Manhattan Circumnavigation #2

When Tom and I did Jerry Blackstone's big Manhattan circumnavigation two years ago, Tom commented that if he ever did it again he'd like to do it on our own as a small group. I thought that in many regards it was certainly doable: the big trip had shown us the basic logistics, the paddling was within our capabilities, and navigation is easy enough (keep the island on your left). The big challenge is timing the tides and current right. If you do it right, you get a significant aid boost from the currents, cutting hours off the trip time. If you do it wrong, the trip becomes dangerous and nigh onto impossible - you can find yourself fighting 5 knot currents and confused, swirling water at Hell's Gate or in "the spider" at The Battery. It seems like it would take a rocket scientist to figure it out.

Have I mentioned the multiple times NASA has presented me with awards for my work?

Yes, I took on the task of figuring it all out. The first thing I did was the brute force approach. I looked at the bib circ's launch times for the last several years compared with the tidal cycle and figured out when you have to launch from Inwood to be at the right point in the cycle. But I really wanted to understand the whole thing better, so I did some more research and found a set of diagrams showing the flows in the rivers by hour in the tidal cycle. Then I plotted out where we would be hour by hour against these flows to verify our planned timing. This was perhaps slightly overkill, but turned out to be useful. The weather forecast for the day of our trip included a chance of thunderstorms in the afternoon and because of my deeper understanding of the timing I was able to see how early I could slide our timing without running afoul of the cycle.

We all met Friday night at the swanky Marriott Tall Tom had arranged for us in Teaneck, NJ. The first order of business was to consolidate boats so we wouldn't have to deal with parking a lot of cars in the city. We managed to get all the kayaks onto two cars, piling three kayaks onto each. In the end, parking turned out not to be an issue, but having only two cars turned out to be a good thing at the end of the trip - more on this later.

Then we went out to dinner. Somewhat by chance we wound up at Yakitori 39, a Japanse small plate restaurant which was EXCELLENT. Yakitori chicken wings, duck and avocado salad, seaweed salad, more chicken, bacon-wrapped something or other (I dunno, I didn't eat it) ... It was a great meal, but not a lot of carbs (no rice!) and so after stuffing ourselves we walked over to the nearby 7-11 and bought carb-heavy dessert foods. Plus, I had picked up Italian bakery cookies in Brooklyn, so we had lots of choices for a carb-loading dessert.

Saturday was an early start. Up at 4 (actually, I woke up at 3:58, two minutes ahead of my alarm - amazing how my body does that), out the door at 5, at the launch at dawn. The tiny park and beach at Tubby Hook were deserted (this in itself amazed me - in my New York or yore, five people would have been sleeping there). And wildlife! In addition to the expected rats and pigeons, we saw a skunk at the park! A real skunk! And they really do sort of bound about like Pepe Le Pew. After giving the skunk time to exit on its own, we unloaded (I kept running up to the cars since my not-paranoid-enough cohorts kept leaving them unattended and wide open) and launched at about 6:20 AM.

Launching

And we were thrown right into the blender. For some reason, the water right under the George Washington Bridge was choppy as heck, and we had the wind against us besides. I immediately started to worry. If it was going to be like this all the way down the Hudson than we'd never make it on time and would be exhausted before we finished even a third of the trip. I began to be glad I had also researched bail-out points along the route. The good news is that the super chop turned out to be a local anomaly (wind pattern caused by the bridge? a shoal? aliens? Who knows!) and within half a mile or so we were on smooth water. We still had the wind against us, but with the current's push we were making pretty good time.

On the water

Down the west side we went - the bridge, Grant's tomb and the Riverside church, the 79th Street Boat Basin. Before we knew it we were approaching mid-town. This part of the river has some "keep-out" zones around the cruise ship terminal and the Intrepid.  I knew what to do if a cruise ship was in port (stay 100 yards out), but I wasn't prepared for the circumstance we encountered - a cruise ship just coming into port as weak approached! Fortunately, the ship got into dock just before we got there. I wouldn't have wanted to have dealt with the wake of that thing, even moving a one knot, let alone had to maneuver around it while it was under way.

It's bigger than we are

At the Intrepid museum we got a treat, as the U.S. Coast Guard bark Eagle was there - a striking sailing ship. The Intrepid is also within the keep-out zone. Needless to say, our resident photographer Rob eagerly violated the keep-out zone (as well as the ones around the tunnel vent shafts) to get the best camera angles. But we had no issues with the authorities. About this time it dawned on us that we had a seventh paddler paddling with us. A solo paddler doing his own circumnavigation had caught up with us. He kayaked alongside us for a bit but got impatient with out touristy pace and eventually continued on ahead of us.

USCGC Eagle

At the downtown boathouse we took our first break - not really necessary, but a good "nice to have". This is one of several locations in New York offering free kayaking and they were happy to let us pull out there for a few minutes - as long as we signed liability waivers. They even steadied our boats as we climbed onto their slippery and weirdly sloped dock.

Me!

Back on the water we regrouped and prepared for the dash around The Battery. This are has a high density of ferry traffic and so we had to time it right. This is where we had our only mishap of the day. A ferry wake caught us off guard and Jim, who was paddling a surf ski (not an enclosed kayak), capsized. We quickly got him back in (on?) his boat, though the mishap earned us an escort for a ways from a Police boat which had been loitering nearby. We got around the point in plenty of time to avoid the Staten Island ferry, but at that point Jen seemed to fall back a bit and so we grouped up to make sure everything was OK - and then realized we had stopped right in front of the dock where a Statue of Liberty ferry was heading and so took off again to get out of its way.

