Hudson Raft Project

Assiduity was an appropriate name for the fifth boat. For one, it is the motto of Albany, just as Excelsior was both the motto of the Empire State and the name of the fourth raft. But the meaning of this layered word captures the essence of this endeavor. “Assiduousness” is similar to diligence, industriousness, a strong work ethic. But it also has a secondary meaning: “constant dedication and often obsequious solitude.” It is not just hard work; it is hard, lonely work executed with a sense of urgency, nervousness, agitation, personal cost. One cannot work in an assiduous fashion on a hobby, in my opinion, but one may work assiduously at framing a new country’s constitution, or drawing intricate strategic plans to destroy an irreconcilable enemy in a campaign of attrition.

Even on the first attempt in 2006 there was more sweat, expense and toil than there was compensatory pleasure. The second trip afforded ten days on the river, but each sunrise introduced a mounting sense of defeat. The third trip was a string of unmitigated crises and personal attacks. During the building of the fourth boat I had to clarify to people that I am not a boat-building enthusiast; that while I feel pride at accomplishing the many steps necessary to build a watercraft, the process itself is annoying and only a means to an end. When, in the end, all our work brought only a week of aggravation and frustration, I vowed to wash my hands of the whole thing and anyone who thought I was a failure could go scratch.

Rob told me he’d be willing to try again. I said “no way. Enough is enough. You win some, you lose some.”

But as the weeks went by something didn’t sit right. I felt generally agitated. I started to question if I would ever do anything I’d planned to do–build my own house, write a novel, backpack around Europe. “Maybe I’m just like that drunk at the bar or that adolescent ‘artist’ who brags about their big plans and ultimately settles for a nine-to-five job with a house in a development, two and a half kids, a cat, a dog, and a 401(k).”

Maybe I will, but not until I finish a few things. I came across this quote from Cornelius VanDerbilt, who almost singlehandedly broke the stranglehold that big business had on the steamboat industry in the early 1820s:

“I don’t care half so much about making money as I do about making my point and coming out ahead.“

And that is just what this project has always been about–making a point. I could never understand why so many people said in a knee-jerk fashion “you can’t build a boat and float down the river,” as if there was a legal or natural law against it. “Maybe you can’t, but I can,” I’d say. “There is no reason why I can’t do this if I put my mind to it.” If I were to throw in the towel after saying that, I’d be a bag of air. So there is no choice.

I spent the fall making blueprints that an architect could follow, using graph paper to draw out each two-by-four. I drew the plans in secret. I figured if I was going to try again, why not do it with some pizzaz? So Assiduity had a cabin, a wood stove, a “bridge” to steer from, a biodiesel paddlewheel and a keg incorporated into the design. I showed the blueprints to Rob on New Year’s Day and he was very excited.

“Wow, this is going to be awesome,” he said. “No back-breaking work this year. We can eat actual, real meals. This will actually be…pleasurable!”

I made copies of all the blueprints and specs for Rob and Todd Haggerty, who would be our quartermaster and cook. Todd had experience working on boats–he worked one summer sanding the side of a giant yacht with a hundred Chinese people, none of whom spoke English. Todd does not speak Chinese, so it was lonely work. Here is a picture of us going over the blueprints, as well as a model we created out of dominoes.

Our first problem was finding a place to build the thing. We knew the dimensions would be 12X24, but we knew from past experience that we needed to start building as soon as possible, because everything takes about five times longer than you think it will take to finish. We tried to find some warehouse space but that proved fruitless. So we decided to build what we could in my apartment and Rob’s basement and in February if it was warm enough we’d start building the main structure at my parent’s house, a mile from the river.

Part of the project involved building a “dinghy” for conveyance to and from the shore. I didn’t want to bring a canoe because I wanted us to build every part of the project ourselves. The dinghy would be essentially a square platform capable of holding three men and a few supplies. For flotation we decided to build two pontoons, each consisting of a plywood skin screwed to a wooden triangular frame, epoxied and fiberglassed to be waterproof.

