On September 9th, I participated in the Five Borough Harbor Ramble, a boating event organized by Erik Baard. The idea was to get a group of small boats together and paddle all the way from the Bronx to Staten.
I drove up to the launching point with Amanda Huron.
Amanda and I have been wanting to take a trip together for a while and I thought this would be a good opportunity to cover a lot of ground. Also, we would be traveling through some areas where the boat traffic and current are significant,
so I was curious to see what we could learn from Erik Baard – an intrepid harbor paddler.
Also I figured that there would be safety in numbers, crossing the Upper Bay – a trip I have always wanted to take.
But the wind and current were dead against us in the Harlem River.
The kayaks were gliding along without much trouble.
But we were struggling to keep up.
John McGarvey decided to stay with us while the rest of the group went ahead to the first meeting point.
“I don’t know if we can keep this up.” I said to Amanda.
The hard part was convincing John to leave us behind. Erik had worked hard to get permission to do this project, and he promised the Coast Guard that no one would be left along the route.
But John also realized that there was no way the Tide and Current Taxi could keep up with the kayaks all the way to Staten Island. And eventually he left us to drift back with the current.
We also had another plan.
On the way down we had seen some inviting looking tunnels – just above the water line.
We crept in to explore.
Dead end.
A few yards down there was another.
This one smelled like a sewer,
and the air was wet with haze.
Amanda thought she saw something crawling in the tunnel. “Rats!” she said.
“Or I guess it could have been cats, I didn’t get a very good look at them.”
I don’t think it was cats, not in the sewer.
Maybe we can save that tunnel for another day.
We drifted with the wind and current,
and we chatted as we watched the bank slip by.
Amanda has been working for Eric Sanderson on a big cartography project about the New York Harbor.
They are making a map of what Manhattan looked like 400 years ago,
when Henry Hudson first sailed in on his search for the Northwest passage.
They are combing information from journals, geological data, historic maps and navigational charts to determine where certain rivers, rocks and trees once were.
They hope to complete it this year – in time for the 400 year anniversary of Hudson’s voyage. (Look for an article in the New Yorker this week about the map.)
We passed by the Flotilla 51 yacht club and I was sad to see that storms this winter took out some of the remaining docks and structures.
The current was really moving so we decided to ride it around the Northern tip of Manhattan and walk back across to where we left the truck.
This took us past the rail yards.
The current swept us North into Spuyten Duyvil.
Up here there are sections of Manhattan’s coast that look just like Henry Huidson must have found them.
We landed at the Columbia boat dock,
and explored the Inwood Hill Nature Center.
Here we found all kinds of information about the area.
They even have a structure built to look like a traditional Lenni Lenape wigwam. Amanda knows all about it because her boss is trying to make one too.
He is having trouble finding bark in such big sheets.
We sat inside for a while and admired the nice big sheets of bark.
We walked back across Manhattan to get the the truck,
and drove down the Harlem River Drive under the bridges where we had just floated.
On the way back to Brooklyn we looked out for Erik Baard and his crew. We didn’t see them from the bridge, but I found out later that the Five Borough Ramble was a great success.
-Marie Lorenz
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