquoise and magenta. Hee hee.

Sleeping Giant State Park, Hamden, CT, 2/20/2011

I have been absolutely itching for a paddle, but the dogs do love it when we decide the forecast isn't quite paddle-appropriate and fall back on hiking instead. That was the call this weekend. I'd optimistically schlepped my paddling kit over to TQ's on Friday night, but when we looked at the forecast on Saturday morning we decided to not try, looked like it was going to be pretty windy for the entire weekend. Instead, we went for a nice hike in Sleeping Giant State Park.

TQ and I were laughing about me stopping to take this shot - this is on the final approach back to the parking lot, and we always get back right around sunset, and if I were to dig back through my photo archives, I would probably find that the number of sets of photos taken from this vantage points is an exact match for the number of times we have gone hiking here.

It was absolutely great hiking weather, although the snow was in a challenging state - crusted, strong enough to hold your weight until suddenly it wasn't; where it was, it was frequently ice-glazed. I'm still sore!

Hoping for some paddling soon.

Duke Riley Cracks Me Up.

image source: en.academic.ru.

This morning's subway ride to work was far more entertaining than usual.

I left around the normal time. The photo above does not depict the car I entered at Newkirk Plaza. No, it was full of people and there were no seats to be had. If there had been, it would have been just another absolutely normal subway ride.

But there weren't, so I got in & found a place to stand.

And now to type a phrase that I bet you have never seen in any other NYC-based blog ever:

There's this neat thing the MTA does.

It's not quite as neat as the neatest thing the MTA does, which is to make car ownership completely optional a whole lotta people like me (I've never owned one). And there are certainly some annoying things that the MTA does.

But this post is being written because of this sort of lower-key neat thing that the MTA does.

In the picture above, you can see that there is plenty of space for advertising posters - a few big square ones & then a lot of little rectangular ones.

On any given car, though, a couple of those spaces will be given over to the arts.
There've been 3 separate programs I've noticed & remembered over the years.

There was the longrunning Poetry in Motion, where short poems or selected verses of longer ones were offered up for you to muse upon as you rattled along underground. There are still a couple I remember, even though that series ended back in 2008.

The successor to that was the Train of Thought series (snippets from great authors), but the placard that I found so entertaining this morning was from a third series - images of subway trains, reimagined by various artists. They're quite a lot of fun, usually a bit surreal, but colorful and cheerful.

This morning, I found myself standing directly in front of one I hadn't seen before.

"in situ" photo from the Subway Art Blog -

better image from a friend (thanks Michael!):
Click and zoom for some detail; a larger, scrollable version can be found on the artist's site - link and directions towards the end of this post.


It's not as colorful as some - but it immediately caught my eye because it was a New York Harbor theme, done in a very intricate style. Steampunk meets scrimshander. Fun! The passengers were mermaids in 18th-century garb - their upper halves, at least. The "cars" were a pair of antique submarines, flanking...hey the Monitor! "Well, that's a nice New Yorky touch", I thought - the Monitor was built in Brooklyn. Kept looking. Coneys on Coney Island? Cute. Kept looking, and then...well, I'm not going to give away any more, but I just saw more and more funny little details that said that this artist had put in some serious time out and about in the "Sixth Borough" (the watery one that wraps around the other five).

I noted the guy's name & did a quick search as soon as I got in to work, just to see what the story was. I found his site right away, DukeRiley.info.

On the splash page, there are 3 rotating images. The first two are fanciful, scrimshaw-like in appearance - the first shows a merman being tattooed by an octopus (while modern garbage drifts in the waves around them), the second shows the Monitor again, on laundry day this time. The third is a very traditional-looking engraving of the Turtle, the Revolutionary War era craft that was the first submarine ever to engage in a military action - another famous piece of New York nautical history.

As I continued to look through his site, I ran across more and more Turtles.

Then finally, it hit me...could this possibly be that guy who...??? Hmmm!

I went back to my Google search and added "Arrest". "Duke Riley Arrest". Find!.

Sure enough! Local boater friends, I think you'll all remember this guy.

He was the one who got arrested in New York Harbor just a couple of years ago.

