Daily Archives: September 22, 2013

By Johna Till Johnson
Photos by Vladimir Brezina

“Do you think we can make it to Piermont Pier?”, I asked.

“I know of no reason why not,” Vlad replied. A small alarm bell rang at the back of my head: he hadn’t exactly said, “Yes.” And Vlad is a man who uses words very precisely.

But I brushed it off. We’d come quite a distance up the Palisades—just over 19 nautical miles, in fact.  Aided by a stiff flood current, we were almost at Italian Gardens, and we were deciding whether to stop there or continue onwards.

Piermont Pier, the long finger of land extending into the Hudson just south of the Tappan Zee Bridge, was only two miles away. We hadn’t been there yet this year, and the summer was almost over.

And though we’d had a brisk northerly breeze in our faces the whole way, we’d come thus far with no trouble. As Vlad said, there was no reason why we couldn’t make it the rest of the way.

So we set off into the wind-against-current chop ahead of us.

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