A couple of weekends ago, we set out to visit our friends and fellow kayakers Alex and Jean, who are also fellow bloggers at 2 Geeks @ 3 Knots (check out their lovely blog!). They live in New Rochelle, just outside New York City, and just off Long Island Sound.
Heading out to the Sound on a summer weekend is pretty typical for New Yorkers.
What’s a little less typical is getting there by kayak.
But hey—we’d been there quite a few times before and knew the route pretty well. And this time we’d have the luxury of spending the night with our friends—so we’d have the chance to explore more than we usually can on an out-and-back trip. We’d been eagerly anticipating this trip for several weeks.
On Sunday a week ago, August 18th, I found myself once more in my kayak accompanying a long-distance swimmer through New York Harbor.
It was the day of this year’s Ederle Swim, a 17.5 -mile open-water swim from Manhattan to Sandy Hook, New Jersey, organized by NYC Swim. This year’s swim was in fact the centennial swim, since the first successful swim over that course, after a number of failed attempts, occurred a hundred years ago almost to the day, on August 28th, 1913.
My swimmer this year was Barbara Held, from San Diego, California. Having completed her Triple Crown of Open Water Swimming—the Manhattan Island Marathon Swim, the Catalina Channel, and the English Channel—Barbara was looking for new challenges!
Every now and then something comes along that’s just a sheer delight from start to finish.
Yesterday, it was this video of the 2013 City of Water Day’s First Annual Cardboard Kayak Race. It features practically all of my favorite things: kayaking, engineering, competition (the thrill of victory and the cold splash of defeat), creativity, ingenuity, and whimsy. All on a beautiful summer’s day in New York!
The event was hosted by the Metropolitan Water Alliance, a not-for-profit that, in its own words, “works to transform the New York and New Jersey Harbor and Waterways to make them cleaner and more accessible, a vibrant place to play, learn and work with great parks, great jobs and great transportation for all.”
The Cardboard Kayak Race is exactly what it sounds like: Teams of competitors are each given identical materials from which they construct, and then race, cardboard kayaks. Starting materials include:
10 5×5 squares of cardboard
10 rolls of packing tape
3 rolls of gaffer tape, and
a box knife
The video is long (though well worth watching—it will leave you laughing with joy!). But if you’re pressed for time, here are some highlights:
The first 12 minutes feature various shots of boat construction
At 12:00, judging commences. You’ll meet the teams, which include the Brooklyn Bridge Park Boathouse, the NYC Watertrail Village Community Boathouse, the High School of Math, Science, and Engineering Alumni, El Centro (from Staten Island), the North Brooklyn Boathouse, the Stevens Institute of Technology, the Stuyvesant High School Village Community Boathouse, and the US Coast Guard Marine Inspectors.
There’s a great comment at 17:30 where the judge asks the Coast Guard team, “Which do you think is the front part of the boat?”, then adds, “I don’t want to confuse you with technical questions!”
Last weekend, the currents took us on another of our favorite paddles—from Pier 40 in Manhattan round the Battery, up the East River, through Hell Gate, and round Throgs Neck into Long Island Sound.
Rounding Throgs Neck is like entering another world. The towers of Manhattan are still visible—all this is still within the borders of New York City!—but they are tiny in the distance. The broad blue Sound opens up. Shoals of white sailboats cruise past. Rocks are crowded with cormorants. We paddle past lighthouses and round islands—City Island, Hart Island, Pea Island…
Here are a few photos (click on any photo to start slideshow).
We paddle down the Hudson, with the Statue across the harbor
North Cove
Jersey City across the river
Round the Battery
Downtown architecture
South Street Seaport
… has a certain 19th-century look
Under the Brooklyn and Manhattan Bridges
Looking back at Downtown
Williamsburg Bridge
Midtown Manhattan
Two towers and a sail
We pass the UN
Into Hell Gate
Good current!
