Do I Feel Lucky?

Why, yes. Yes, I do.

The storm for me: Ohhh, I better leave work early. Ohhh, I better make some elk chili. Oh, la, how lovely is my neighborhood with an aesthetically pleasing 8 inches of pretty fluffy snow.

Meanwhile, somewhere in Rhode Island:

PS - The TillerShovelman meme so far -- 'cause like the Maidenform woman, you never know where he'll turn up next!

Oh Docker started it with one of his trademarked ode-ious posts. Next, Baydog chipped in with a little fashion critique (funny with the lift tickets - during the brief period in high school that I was doing a little skiing, the fashion among my friends was to leave the lift tickets on so everyone could tell at a glance how much you'd been skiing that winter). Next, the Shovelman shows up rescuing the Expedition to the End of the World and today the esteemed blogger's memeitude continues for at least another 15 minutes!

Chili!

Goes great with chilly!

Chilly!

Goes great with chili!

Seals on Sunday

What's that at 12:00, right on my nose? Why, I do believe that is a Seal of Approval for Steve the Paddling Chef!

 The weather during the end of the week last week was very shifty, leading to my decision to ditch my Tuesday night music last week in favor of wrapping up the 100 miles I'd realized I was pretty close to logging in January. As it turned out, I probably could have gotten in some miles on either or both Wednesday (when the rain that was supposed to start bucketing down around 6 held off until much later) or Thursday, which was cold but not as cold, I think, as the forecast had threatened, and again I think the wind came screaming in again later than expected, leaving another decent window for a walk right after work. Still, you know how it works - if I'd decided to gamble on the 30th or 31st offering decent walking conditions, they wouldn't have. It did pour on Wednesday, and the wind on Thursday ended up howling so loudly late late at night that I had a nightmare about my very solidly-built circa-1940's low-rise brick apartment was swaying and on the verge of collapse. I was SO glad to wake up - and when I did and heard the commotion outside, I knew why I'd dreamed that!  

Tricky conditions for trip planning, but fortunately Steve had thought to start looking at the weekend and decided that Sunday might be worth another shot at a Jones Beach seal paddle & sent out the word among the winter paddlers that he was thinking that way. By Thursday, although the original forecasted temperature of 40 had dropped some, it was still looking like it would be above freezing - and the windspeeds were looking more and more cooperative for our purposes, so he made the call - it was a go!

The plan was to meet at Jones Beach at 10, launching sometime around 11. We'd started out with 8 people coming but the predicted temperature did keep dropping. Saturday was bitterly cold (great day for the Outsider Art Fair I went to with a friend)  by Saturday evening, we were down to the 5 of us who ended up going.

Sunday morning was definitely on the nippy side, but it was nice and quiet and seemed like it was going to be a good day. This was the first time we'd used the roof rack and saddles since Sandy, when they were submerged in salt water during the flood - TQ had been too busy with his job out in Rockaway to have time for those, but I'd gone to the club for the big post-Sandy cleanup day and I took care of those and although TQ said the locks on the bars are a little sticky and need a shot of silicone lubricant, everything else was fine (hooray).

We were a bit late to Jones Beach because it took us some extra time to set up the racks. We launched down near the Coast Guard station at the west end, near where we finished the club hike 2 weeks ago; I don't know about everybody else but I think I might vote for this launch for all future club trips - we usually launch at Field 10, which nobody can ever find without driving past it at least once. I was laughing this time, I swear this was the first time I have ever gone to Jones Beach, with TQ or anyone else, that we didn't end up doing an accidental trip the roundabout at the base of the Jones Beach tower. This one, you can actually see from the road. Here's the gang launching, minus only me and TQ of course - we were next on the water, we got there late but we're pretty efficient about getting on the water quickly. I probably would have tried to take some pictures of the birdwatchers that were there - it was chilly but there were a whole bunch of them there looking at a flock of little birds that I probably would have taken for sparrows if not for the bundled-up birders training their high-powered scopes at them. Turned out that they were snow buntings and horned larks and one single lark sparrow, which the birders were having a wonderful time trying to pick out from the rest. I was a little worried that we were going to scare the flock away, but one of the birders said we didn't have to worry, they would fly but they would circle back and land again the minute we were by. Would've loved to watch a bit more but our friends were waiting (plus it was awfully cold standing around)! 