He got arrested for trying to sneak up on the Queen Mary 2.

In a small boat named the Acorn, which was his own hand-made, full-sized, working replica of the Turtle!

Everybody remembers him, right?

And he was arrested with two other people - one of whom was a direct descendant of David Bushnell, the inventor of the original Turtle.

It was a crazy stunt. Maybe dangerous, even, even if the little boat functioned perfectly. The Coasties take their guard duty very seriously, and they have guns, and had these folks gotten much closer to the QM2 before they'd been spotted...well, things could've gone very very wrong on this artlark.

But still...man, does this guy love his New York nautical history, or what?

You can read more about the voyage of the Acorn, and a few of Mr. Riley's other escapades (including an inter-museum naumachia in Queens that sounds absolutely hysterical) on his Wikipedia page.

Area boaters - if you find yourself on a subway car, and you see that poster, try to get a good look at it. I mean really look at it. I've ruined the surprise a bit, but I think you'll still enjoy the "in jokes" (and the fact that you are probably the only person in the car who gets ANY of them).

For the curious non-New Yorkers (or impatient New Yorkers), go here, find the MTA Arts for Transit Art Card poster thumbnail (2nd over, 5th row down), and click. That gives you a nice, big, scrollable view that lets you see the details you can't see on any other of the depictions I found on the internet.

You might not get the localisms (Ruffle Bar to Mill Rock, hee hee hee!) but there's a lot of fun stuff to look at.

And then there's the rest of the site to explore, too.

Have fun!

P.S. - special local-boater challenge - anybody remember another harbor shenanigan of Mr. Riley's that ended up being all the talk of the community (or at least NYCKayaker) there for a bit?

Bonus points if you can tell me what it was without spending too much time on his site. That was how I figured out that that was his, too.

Hint: It wasn't nearly as spectacular as building a working replica of a Revolutionary War era submarine & trying to use it sneak up to the QM2. However, I think there were few among us hadn't at one point or another secretly imagined doing exactly the same thing!

;D

Friday afternoon addendum - O-Docker left a link to an excellent NY Times slideshow of the interrupted voyage of the Acorn. Worth a look, especially if you missed it the first time around!

Evolution Of The EarMaid

The First Appearance of the EarMaid - in the company of schooner Adirondack, at an Adirondack crew party at the Ear. Had to be 2003 or 2004 or so July 2006 (that "doodle" tag came in handy!), it was definitely my first time at the Ear. Got drunk and played with crayons. Woohoo!


photo by Carolina of PortSideNY


The most recent appearance of the EarMaid. Friday, February 11th, Waterblogger's Night Out, Iteration The Third, or is it the fourth? Got drunk and played with crayons. Woohoo!

Three cheers for friends who don't tell you to grow up and act your age!

HUZZAH! HUZZAH! HUZZAH!

Reports from my fellow inebriates:

Tugster
Tugster again
Peconic Puffin
Adam, the Messer About In Boats
The Old Salt (was that ever a nice surprise - I love his blog, and I'm not sure I actually realized he was from hereabouts until he was sitting across the table from me!)

Present at the debauchery, but not yet admitting to it publicly (ha, like that's gonna do any good with the rest of us blabbing):
Carolina of PortSide NewYork (cripes, that reminds me, I've rebuilt a substantial portion of my bloggy blogroll, but I do want to keep going & reinstate the Favorite Not-For-Profits and Trip Planning Tools and Other Boating Safety Info link lists. Ways To Get On The Water in NYC can wait until drysuit season's over, methinks.)
John and Vicky (Luseana the Mystic Mermaid to her friends) who love everything from Summit to Shore and beyond...
the one and only Bowsprite!
and oh yeah...this guy, too! ;D

photo by Tugster Will

Glad others had their cameras - I'd sort of temporarily lost track of mine (happens a bit more now that there are 2 apartments to lose things in now).

Here's to another fine evening of rollicking revelry! Let's not wait for 2012 to do it again!

Froggy Valentine's Day!

Thank you to Tugster for reminding me of this!

Pier 63: Making a Home for the Kayaks

So Eric asked, and John offered, and as soon as things started warming up enough in the early spring of 1999, the paddlers of Manhattan Kayak Company began making an odd-shaped end hold at Pier 63 Maritime into a home for the company's fleet.