That was all we could do in my apartment. We had to wait until we could go outside before we could do any epoxying, because the smell of the stuff is obnoxious and will make any space smell for weeks. Also the epoxy needs to be 72 degrees in order to harden, and for every ten degrees below that temperature it takes twice as long to harden.

During the winter we began working on the charging system. Originally, I wanted to power the boat with two electric trolling motors mounted on the port and starboard sides of the boat, so that by turning one motor on and one motor off you could steer, and by having two motors on we could move forward. We calculated that we would need at least two 51 lb thrust motors based on our projected weight, and that would require a constant 781 watts per hour in order to propel us at 3 miles an hour. We planned to bring four 120 amp deep cycle batteries, which each store 1440 watts. But it harms a battery to diminish it below half-charge, so the total watts we’d have available from the four batteries would be 2880. That would give us 3.6 hours of propulsion at 3 mph. It would provide us with about 11 miles of progress before we ran out of juice.

It would be easy enough to plug in a three-bank battery charger and charge our batteries in three hours, but I wanted the boat to be capable of running “off the grid” and without using fossil fuels. So my first idea was to use solar panels to charge our batteries. But each panel, costing $200, only generates 30 watts an hour, so I would need 26. And they only generate their maximum output when in direct sunlight. If a cloud rolls over they stop making power. So solar alone was not an option. I got the idea to use a windmill. I did some exploring online and found a windmill package that could be bought via a kit from otherpower.com and would generate 1,000 watts (1 kilowatt) in a fifteen mile an hour wind. We certainly had that on the river. But the windmill would have to have a 7 foot rotor span, it would cause a lot of noise, make our boat top-heavy, and would actually push us backwards with more force than it generated if we tried to motor into a headwind. So a giant windmill for propulsion was out. But I had read about a number of “pedal power generators” which use super-strong “rare-earth” magnets to generate 100 watts when spun by a bicycle. We set about building that. We got as far as building the “armature,” that is, the wheel on a generator that holds the magnets, which are spun relative to a coil of wire. Todd, Rob and I were helped in this process by my friend Ben Maggi who is an electrical hobbyist.

We got about all we could get done in my apartment and started working on the main structure at my parent’s house in February. It was cold–but we knew we had to start work early if we expected to build the boat by June. We made three trips to Lowes to get supplies. I water sealed and stained all the 2X4s and plywood we’d need for the deck and cabin in my parent’s basement. This took two days. Since it was cold in the basement the boards stayed tacky and oily. But when we started working on the boat the first weekend in February the sky was clear blue and it was refreshing to get outside.

It was a balancing act when it came to weight, strength and pizazz. Pressure treated wood would help prevent rotting, but it weighed more, cost more, and contains chemicals that get spewed in the air when you cut it. Untreated wood weighed and cost less but required water sealing. I decided to get pressure treated wood for the deck, because it would be close to the water, and untreated wood to build the cabin. As you can see, we approached the deck the way a person might build a patio deck. The walls we framed out like walls in a house.

That took all weekend. We had an old fashioned “cabin raising,” except without the square dancing.

At the end of the weekend we congratulated ourselves. Then it was March and we knew we had to pick up the pace. We had to have the boat completed by May 1st, because we had to get the thing registered and Parks and Recreation in conjunction with DMV takes a full 8 weeks to register a boat. So we started having to go down to my parent’s every weekend to work.

In the meantime I bought an “Alaskan Packer” wood stove, which only weighed 12.5 pounds and was designed for dog sledders and archery enthusiasts in the Alaskan bush. I couldn’t wait until it arrived so we could try it out. It would help dry our clothes if they got soaked in a storm, and it would be picturesque to have a wood stove fire some night on the river, listening to the crickets and drinking a beer in our screened-in cabin. We fried up some cheese dogs to christen the thing.