Turned out Steve had never actually been out of the inlet, so that was what we did first. Quite the contrast to the heavy chop here last time!

Having stuck our noses out into the Atlantic, and my motion to paddle to England having been universally voted down without so much as a second, we turned around to go find the seals. Or go let the seals find us. These sealwatching paddles are always interesting in that it's really not entirely clear who's watching who, and this time was no exception. First little round head popped up just after we'd re-entered the inlet - I didn't manage to get a good shot (I was a little fumblefingered with the camera all day because of the thick gloves) but Steve and the seal are watching each other here - 

Cropped view with what I'm pretty sure is the top of the seal's head, unless it's a particularly well-defined wavelet:

We watched that one and couple others that also came up to take a look, then headed on in towards the marshes -

And then the wind died completely and the water went to flat calm, and  the seals were everywhere. Practically perfect seal-watching conditions - a choppy day, those little heads are so hard to spot, a day like this, it's the easiest thing in the world. Wish we'd had this weather the weekend of the club's seal paddle!

We pretty much stopped paddling and just looked at the seals looking at us until we started to get chilled enough that we decided to move on.

Plenty of birds, too - none of the dovekies birder friend Mary told me to watch for (cute little birds, I would've loved to see them, and when I mentioned that to one of the birders who were watching the buntings and larks in the morning, she got very excited - "There are dovekies?" - I did explain that that was just what somebody had said we should watch for!) but we saw more loons, and I think a couple of long-tailed ducks, and mergansers kept surprising up when they'd suddenly pop into view right next to our boats. Lovely!

Moving along now to warm up after we'd all gotten chilled during the drift, Steve suggested that we head just a little way into the marsh, just up to the little summer house in the picture above.  He's taken to calling that "Bonnie's place", not because it is, but because boy, I do wish. You can keep your Cancun, you can keep your Cote D'Azur..it may not be Hawai'i but for someone who's settled here in NY, I just think that having a little place like this to go in the summertime would be heaven. 

Looks like they made it through Sandy OK. Nice to see. 

After that we turned around headed back. TQ decided to sprint back, as he'll sometimes do when we're out together everything's quiet - it was fun watching the seals but he was ready to move. I tried to keep up with him for a bit, but then I had one last seal pop up pretty close and HAD to stop to try to take a picture -

Stymied once again by the neoprene gloves, and on top of that my hands were officially freezing at this point - I actually thought the camera was having problems but when I looked closer back at the dock, I realized that I had just zoomed it all the way up to max (Optio W80 has a 5x optical zoom but then it goes on up to 30x plus digitally) and this was the sky! Oh well, I still enjoyed this last encounter.

Waved goodbye to the seal and started paddling fast to warm up again. Next stop Bigelow's! I'd foregone this after the hike because there were a couple of people who were interested in being back at the club by a certain time, so us going back early let the carpool be more efficient, and I just didn't feel like I'd worked up enough of an appetite to do justice to a plate of Bigelow's lovely clam bellies. No such reservations this time! 

End of another fine day. Thanks again to Steve the Paddling Chef for pulling this together despite a very unsettled forecast - turned out great! 

Kayaker for Secretary of the Interior

Read all about it!

Hypnotic winds

Good morning! Just had to share an animated wind map that my friend Jeff K. sent to me. It's not meant to be practical, in fact the creator specifically says, "Please do not use the map or its data to fly a plane, sail a boat, or fight wildfires", but it's lovely and interesting. Click here to visit.

Fish on Friday - The Fish Guru of Piermont Pier

"If you are on the river long enough, you will meet a sturgeon. If you are lucky, you will get to touch it." -Susan Fox Rogers, My Reach


Well, no, I haven't met a sturgeon yet, but the group that I paddled with on that beautiful foggy day on the Hudson a couple of weeks did have a very interesting encounter of the piscine variety. Ours was with a young striped bass who got caught on the Piermont Pier, but was lucky enough to get to go home again with a strange tale of adventures above, and a souvenir to prove it. I've been meaning to share this ever since, but I keep getting sidetracked, so before I forget, here's the story of our visit with the Fish Guru (so said his license plate!) of the Piermont Pier.

