Bonnie Hulkower met me on the last day.
I had a vague goal of getting back to Brooklyn,
but my real goal was to intercept the Doyen,
and see if we could meet her captain, John Dean.
John is an 88 year old sailor who has been across the globe in his 32 foot Ketch – the Doyen.
He wrote me a few years ago about my project, and when he found out that we would be coming through his neighborhood he invited us for a ‘gam’.
We tied up my boat and dragged her along behind.
It felt great to be using the wind rather than fighting against it,
and the feeling of the lines in my hands reminded me of sailing as a kid.
John told us that when he goes to sleep at night, he imagines one by one, all the hundred islands where he has moored his boat.
He has lived here in Douglaston almost his whole life and he has been sailing in the area since 1936.
Now he takes his grand-kids out in the boat.
John told us that the tide would be in our favor for the next 2 hours,
and he offered to drop us under the Throgs Neck Bridge.
We thanked him and he wished us a happy voyage,
and then we watched the Doyen sail away.
It was a pretty sight in the shadow of the high bridge.
John was right about the tide,
and within a few minutes we were gliding under the Whitestone Bridge.
As we came around the bend at Powell Cove,
we could see the Manhattan skyline for the first time.
On one side of the sound were the wilds of the Bronx River,
and on the other, planes coming and going from Laguardia.
We paddled for a large abandoned factory on the bank,
and we tied up on it’s leeward side to get a break from the wind and sun.
We saw a boat that was so huge and so weird looking that we thought it was a building.
I had the sense that it was some kind of floating machine or mobile water processing facility.
I also thought that because of a strange smell in the area.
We could see the tall wire fences around Rikers Island to our left,
and to the right was a barge that I have always heard about.
We had arrived just in time for a swim at the ‘Floating Pool Lady Barge”.
We were not allowed to take any pictures inside the pool,
so you will have to believe me when I tell you that it is the most beautiful thing in the world,
to sit by a clear blue pool, surrounded by swirling currents of the Long Island Sound,
at the end of a long day of paddling.
We locked up the boat,
and started to make our way back to Brooklyn.
We had traveled 13 miles.
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