While the weather improved we built doors for our cabin:

And built front and back deck sections, which we connected with bolts:

We made the deck sections in three 8X12 foot sections so that we could take them apart and ship them individually on a trailer. For anything over 8 feet wide you have to apply for a special permit and you can only move it during certain periods, and you have to weigh the load to prove that you don’t put too much weight on an axle of your trailer and blah blah blah. After reading the transportation rules and regulations, I found out it would cost over $200 to have “the right” to move the boat, one way, on one weekend. But if it could be disassembled into three pieces, each under 8 feet wide, I wouldn’t have to jump through the flaming hoops, and it would be easier to move anyway.

We got the back part of the cabin, or the “boathouse” built. It was designed with an open back wall so you could bring in the dinghy and dock it under a roof.

And we stained and put on the deck boards so we could walk around:

By this point it was April, and it became clear that the amount of power generated by our pedal powered generator would be insufficient, as would the power generated by solar panels–and the windmill idea was too expensive and might actually be counterproductive if it functioned as a sail in the wrong direction. We decided to incorporate a square sail, but as we knew from previous years, the predominant wind blows upstream in the summer. So I decided the best, most efficient way to generate the power we needed for our boat would be to purchase an electrical generator that could run on biodiesel and therefore not use fossil fuels.

They don’t make biodiesel generators, but diesel engines will run bio fuel with some small tweaks, I read. I found a “biodiesel generator engine” online that could generate 4KW, or four times the power we needed. Here it is when it arrived:

“Thats odd,” said Rob when we took it out of the styrofoam. “Where do you plug anything in? It looks like just the engine.”

What do I know about engines? I read through the instruction manual the next day.

“‘Warning. Gases toxic. Do not intermingle with smoke and flame. Be careful to not run at the confined places.’ What kind of instruction manual is this?” I said to Todd’s wife. She flipped through the manual.

“What are all these diagrams and formulas?” she said. “It looks like a bunch of parts that you don’t have.”

I took the book out of her hand and looked where she was pointing. “Are you serious?” I said. “Look at this. We only have the engine here. We have to build this generator piece by piece?”

“Well,” said Juli, “you wouldn’t want to be accused of cutting corners.”

So I contacted the guy who sold me the “biodiesel generator engine” and he told me “yeah, these are just the engines, I don’t have the rest of the parts.”

In the meantime we kept working on the pontoons for the dingy. When it got to be 72 degrees, we opened up one of the $100-a-gallon epoxy containers, mixed it with sawdust, and used it to seal the seams. Then we sanded them down and stained them.

I bought twenty-four 55-gallon drums from a gourmet tomato sauce factory for our flotation. They used them to store canola oil. I found out it took 450 lbs to sink one barrel, and since we estimated our raft would weigh 3500 lbs when finished, we would need 8 barrels. But since we only wanted the barrels to be submerged 1/3 of their diameter (so that we weren’t plowing them through the water) we had to buy 24. We sealed them up with epoxy and fiberglass.

But we ran out of fiberglass halfway through the day, and it didn’t hold well anyway. So we began to build the “bridge” which was my favorite part of the structure.

The bridge would sit on top of the cabin, off-center toward the port side. We wanted 360 degrees of view, so we made the top half of it out of plexiglass. This is where the ship’s wheel would be stationed, as well as a table of electronic switches and displays to turn on the navigation lights, spot light, solar charger and VHF radio. Also in the bridge would be a table where Rob could lay out a navigation map.

The bridge itself sits atop a 1 foot spacer which, through hatches, provides access to a battery compartment. We built the spacer out of interlocking pieces without screws.

We built the walls of the bridge on the ground, having to use some trigonometry to figure out how to cut the angled front. We brought each wall to the top of the boat to be attached together. It was a windy day and it was pretty scary trying to hold up those walls ten feet in the air as they wobbled around as we tried to combine them to form a room. Even after we got the ceiling joists attached the structure wanted to fold over like a card house. So we added “standing rigging,” which is line running from the top of the bridge to the deck to keep the top immobile. Then it stayed stronger so we could reinforce the structure.

By the time we got the bridge up it was nearly dark and we had to call it a day. Over the next week I feared a big storm would blow it over. Nonetheless we came back the next weekend and reinforced it and it was fine. I took this picture on May 5th to send to Parks and Recreation to get the process going on the registration. The flotation was not attached yet, but I needed to start the process.