We'd stopped at the pier for lunch and a bit of a leg-stretch, and just as we walked down to the end, we noticed that one of the fishermen had something on the line and stopped to see what he was going to bring in.

He gradually brought the fish to shore - 

a striped bass, not too big yet. 

The fisherman brought his catch over to the bench where his tackle was, laid the fish on the bench beside the tackle box, and I think that's when one of our crew noticed that the tackle box had some unusual-looking equipment in it. 

As he pulled out a couple of items, we started to ask him what he was going to do - as we began asking questions the fish began flopping in earnest. He asked us to please be quiet for a bit and he'd explain when he was doing when he was done. He began by gently laying the towel over the fish - this seemed to calm the animal, which settled down and laid there quietly.

The towel came off for a moment for measuring, then went back on. 

The fish was re-wrapped for the next step.  The fisherman picked up what looked like a length of wire, tilted the fish's tail up to vertical, and swiftly punched the wire through the flesh of the tail. I was confused for a moment, but then the fisherman attached the loose ends of the wire - 

And as he pulled his hands away, I could see that the fish was now wearing a tag.

That was about it. This was a nice, fat, healthy bass, although not too long nose to tail, so the fisherman decided to weigh it (think he said around 5 pounds), then it was time for the fish to go home again - although the fisherman did let us grab a couple more pictures.

Closeup of the tag. If you click for detail on either one of these, you might be able to see the tiny, tiny print on the tag that says "Littoral Soc., Highland", part of the contact information for the owners of the tag, the American Littoral Society. 

After a couple of  quick photos, it was time for the fish to go home again. Insert dreadful joke about "flying fish" here. 

And a minute and a tail-flick later, all that was left was spreading rings on the calm calm water. 

With the tagged fish back in the water and swimming away, the fisherman was now happy to talk to us about his volunteer work as a fish tagger for the American Littoral Society. It was an interesting program to find out about, I've done some beach cleanups and shorewalks with our own local chapter of the ALS so I'm familiar with the organization, but not with this particular program, one of the ALS's Citizen Science programs, and this gentleman is a very enthusiastic participant. He loves to fish, but only catch-and-release, when we asked if he ever ate them he laughed and said "No, they're like my pets", then he got a little more serious and said that he would order fish in a restaurant but that although the Hudson is better than it once was, it's still polluted enough that the toxins concentrate in fish, especially predators like the striped bass and bluefish that are some of the most popular species to fish for. But I'd also say that he really does like the fish too - he reserves the tagging for the striped bass, but he knew a lot a ton about all kinds of fish. 

One of his friends there mentioned that he was a retired principal - well, you can take the educator out of the school, but with a good one, I think the classroom will just happen wherever people who want to learn appear. Realizing that some of us were genuinely fascinated, class was in session and it was time for show and tell. First a little more about the tagging program, which I'll link to at the end of the post. The tags come attached to these numbered cards; when a tagger tags a fish, he fills out the information and sends the card back to the ALS, which keeps it on file. Down the road, when another fisherman catches that striper, if they return the tag (whether they keep the fish or just take the tag off and release it), the ALS will let them know when and where the fish was tagged and how big it was at the time, and they'll let the tagger know where and when the fish was re-taken. The farthest that one of this fisherman's fish had traveled was all the way to Montauk correction from one of the folks on the trip - MAINE, try MAINE (!!!!)(and he'd tagged it there in Piermont so that was a pretty good distanceFAR); the ALS pages that I'll link to have a few more interesting statistics if you're curious.

With the ALS tagging program explained it was time for general fish stories;

we didn't get to meet a sturgeon but he did have a picture to show us.

Finally it was getting time for us to move on, and for him, there were more fish to be caught - but what a pleasant interlude with the Fish Guru of Piermont Pier. 

And how nice to see actual research being done here in the Hudson River National Estuarine Research Reserve. Want to learn more about the American Littoral Society's fish tagging program? Click here to visit the site.