Daysailing

7/28/07 – I got up early this morning because I was taking Andy and two of his friends on a sailboat ride around New York Harbor. I took the subway down to the World Trade Center stop and then took another train under the Hudson River to New Jersey. There were no taxis around so I just walked to Liberty State Park from the train station. I arrived about an hour later and a big black fellow named Charlie was putting his nice fishing boat in the water. I went down to talk to him and asked him f I could bum a ride out to my sailboat when he departed. I helped to get the boat off the trailer and then we cast off the dock as another boat was backing down the adjacent ramp. As soon as a woman stepped out of the passenger seat, Charlie got very excited and began to utter grand explanations about how great her bosom, among other things, was. I was a bit confused by this since the woman in question much more closely resembled Jabba the Hutt than Helen of Troy. He proceeded to spend the next fifteen minutes slowly circling the area while I sat helplessly on the bow waiting for the 100 yard ride to my boat. Perhaps swimming would have been a better idea after all. I finally got to the boat far behind schedule, untangled the anchor lines, and set out. I had planned to do the trip up to the 79^th Street Boat Basin at slack tide but since I was behind schedule, it took far longer than I had expected. I finally made it up there and met Andy, Paul, and Andy’s two friends, Angela and Talus.

They had seen a helicopter make an emergency landing right next to them in a baseball diamond so as we were preparing to leave, they all talked to a New York Times reporter who later wrote an article quoting Andy. When that was finished, we went out on the boat and sailed all the way down to the Statue of Liberty and motoring back against the current. I decided to keep the boat on a mooring there even though it was expensive because I wouldn’t have to worry about it at all for the remainder of the week. Paul, Andy, and I went back to his house and rested a bit before Paul and I went to Pangea for dinner, a restaurant that my aunt, Margo, suggested for us. We then continued to walk around the East Village for a while before going back to bed.