Now, with all that “freeboard” above water, I started to be afraid of the effect the wind would have on our steering. I wasn’t sure our motors would be enough to move us through a strong headwind. Besides that I hadn’t been able to find a way to charge the motors. So Rob and I decided we’d build a paddle wheel that could run directly off the biodiesel motor via a belt and pulley. The problem was that the engine ran at 3600 RPMs and we wanted the paddle wheel to rotate at, well, 6, which meant if we put a two-inch diameter pulley on the engine axle, the pulley on the paddle wheel axle would have had to be 100 feet. It was from spending hours on wikipedia and other sites that I learned about gear ratios to build this paddle wheel.

While we thought about the gear ratio problem we set about building the paddle wheel structure. As always, I drew up the plan, Rob improved it, we went to Lowes to see what they had for materials and amended the plan some more, and then we set about building.

Once we got the paddle wheel done we started building a ladder in the wall so we could get to the top deck by either side, and we built the windows in the front, which fold down or up like shutters.

Here is a picture of Assiduity as of the last weekend in May, 2009:

Progress to June 9th (37 days until launch)

It was getting to be crunch time. This week the inspector, a deputy-sheriff from Greene county, called to set up an inspection of the “hull” so we could get a hull identification number and register the boat. We worked to make sure the hull would be ready by the time he arrived.

We raised the boat so that we could attach the barrels underneath. We used a car jack to raise the boat an inch here, an inch there, until we got it all about 25 inches off the ground.

To attach the barrels beneath we knew we’d have to crawl under the boat, which rested only on uneven tree stumps we’d taken from a wood pile.

Meanwhile we thought about the engine and the paddle wheel. The engine ran at 3000 rpms, and we wanted the paddle wheel to run at 30 rpms, which is 100 times slower. That could be accomplished by having a gear on the paddle wheel that was 100 times larger than the gear on the engine. But that would be ridiculously large (it would require an 11 foot gear on the wheel if we had a 2 inch gear on the engine.)

Rob got the idea of running a small gear to a larger gear via a belt. That larger gear would be on the same axle as a smaller gear, which would run to another larger gear via another belt. If we ran a 2.5 inch pulley via a belt to a 25 inch pulley, the second pulley would run at 300 rpms (ten times slower than the 3000 rpm engine). That pulley would be on the same axle as another 2.5 inch pulley, which would be turning at 300 rmps, since it would be on the same axle. That pulley would then have another belt running to another 25 inch pulley attached to the paddle wheel. The wheel would run at 30 rpms (ten times slower than the 300 rpm intermediate axle).

We needed two belts, two 2.5 inch pulleys and two 25 inch pulleys. I struggled all week to find a 25 inch pulley–essentially a wheel with a groove in it so that a belt wont slip off. And then I thought about a bicycle wheel rim–they are 25 inches with a groove, and therefore perfect. I got two bicycles from a flea market for $5 each, and cut the wheels off.

I also found an old grinder machine, which has an axle with two disks which could grab the wheel and pulley. It goes to show that it doesn’t have to be made for the application you’re using it for, it just has to work.

But we had to put the wheel on hold when we ran out of a certain kind of bolt we needed.

We moved on to the barrels, since we figured the inspector was coming to look at the hull, not the engine. We finished sealing the barrels using squares of fiberglass painted with epoxy over all the holes.

And we sealed the ceiling, because it was leaking where it met the walls.

June 18th UPDATE (28 days to launch)

That day we passed inspection and received a Hull Identification Number we could bring to DMV to register the boat.

We’d spent the weekend putting the barrels onto the boat. Rob went down during the week and made [100] 4 -1/2″ by 4″ plywood pieces which we “started” the screws into.

Meanwhile, we’d been given 150 feet of old fire hose from the Cornell Hook and Ladder Fire Company in New Baltimore. The fire hose is great for attaching barrels–we learned that on the 2nd trip. Back then it had come attached to the dock we got donated and in the spirit of “doing what you can with what you have where you are” we used it to affix the barrels back in ‘06 to the Crablegs 2.0. Its nice and wide, tough, and it would cost a lot more money to get the same size strapping from a hardware store. We took the hose and cut it into sections about 5 feet long.