The lower East River was the section I had been concerned about since it had been quite choppy on the previous circ, but this time it was quite smooth and we immediately felt the helping push of the strong East River current (the East River is actually a tidal estuary and completely turns around and reverses its flow with the tide). The Brooklyn Bridge is my personal favorite - it's a thrill for me to paddle under this beauty. After we passed under the Brooklyn and were heading towards the Manhattan we saw yet another ferry heading our way. We tried to ascertain which side of him we should be on - was he hugging the shore or heading out into the harbor? It seemed like every time we maneuvered to get out of his path, he would turn towards us again. Fortunately, this was all occurring right in front of the little beach area under the bridges (the same beach where just weeks earlier a foolish kayaker had lost his boat while he was ashore in search of pizza, triggering a massive search and rescue operation when the kayak was found floating unmanned in the river) and so at the last minute we made a mad dash for the beach to get out of the ferry's way. We think he was intentionally screwing with us.

Brooklyn Bridge

As we paddled up towards the Williamsburg Bridge we had a run-in with another boat, this time a tour boat. We were a little further out into the river at this point and it came up on our right side, between us and the Brooklyn shore, aiming, I guess, to give the tourists a glimpse of hipster Williamsburg from the water. The boat passed us and then cut left, trapping us inside a sizable horseshoe shaped wake. We all had to focus on staying upright. For the second time of the day Suzanne yelled at me for getting in her way as I positioned myself to take the wake head-on rather than broadside. All at once I looked over to see Rob riding out a double, super-tall foamy wave of wake. I swear, this was Hawaii Five-O stuff. In my mind I began to formulate how I'd get over to him when he capsized - but as the wave passed him and he reappeared from within the foam, we saw he was still in his boat. Clearly the badass moment of the day!

Mid-town

From there it was a scenic (up the east side of mid-town) and uneventful ride up to our lunch break at Hallet's Cove. I love Hallet's. It's a little beach landing area right in the middle of a street in Queens. Hop out of your kayak, walk up three steps, and you're on Vernon Boulevard in Astoria. This is quite different than the desolate barrier islands where we usually take our breaks on kayak trips! Hallet's is hopping. There are people there enjoying the few feet of watefront beach. The pedestrian traffic is a mix of Latinos and hipsters. A large group of beginner kayakers on a group trip out of the Long Island City boathouse pulled up. We walked through Socrates Park and Sculpture Garden, where there was a typical New York mix of plant sale, families, yoga, and everything else going on and used the bathroom at the Costco. We talked about how next time we should skip bringing lunch and just get a pizza from Costco! I didn't tell Jen, but we were just blocks from the Isamu Noguchi Museum and the Museum of the Moving Image.

At Hallet's Cover

We had a tight window to pull out of Hallet's and make it through Hell Gate. You have to catch this section at slack tide, or it can be quite hairy. We launched at the earliest point in that window (still mindful of thunderstorm potential) and slipped without incident into the Harlem River. This final section of the trip is pretty relaxed. At this point you still have a tidal push (the Harlem River is tidal as well) and the river is a narrow, straight canal heavily shaped by man to be easily navigable. In fact, I learned something on this trip I had never known - that the borough of Manhattan and Manhattan island are not one in the same. There's a little piece of what's now the mainland that's part of Manhattan. Marble Hill used to be the very tip of Manhattan, then they cut the ship canal across it, effectively slicing it off and making it an island. Later on, the original river on the north side of the island was filled in, making it part of the Bronx landmass. But the neighborhood of Marble Hill and its surroundings officially remain part of Manhattan.

I knew there were a lot of Jews in New York, but until this trip I never realized the island itself had been circumcised!

Jim at Yankee Stadium

This part of the trip is described in one person's blog as "ugly industrial", but we kinda liked it. More "real" than the skyscrapers of midtown. Plus, Yankee Stadium! At the very northern tip of Manhattan (island) the industrial blight fades away and it gets kind of green and pretty. In this section you also see the anomaly of a lighthouse on top of a building and a tower so attractive it's hard to believe it was built as a mundane piece of infrastructure - a water tower - in the 19th century. We made our final stop at Peter Sharp Boathouse. Then, a quick trip through Spuyten Duyvil, back out into the Hudson and back to our starting point Inwood.

As with our Tom's and my experience, the little park was much more alive in the late afternoon (we landed at 3:30 PM) than earlier in the morning. Instead of skunks and rats, the park was filled with locals smoking weed and taking in the sight of the river. Out on the street, the dead end of Dyckman Street had been turned into valet parking for La Marina restaurant. How they get away with this - it's a city street! - I don't know, but I do. Last time, between the valet parking scene and the act that 100 boaters were unloading at the same time, Tom and I chose to carry our kayaks across Manhattan to the car rather than try to get anywhere near the launch with the car, which would have been impossible. This time it was earlier and there were fewer of us, and so it wasn't quite as bad. The good folks running the valet parking were good enough to let us bring in one car at a time and we loaded boats while dodging the never-ending shuffling of cars around us. Then it was back to the hotel where we shuffled boats once again and showered (separately). We met down in the bar intending to just have a drink then go out, but we were all pretty tired and wound up eating dinner right there.

As the official trip leader and "commodore" of this outing, I hereby declared it to have been a success! Bravo Zulu to all participants!

Highlights

Some links to some other landmarks along the way:

The Little Red Lighthouse under the GW Bridge
Battery Maritime Building
The Queens Pepsi-Cola Sign
Socrates Sculpture Park