Hudson Raft Project

Originally we had planned on four means of propulsion: the tides, a rowing station that used a mechanism from a rowing machine to allow us to use our leg muscles while rowing, a mainsail and jib sail, and four solar-powered batteries that would power an electric motor and provide us with approximately thirty-six miles of propulsion.

However as launch time neared some problems arose. In order to use a motor, or even to carry a trolling motor on a vessel, one must register their boat. Before that can happen, you must send a picture of your boat to the state office of Parks and Recreation. Then they send an inspector to look at your boat and they give you a hull number. Then, when you have a hull number, you can register. This all sounded very complicated and I called two weeks before our launch to see if I could expedite the process. But the man on the phone only laughed and told me there was an eight week turn-around time for inspections…so no motor.

I rented a 27 foot Uhaul to get the boat from Rob’s house by the Alcove Reservoir to the launch site in downtown Albany. It was like driving a tractor trailer—I couldn’t believe I was allowed to drive the thing without a special license. Anyway we got the boat to the water and got it put together. There were a few small leaks when we put the boat in but nothing we couldn’t fix by bailing every now an then…perhaps a gallon a day.

We had a great launch with lots of support. Many of our friends were there and family too. Almost all of the strangers we met along the way had heard about the story, and that was uplifting. There was no wind at all on the night of the launch so we had to row away from Alive at Five. The rowing mechanism worked great, and all night we rowed and it was very peaceful and serene. The sky was pitch dark except for a full moon and a sprinkling of stars. We had a moment of silence as we passed the spot where our third raft was vandalized, and boaters came up to us and gave us pepperoni and cheese and signed our boat. That night we made it to southern Bethlehem by oar and slept on the raft because when the tide changed we were at a spot where we could not go ashore—there was only an old dike and brush. We slept cowboy style and had a good rest.

On Friday morning we woke up at five-thirty in order to get the tide. There were gusts of south winds [those are winds that blow south to north] that periodically made it hard to row. We ended up snapping an oar trying to row through them. As we passed Henry Hudson Park in Selkirk we saw the parents of a friend of ours, and we figured we’d say “hi” and also use the coveted public restroom there. When we got back on the boat ten minutes later a wind started blowing so hard we couldn’t row through it and we had to beach. There was an old man fishing there who had read about the boat and he came over and stared at us and we showed him every part of the boat. Since we couldn’t make it south we figured we’d use the time to fix the boat. We called our friend JT who brought strong wooden poles to fix the oars, a new pump to deal with the leaking water, and some screws which we’d forgot to pack. By Friday afternoon high tide we were ready to leave. We got on the water and after five minutes shards of lightning began bolting down all over, and rain cascaded over everything. We tried to row but it was such a storm we ended up spiraling in circles down the river. When it was over Rob made a point that we couldn’t get caught in lightning storms considering our twenty-foot metal mast. That night we made it to New Baltimore. We ate at the Boat House but we couldn’t keep our eyes open during the meal. We had to chew sometimes with our eyes closed we were so tired. Then we went back to the boat and slept in a gazebo at the park. My backpack full of clothes had gotten soaked, so I had nothing to change into, and Rob’s sleeping back was soaked, so he slept on a foam mat with a poncho for a blanket.

On Saturday morning we got up at 4:15 am to catch the tide. It was sunny but again the weather fluctuated between no wind and a south (from south to north) wind. We only made about six miles before we had to land at a beach on Bronk Island to wait for the tide to come back in. We were burnt to a crisp the day before because we forgot sun block. We thought we could get some at a marina but every marina we passed was closed because of the time. We got more burnt that day. A trio of kayakers came up to us and told us we had a nice boat and I was proud. During our time on shore we had a picnic and explored the beach. We got our boat bailed out and our ship in ship shape. But as the tide went out our ship grounded and it bent the keel so it was hard to steer the ship straight after that. Then it was high tide again and time to go, but a south wind again. We had to anchor and wait for it to stop blowing. Then we tried again and made another six miles. It was time to anchor and sleep that night around 11:30, but there was nowhere to go ashore, so we got out of the channel into a bunch of lily pads and sea weed and we slept on top of the boat cowboy style again, and it was good sleep. We were exhausted from the sunburn and the paddling and the shifting hours of sleep and the food we were eating – nothing but nuts and some Nature Valley bars and apple sauce.

On Sunday we got up and again there was no wind. We started cursing the wind because we hadn’t even had a chance to use our sail yet and we’d been on the water four days. We rowed and rowed and made it under the Rip Van Winkle bridge, where the first raft had sunk, to Catskill Point. At the Point a crowd of people were gathered who watched us intently and said things like “you’re early” and “it starts in Athens!” We had managed to land an hour before the annual Wacky Raft Race from Athens to Catskill, which involves people building rafts and racing them from those two points. “We’re not in the race,” we told everyone, which confused them more. We spent the day watching the race and critiquing the rafts, and we got free tee-shirts. An hour before high tide that night the skies blackened and the wind picked up. The folks on shore told us a storm was moving our way at forty-five miles an hour and there was lightening and penny-sized hail broadcast. That forced us to wait out the storm at a gazebo at Catskill point. The storm kept up and we had to miss a whole tide because of it.