I would NOT advise trying to cut through hose with a chop saw or circular saw. We tried that and the blade grabbed the hose and pulled it into the saw, nearly breaking the thing. Now my chop saw doesn’t cut straight. We tried to use a circular saw but the blade grabbed the hose and jerked the saw out of our hands. Finally, we put the hose on a stump, had two people hold the hose taut and cut it with a hand saw.

The hose has an inner layer. We were able to pull the outer layer off like a snakes’ skin. That gave us twice as much length.

Then we had to crawl under the boat, supported by stumps and four by fours a couple of feet off the ground, to attach the barrels. One of us sat Indian-style underneath with the drill while the other person took a 4X4 and used it as a lever to hold up the barrel while the other screwed the hose “straps” into the decking.

Update June 30th (17 days until launch)

We made slow progress on many different, necessary fronts.

Biodiesel

We did not use Waste Vegetable Oil (WVO) for our propulsion. That requires a complicated system wherein you first heat the WVO in a separate container to lower its viscosity. Biodiesel, on the other hand, can be poured directly into a diesel fuel tank. Some biodiesel is mixed with petroleum in a certain proportion [eg B20 is 20 percent biodiesel and 80% petroleum] but we need 100% biodiesel which is WVO treated with an ether and other chemicals. We need to procure at least 50 gallons, if not 100.

Outriggers

With so much “freeboard” sticking up above the water–about 16 feet–the wind was really going to affect our boat. I was nervous that a sideways wind might be enough to tip it. At minimum, a sideways wind would push us leeward significantly and throw us off course. So to combat the wind and stabilize the boat we designed two “outriggers” which would each stick out four feet from the port and starboard of the vessel.

These were essentially frames that contained two barrels and protected the boat from listing too much to either side. I finished the port outrigger but we ran out of 3″ screws and corner brackets as we were halfway finished with the starboard one, so I couldn’t cross “finish outriggers” off the list of things to do.

Paddle Wheel

“I feel like the Wright brothers,” I said to Rob as we worked on the paddle wheel and gears just about two weeks before our launch. They were the inventers of the first manned flying machine. “We try something, we find we need to get a new part. We get that part, we hook everything up, something snaps. We need a new part, and so on.”

First, we had to put up a tarp so that we could work in a downpour.

Then we got the bicycle rim mounted to the paddle wheel. At first we tried to find some way of attaching it to the axle in order to turn the wheel. Finally we realized we could just drill through the aluminum rim and connect it to the wheel itself. The rim will serve as the pulley on the paddle wheel.

Next, we built mounts so that the wheel could spin at the back of the boat. We tested this out by spinning it with our hand in the style of The Price is Right. “Eighty eight cents. Common twelve!” Rob joked. It spun well on its hinges, which are essentially two floor flanges supporting the pipe. Next we got the intermediate gear, which will lower the RPMs from 3000 at the engine crankshaft to 300, mounted together.

This worked well when we tried it. On the right is the engine with a belt going directly around the crankshaft. We could see when we got it started that the pulley attached on the same axle as the bike wheel was moving much slower than the crankshaft axle. But the problem came when we then mounted the piece above to the paddle wheel. First, the force of the wheel kept turning the intermediate bike-axle piece, and then the belt would slip off the engine crankshaft. Then we saw that there was a wobble in the paddle wheel and we had to address that problem. Then we stripped a screw that connected the pulley to the engine crank shaft, which we would have had to go to a specialty engine store to replace. In frustration we decided to see if we could get the engine to drive the pulley right from its engine to the paddle wheel without going through the intermediate piece with the bike wheel. We got it up and running and it spun the paddle wheel at about 150 RPMs for 30 seconds, but the there was a snap and a wobble and the whole side of the paddle wheel wherethe spokes connect to the axle broke in half. That required at six hours and a trip to Lowes to fix.

“I guess we’re the Wrong brothers,” I grumbled.