Krevey's welding team had done the heavy lifting for us. The barge was an old railroad float barge.
image from WorkingHarbor.com's FAQ's - links to that & an interesting article about NY Harbor's last remaining car float operator can be found at the end of this post.


the hold 2
With the deck needing to support that kind of weight, this space was originally filled with heavy cross-bracing. When John found an occupant for a hold (and I think most of the other holds had occupants at this point - an eclectic mix of a boaters, artists & dancers, plus the public restrooms - ours was just too weirdly shaped for anything but storing a bunch of small boats!) the first thing that would happen would be that his welding team would descend & cut out most of the cross-bracing, leaving enough to make sure that the deck could still handle light delivery vans & such, but leaving a workable open space. They would also cut a more practical access - the original access being little round hatches
The Hold
For us, they also cut a hole in the end. That let right out onto a low dock - this was actually a nice change from Chelsea Piers, where every paddle began and ended with a time-consuming boat carry through a parking lot.

But that still left a lot of work to get the place ready for the 1999 season!

What a weirdly fun time that was. I went to John's viewing last night, and one of his close friends told about going down to Delaware to help John and Angela renovate the newly-purchased Frying Pan. "For a week, I shoveled sand, and scraped barnacles - for fun!"

I got a good laugh out of that because it was so wonderfully reminiscent to my own introduction to the strange little world of the barge.

They say genius is 1% inspiration, 99% perspiration. If Krevey thought you had the inspiration - oh, he'd give you (and all your friends) the place to work up the perspiration! :D

We (the 1999 MKC partners and friends) moved rusty scrap metal, and scraped rust, and painted rust. We became Rustpeople. We blended in with the barge. I don't think I've ever been as dirty in my life.

My gosh, it was fun.

rustpeople - me, Brad, Stef, Bob, Eric, Jonno, Irene & Susan

And of course we paddled too - as soon as things were cleaned-up enough to bring in some boats!

rustpeople go paddle - me, Abigail, Jeff, Eric, Irene & Bob. This may have been MKC's first paddle at the barge -

we were all giddy.

Eric

That's all I have time for today - need to run in & put in a couple of hours in the office, but I just wanted to share these pictures. This was about all I had from that time, I didn't have a digital camera yet, but I had scanned these prints in & posted them back in 2006 in a fit of nostalgia a couple of months after the barge had been shut down at the 23rd street location.

What an exciting Spring that was.

Working Harbor Committee's Harbor FAQ's, source of the working car float photo:
WorkingHarbor.com FAQ's

Read more about future of the last remaining NY Harbor railroad car float operation in the June 4 2010 Waterwire

just home...

Just home from the viewing. So good to see all my old friends from Pier 63 together again, even if the reason was terrible. What stories people had to share, what wonderful, warm, funny stories. John Krevey lived more in 62 years than a lot of people would do if they were granted a hundred and five.

Friday Frivolity

This just plain cracked me up.

Article on John Krevey

Sorry to go from gleeful back to sad so fast, but I just found out from the Bowsprite that there is an article about John Krevey's passing up now on Downtown Express.com.

I will be continuing to tell my own stories about him and the barge here as soon as I can - unfortunately between work (gonna be a late one tonight), fun (meeting up for a few pints with the local boatbloggers tomorrow night at the Ear), and a temperamental computer, I'm not sure when I'll be able to squeeze that in.

But this was a nice little overview of the things he brought to the waterfront.

Instant Happy!

LOOK!

:D

Woof.

There is definitely at least a Part II to yesterday's post - but there was a sea kayak committee meeting tonight and it's a little too late to get going on that tonight, especially when it's still maybe just early enough to do a little investigation into why my 2-year-old computer is suddenly having startup issues. :(

So I hope you won't mind this totally frivolous intermission. I just couldn't resist picking up on the Dogs In Hats theme Pandabonium & O-Docker have started.

Good dog, Mistie. What a patient girl you were.

Thank you to my dad for finding & scanning & my mom for organizing these in such a way that my dad was able to find.