Off Rikers Island
Prison barge
The next two bridges: Bronx-Whitestone and Throgs Neck
Just before rounding Throgs Neck, we look back at tiny Manhattan
Stepping Stones Light
Grim Hart Island
We land on Pea Island for lunch
Green vista
Red and green
Siesta
Fishermen offshore
Time to get back into the boats…
Cormorant (and gull) rock
Off City Island, we paddle between hundreds of moored sailboats
The wind is freshening, and the sailboats are going out
Back into the East River
Hell Gate again
Under the Hell Gate bridges
… toward Manhattan
The Domino sugar factory and the Williamsburg Bridge in the late afternoon light
Under the Willliamsburg Bridge
Moody skies
Downtown vista
Brooklyn Bridge
South Street Seaport once more
Into the sun
Round the Battery
Dramatic skies over Jersey City
Sailing at sunset
The glass towers above North Cove reflect the light
We awoke to a beautiful dawn spreading across the sky, mistily lighting up the graceful lines of the Tampa Bay Skyway.
Well, technically, Vlad awoke to the dawn… I arose somewhat later, once the coffee was ready. We sipped it, watched the sunrise, and remarked on the steady progression of birds flying north—for all the world like commuters starting the day!
We agreed that Egmont Key, though an unplanned stop, was a wonderful place to start our real adventure.
Ailsa’s travel-themed photo challenge this week is Architecture.
Manhattan, of course, is full of dramatic architecture. But it’s sometimes hard to grasp it all from the inside. You need to stand a bit apart—or even better, sit in a kayak!
Here is some of Manhattan’s architecture that we saw on our paddle just this last weekend (full set of photos is here):
For kayakers, islands exert a special allure. There is the attraction of a circumnavigation, returning to the very same place from which you started from the opposite direction and completing the magic circle. But even more romantic is the idea of paddling out to that remote, preferably deserted, island that you can see on the horizon—or just on the chart!—which can be reached only by boat…
In New York Harbor, we have plenty of islands—even apart from the world-famous ones. But there’s no denying that they all offer a decidedly urban paddling experience. No matter what remote corner of the harbor you are in, the city is always there when you look up. And the city is exciting. But sometimes the country calls.
So in mid-May, we drove up to Westport, MA, on the south coast of Massachusetts just past the Rhode Island border. While Johna was enjoying a couple of days of surfing and rock-gardening (which I hope she will write up, as she did last year), I set out to paddle to my favorite deserted islands.
It’s our routine. Weekends, we paddle. And when the tidal currents say go south, we go south. And, unless we can think of something more ambitious, that means Sandy Hook.
But each trip is different. The sea and the sky have a different look and feel each time. We see different ships in the harbor. I can’t resist taking photos to capture it all. Here are a few from yesterday’s trip.
(click on any photo to start slideshow)
We inspect a new, a very useful, green buoy that the Coast Guard has placed in the harbor
We pass over the Bay Ridge Flats, among the anchored barges
A yellow buoy, for a change
Looking back at Manhattan
Who will win this one?
It wasn’t at all clear which ship was closer to us… now we have the answer
We follow the Maersk container ship out to sea
We pass under the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge
We wait for traffic to pass in the Ambrose Channel
Even bigger traffic!
Time to start across
Lonely Romer Shoal Light
On Sandy Hook…
… we climb up to our favorite ruins for lunch
Ruins with a view
Prickly pear cactus now grows in the gun emplacements
View in the other direction, toward Atlantic Highlands
In the salt marsh below the ruins, crab holes
… and fiddler (?) crabs
With terns wheeling above, we paddle back
Cormorant apartment building
… with plenty of tenants
Sun on the sea
Water texture
Romer Shoal Light again
… all alone in the sea
Red buoy
It’s hard to capture the feel of the waves, but sometimes it’s something like this
Late afternoon seascape
We pass Coney Island
… and back under the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge
The city is in sight
Sunset light on the water
Just at sunset, the red sun appears from behind the cloud on the horizon, next to the Statue of Liberty…
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.
A couple of weekends ago, we set out to visit our friends and fellow kayakers Alex and Jean, who are also fellow bloggers at 2 Geeks @ 3 Knots (check out their lovely blog!). They live in New Rochelle, just outside New York City, and just off Long Island Sound.
What’s a little less typical is getting there by kayak.
Vladimir Brezina (RIP) 
Johna Till Johnson
Wind Against Current 