On Monday morning, the fifth day, we got up again at five. We we’re covered in dew and bug bites. During the day when it is hot the horseflies swarm you and bite at your feet until your feet look like cobblestones. At night when you sleep there is an incessant buzzing in your ears and I was forced to sleep in my sleeping bag with a hooded sweatshirt over my face and a pair of gloves on in the summer heat just to keep from getting bit. We took off from Catskill Point, made it about a half-mile, and then the south wind again pushed us north. We tried to row, but rowing only kept us still. Morale was getting low. We stopped to eat some nuts and a Hidden Valley bar and drink a warm beer (all the ice had melted), and then we noticed the wind change. The wind changed and blew from the northwest. That day we finally got to use our sail, and we really got moving and actually made twenty-three miles that day. If we could have a north-west wind the whole time the trip would take five days. Unfortunately that was to be our last north wind. We put in every ounce of strength in order to make it under the Kingston-Rhinecliff bridge that night, past the point where the Crablegs 2.0 was abandoned. It was eleven when we got to shore. Rob tried to go to town for supplies but we were right in the industrial-port part of town and there was nothing open. He found an old man and asked him if there was a store around and the man told him “don’t even try” because nothing would be open and it was a bad part of town. So Rob got back to the boat and we slept there from midnight to five a.m.

At five a.m. on Tuesday the sixth day it was time to set sail. It was really getting hard to get up in the mornings now. Rob had really bad sunburn (he has fairer skin than I do and I had blisters that looked like a disease) and he had to put rags on his head and cover all his skin during the day. The lack of food was making us irritable. But it was the south wind that kept coming that really made us frustrated. There was simply nothing you could do but row, and row, and sometimes that wasn’t enough. I joked to Rob that we may go down in history as the first people to row a sailboat from Albany to Manhattan. On the river we met a boatful of guys who were fixing up the Esopus Lighthouse and when we passed there a couple hours later they invited us up for coffee and showed us the work they were doing. Boy I was thankful for the coffee. I have about five cups a day and I was having withdrawals. The guys at the lighthouse were real friendly, honest-hard-days-work types who took a lot of pride in the fact that they—a local group of contractors—had out-bid a big corporation for the contract to fix the lighthouse. “They wanted eight-hundred thousand just to ship a barge from the city up here with their materials. You know how we got our materials here? With an old fashioned wheelbarrow, a hundred fifty loads worth up a forty foot ramp. That’s where the concrete came from that you’re standing on now,” and so on. We left there and got to Esopus Island about ten miles south of Kingston before the tide changed. While Rob took a nap—he was starting to get ill—I cleaned up the boat a little and listened to the weather report on our wind-up radio. The forecast made me sick: there would be four straight days of a south wind blowing at 10-15 miles per hour as a tropical storm hovered over our region and sucked in hot air from the south. It’s one thing to have to row because there is no wind, it’s a whole other game to try to row against it in a 700 pound boat. I thought maybe the run-off from all the storms would be some help, and I tried to plan a route on the map that would take us close to the west shore of the river, where the wind might be blocked a little by the peninsulas that stuck out. That night another big storm came. We tried to “stick our toe” in the river by going out just a little ways from shore but we got immediately blown back. An hour later we tried again and it was the same thing. After another hour we got on the water and the wind died a little and let us row. And row, and row. We saw the light of the Mid Hudson Bridge in Poughkeepsie, and we thought if we could get there we might finally be able to go ashore and at least get a slice of pizza or something. But when we landed in Poughkeepsie it was quarter to one in the morning and everything was closed. We walked about ten blocks into town and nothing was open. Finally we tried Mahoney’s, the bar by the train station, but they were not serving food. This was really frustrating. We went back to our boat and slept, knowing we’d have to be up in four hours to try again.

On Wednesday, the last day, we woke up because it started raining on us as we slept. I looked at my watch and it was five-thirty a.m. We went to shore to use the public bathroom but it was locked. Rob wanted to charge his phone, so he plugged it into an outlet outside the municipal building at the marina there, but a cop came by and accused Rob of stealing electricity, took both our names and waited until we left. Rob was half dead with dry heaves, no food and sleep. We got to a marina two miles downstream at 7:30 a.m. and there was a very simple exchange. “Man, I think I have to go home.” I understood. “Will you take your stuff with you?” That was a sad moment. I dropped Rob off at that marina and he had to walk an hour back to Poughkeepsie in the rain to the train station sick. But I had to make it, so I rowed on. I kept close to the shore and avoided the wind when possible. At one point the current suddenly changed and forced my bow out to the channel and I had to row hard to get back near the shore, and in the process I broke another oar. Then I decided to anchor. It had become sunny and I was happy with my progress, but it would be another five hours until the tide changed and I had nothing to listen to or read and nobody to talk to. I couldn’t go to shore; on shore was a pile of rocks and railroad tracks. So I straightened out all the lines, cleaned the boat and sat down. That took about a half hour. Then I tried to sing Patsy Cline songs to pass the time, but that got old. My anchor got stuck in the rocks and the water was too deep for me to stand, so I ended up having to cut the anchor rope and I lost my knife in the process. So at that point I had one working oar, our navigation lights had died, there was six inches of water in the bottom of the boat that smelled like feet with gangrene, and I had no knife. I decided to sleep the hours away. But no sooner did I put my head back on the deck than drops started falling, and that turned into a hard rain. There was nothing to do but put a poncho on and sit there and let it rain on my head.

