By Vladimir Brezina
Here’s a second response to Ailsa’s travel-themed photo challenge, Soft. (The first response was here.)
The soft light of evening on the water—
Copyright
Wind Against Current by Vladimir Brezina and Johna Till Johnson is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.Authors
Vladimir Brezina (RIP)
... kayaked the waters around New York for more than 15 years in his red Feathercraft folding kayak. He was originally from (the former) Czechoslovakia and lived in the U.K. and California before settling down in New York. He was a neuroscientist at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York City. He died in 2016.Johna Till Johnson
... is a kayaker and technology researcher at Nemertes Research. She's an erstwhile engineer, particle physicist, and science fiction writer. She was born in California and has lived in Italy, Norway, Hawaii, and a few other places. She currently resides in New York City.Recent Comments
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Wind Against Current 
Pingback: Travel Theme: Soft | Wind Against Current
Soft clouds, water with only soft waves. Even the rocks look mossy and soft. I like it.
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Thank you, Madame :-)
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Beautiful :) love the magick of sun clouds and water :)
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Me too! :-)
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There’s a beautiful soft glow to the sky in the last one Vlad, but I bet Johna will tell you those choppy little wavelets weren’t very soft, and that the reflected light bouncing off those two buildings made her turn her head away! Fun addition :)
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They feel soft in a kayak—at least until they get a bit bigger ;-)
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Really? I’d always imagined that those little choppy wavelets would feel just like that – pup pup pup – but you glide though them like butter, eh? How nice! It’s always an education – your pictures on the water :)
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Well, the waves move a lot more slowly than you might imagine, and when they are rounded like those in the photo, the kayak just bounces gently up and down as it goes over them. Since you control the kayak with your body, you get into a nice smooth sync with them… It’s when the wind picks up and the waves get bigger and steeper that they begin to hit the kayak with a hard shock…
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One day I’m going to experience how it feels – I was never much into boats (since we had almost no water nearby) but you’ve piqued my interest these last several months and I’ve been imagining adventures by kayak. I was so looking forward to reading about your trip back home from up north the weekend Sandy came … :)
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Adventures by kayak? Go for it! :-)
Yes, we were looking forward to our trip north too. In retrospect, the first weekend we planned to go, the weekend before Sandy, would have been perfect—apparently there were fall colors, sunny skies… But we had too much to do, and we thought the next weekend—the Sandy weekend—would be even more perfect. A bird in hand…
Now kayaking in New York Harbor is at a standstill, although slowly coming back to life. There are still restrictions on recreational boats in the harbor, and various other barriers to getting on the water—for instance, the dock we usually launch from is stuck up in the air at a crazy angle. Fortunately, however, we have the folding boats we can take to launch somewhere else :-)
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Well, first of all I’ll have to get home and find one to do a test paddle in!
That first outing on the harbour will be interesting. Vlad – to see Sandy’s work from the water. Hope for everyone’s sake the clean up can be accomplished soon. It will be getting seriously cold soon, won’t it?
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It’s getting quite cold now (the air, not the water quite yet), but we go out all year. It’s often very peaceful in winter…
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I hadn’t thought of what it must be like right on the water in the middle of winter – the water’ll be warmer than the air, a lot of the time won’t it. Oh how interesting. Were you both kayakers before you went to live in New York?
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Well, right about now, in the fall, the water can be warmer than the air. Certainly it often feels that way—when you are paddling into the cold wind, it’s wonderful to dip your hands now and again into the water that in comparison feels bath-warm… :-)
But later on in the winter, the water is bone-chilling. It gets close to freezing even in New York Harbor, and it does actually freeze, quite reliably every winter, just a few miles up the river.
No, we both started kayaking in New York City.
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Fascinating :)
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It’s hard to tell, but I THINK I’m wearing sunglasses… so what I was seeing would have belonged in the theme “dark”. :-)
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Na na – I reckon it’s to deflect the blazing glare from those buildings! :)
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Just lovely, Vlad.
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Thanks, Melissa!
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You really captured it.
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Thanks!!
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Pingback: Travel Theme: Soft | newsofthetimes
Love the soft looking moss green rocks
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Yes, they were special! Soft and very slippery…
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Beautiful soft images. :)
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Thank you so much!
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Where are the lovely mossy rocks?
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Near Roanoke Point on the North Shore of Long Island, on Day 8 of this past summer’s Long Island Kayak Circumnavigation…
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Really pretty colours in the sky…the one with the rocks looks like it was from a separate trip?
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Well, the first and last photos are just from New York Harbor, but the other three are from our Long Island Kayak Circumnavigation this past summer. The photo with the rocks is from Day 8…
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Soft skies – soothing
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Yes, very much so…
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Beautiful photos for the challenge, Vlad. :)
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:-)
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Beautiful photos .. I especially like the mossy rocks – that photo has a touch of eternity ..
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It felt like it that evening…
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Beautiful!
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Thank you, and thanks for following our blog!
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Wow, just gorgeous. The first looks quite familiar. The fourth – hard to believe that’s the city. Oops! I see it’s not.
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Not far from the city, but another world…
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I pinned the first photo of the city in the distance on my “Cityscape Photography” board on Pinterest. http://pinterest.com/gaylealstrom/cityscape-photography. I hope that’s okay with you.
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Yes, of course. Thanks, Gayle!
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