Registration — the DMV & liberty-sucking bureaucracy.

Isaiah Berlin pointed out that there are really two kinds of liberty: positive liberty and negative liberty. The latter is kind of the old-school, Founding Fathers’ version of liberty as freedom from tyranny or the arbitrary use of authority. The former is what I think most modern Americans think of as liberty, which refers to having the means or ability to do something [rather than the lack of restraint from doing it.] The latter idea is like having the liberty to travel because you have enough money to buy a plane ticket, the former is having the liberty to travel because you are not imprisoned.

Thoughts of what it means to have liberty and freedom are always on my mind as I plan these trips. This is because the biggest inhibitor to success is not the gale-force winds, the celestial-powered tides, or even drunk teenage vandals. It is the many-layered wedding cake of forms and functionaries one must wade through in order to have “the liberty” to perform particular actions necessary for the success of this project.

It required eight individuals, two state agencies, 4 forms, a signed affidavit describing how I built the boat and all of my material receipts to get where I was in the registration process. I brought the forms I needed to the DMV on a Thursday, waited forty minutes in line, and was given another form to bring back the next day. Friday I brought back the forms from the previous day and was told to take a seat because “it doesn’t look good.”

“Where is the title to the boat?” said the young woman behind the counter.

“I don’t have a title. I built it myself,” I said.

“Do you have a bill of sale?”

“No–because I built the boat myself,” I said.

“You built it yourself? What model is it?”

“Its not any particular model. Its made out of planks and barrels and plywood.” The clerk looked at me askance.

“I’m going to need to talk to my supervisor.”

So I waited for ten minutes at the counter until a white haired man came out.

“We can’t process this without a title, sir,” the man said.

“Why not? Look, the inspector came down and certified that this is safe. He provided a Hull Identification Number. I just now need to register it so I can put it on the water.”

“That’s not the problem, sir. Our computer requires us to check that there is a bill of sale so we can establish ownership of the boat. I can’t check that box without a title.”

“But there is no title. Look, I own the boat. I can show you pictures of it. There is no mistaking that it is my boat–”

“Sir that won’t be necessary. Please take a seat and I will talk to my supervisor about this.”

So I took a seat and now I was beginning to get pretty angry about having been at the DMV for three hours over two days.

John Stuart Mill, in his 1859 work On Liberty, establishes the smartest legal precept: the Harm Principal. This principal argues that a person ought to be able to whatever they want to do as long as it doesn’t harm another person.

I thought about this as I saw the man and the young woman carry my paperwork to another counter, where she and the old man conferenced the forms with another middle aged woman, whom I guessed was their boss, and then called me up a few minutes later after the supervisor went behind a one-way mirror.

“Do you have the bottom half of this form? Form OPS-420?”

“I only have the top of the form. The inspector kept the bottom half.”

“We need the bottom half, not the top half. He should have kept the top and given you the bottom. You’ll need that.”

“Is that it?” I said annoyed.

“No. Take a seat. We may need you to fill out some other paper work and bring in a proof of ownership.”

I took a seat. In addition to the eight individuals, two state agencies and 5 forms needed to register the boat, if I was to transport my boat overland to the river it would require $150, two forms, and a third state agency (DOT) to have the right to move my boat during a 5 day window, while also requiring a preceding certified escort, liability insurance, and proof that the boat would not put more than a certain amount of weight on each axle of the trailer. All of this to do what an Iroquois or Algonquin could have done in one morning under his own volition, perhaps with the help of a pal. But we call our society “The Land of the Free.” I guess everything is relative.

The clerks conferenced with the supervisor and then called me back up.

“You’ll need to have the bottom copy of form OPS-420. Also you’ll need to bring in any receipts you have to establish that you actually own the boat you’re trying to register. And you need to write a description of how you built the boat. Then we can generate a registration number for you.”

I left. The next week I brought in all my paperwork again. This time when my number was called I got a young female clerk who looked like a stoner. She signed everything and told me to have a great day. I hope she becomes Commissioner of the DMV.