It rained for an hour. Then it rained for two hours. After three and a half hours I thought it was about time to drink a beer. So I got a can of warm beer and opened it up and it foamed all over my hand. And then I started to think about the chicken and biscuits and mashed potatoes and gravy my mother was going to cook for me on my birthday, the day before our launch, but which I’d missed in order to put the finishing touches on the boat. She said she’d keep the chicken and biscuits and gravy and mashed potatoes until I got back. Chicken and biscuits and gravy and mashed potatoes—oh it sounded so good after eating only pistachios and Hidden Valley bars for a week. And then I thought about all my friends, and the beautiful girls I know who I never see because I’m always at Rob’s house building rafts, and I said to myself “what the **** are you doing?” And all at once everything seemed to be a farce. So I started making ready to abandon ship and the mostly miserable experience the trip had been.

The ship was in no shape to sail, I’d have to walk back to town on the railroad tracks. I gathered all the things I’d have to carry: a backpack full of clothes that was drenched and heavy, my sleeping bag, the “raft bag” with all the tools, the bag of maps and my personal affects, and a dry bag full of other gear. Also my life jacket and poncho and hat. I threw all those things ashore and took the old-time wood steering wheel off the boat because I wanted that as memento. Then I waded to shore and climbed through a thicket in my sandals, got on all my gear (that weighed seven thousand pounds), and started walking in my sandals on those big railroad-track rocks. As I walked I was thinking about a Twilight Zone episode where a man steals a bunch of gold bars and puts them in a sack and escapes across the desert carrying them, but they get so heavy he can’t carry them, and he has to get rid of a couple bars to keep going, then a couple of more, until he has only one bar left, which he dies with. Everything was extra heavy to carry drenched in the rain. So I stopped and looked into my stuff, thinking “what can I get rid of” because I knew I had a six-mile walk. I opened my backpack and saw wet socks, so I threw those wet socks away with distain, and I got rid of a wet towel, and a tooth brush. Then I loaded up again and kept walking, but after another quarter mile I had to drop everything again. Now I got rid of a bunch of tools and some other random stuff. But as I kept walking I knew the biggest problem was the steering wheel I was carrying, and at some point I snapped. I picked up that wheel and yelled a string of obscenities and threw it as hard as I could into the woods, screaming and shaking. Then I kept walking in the rain.

After two and a half hours in the downpour I finally came to a marina on the side of the tracks. The same marina I’d dropped Rob off at that morning. It ended up being a boat club. It looked like a place that had reached its prime in the ‘50’s, with wood paneling and old-time lighting. I came in out of the dark and downpour with five bags and a week-long beard and announced that my ship had sunk. Two old-timers at the bar took my bags and bought me a beer and made me tell the story, and one of them said “are you the one building a boat, tried this last year and keeps sinking?” and I said “yeah, that’s me.” My charger got fried in the rain so I couldn’t call anyone on my phone, but the old-time bartender let me use the club phone. It was a rotary phone and I hadn’t used one in about ten years, I’d almost forgotten how. I got a hold of Rob and he agreed to come pick me up, which would take about two hours. I was freezing and shivering because I was wet and the air-conditioning was way up. As you can imagine I was kind of down and out and decided to have another beer, when a woman walked in with a fiddle in her hand. She was an attractive middle-aged woman with black hair just beginning to gray, and she came in out of the storm and brushed herself off. The bar had blue-grass jam sessions every other Wednesday and I just happened to show up for that. So I sat back and listened as the players began to arrive and pluck their strings, their banjos, their fiddles and guitars. That woman played her fiddle with an expression on her face I can’t describe except to call it pure serenity, as she rested her chin on the bottom of the wooden instrument and smoothly and carefully ran her bow over the strings she closed eyes and a satisfied smile showed at the corner of her lips. Those people played melancholy songs as the rain poured down. One in particular got to me: a song sung by an old man about his youth, when he was in love with a seventeen year old girl, whose face he can’t even remember, but who represented all the dreams in the world for him then. With an old twangy voice he sang, “Oh, how it would be so fine, to be back in nineteen forty-nine.” I knew just what that old man meant.