Miscellaneous Work

Rain spoiled our Saturday, leaving us only Sunday to finish up the work. Rob set about building hatches in the front of the boat.

These hatches framed a sort of cage hanging below the deck between the pontoons. We could kee 5-gallon fuel buckets and four coolers in them. By putting these heavy items forward and low we would have increased the stability of the boat by lowering the center of buoyancy and helping to shift it forward. Plus they looked cool and made good use of space.

In order to complete work on the bridge we decided to bring it to the ground. My dad said “you’ll need about six guys” to lower it down. But I didn’t think human muscle was the best way to handle the problem. For one, even with six guys it would be difficult to simply hand the bridge down off the cabin. It is hard to get two people to lend me a hand at the same time, let alone six. So we took a page from Archimedes’ play book–or maybe the Egyptian play book-and lowered it using a ramp, rollers and a truck.

First, I got two 2X12s that were sixteen feet long and constructed scaffolding ramps using those boards and 4X4s:

Then we put metal pipes under the bridge so that we could push it forward with ease. We tied the back of the bridge to my father’s truck, leaving enough slack so that when the rope became taut the bridge would be balanced on its fulcrum awaiting descent.

Then it became a matter of easing the truck forward while Rob guided the bridge on the scaffolding runners. A couple of times the ropes jerked and the bridge almost slid off the guides, but it was slow and steady work. At one point we had a scare as it looked like it might slide off and I had to duck out of the way.

When we got it to the ground we took four round stumps and set the bridge atop of them so that we could roll it on the ground. Then, being down, we were able to work on it without being almost twenty feet in the air.

Next I set about building the navigator’s table in the bridge.

I cut out spots for the two by fours to save an inch and a half of space and so that nothing would fall behind the table. On the back I reinforced the table with a wood board, and I incorporated a raised edge to keep pencils and other small items from rolling off in a pitch.

We finished up the ceiling of the bridge and further sealed the cabin and engine-room ceilings.

UPDATE July 7th (Nine days until launch)

Transportation

It was 9 days until our scheduled launch and the pace of things were really picking up. In 4 days [Saturday, July 11th] we would ship our ship to the river. A New Baltimore resident, Nils Backlund, had contacted me to tell me that we could keep our boat anchored at his house on the Hudson. That would cut down on a lot of the stress I felt other years when I feared leaving the boat in the water because people repeatedly cut the lines and broke pieces off and the police threatened to tow it away (see 2007: The Manhattan Project). Mr. Backlund also let us use his trailer to transport the boat in pieces–otherwise I had no means of conveyance. Unfortunately downpours destroyed the road which we were planning to use to ship the boat to the river so we had to choose more dangerous routes. We either had to bring each piece on a long circuitous route down a narrow road with an eroded precipice on one side, or travel down a shorter road directly to the river but which is very, very steep.

Steering

As we approached the deadline to launch, July 16th, we found it necessary to put in 14 hour days on the weekends, to work on the boat after work and on holidays. Downpours pushed us indoors into my parents basement, but we continued to work in the puddles and confined space there, building the rudder, two keels and the doors to the bridge.

I found a formula for calculating rudder size, and we made ours out of two 2X12s epoxied together at the seam, then connected with wood connectors and epoxied again.

In that picture Rob is tracing a cup to give the rudder uniform, rounded sides. We cut the corners and sanded it with an electric sander. We used a hand-held belt sander and a random orbital sander–I’d recommend the belt sander because its quicker and scratches the wood in the same direction (which will show up when you stain the wood).

A rudder can be anything. The ancient Greeks and Phoenicians used a device that was essentially a long oar stuck into the water behind the ship. In the Middle Ages big planks shot down below the wheel of a ship. They were attached to the transom (the back wall of the ship) by hinges. That was similar to how we drove our rudders on last year’s boat. But if you can make a “balanced rudder” you will have a much easier time steering. As you can see in the picture, it looks like the rudder has a gouge cut out of it. The bigger part (to the top of the picture above) will stick below water, while the hinges will be attached to the skinnier part above it. By placing the hinges 20%-30% into the rudder, the bottom part that sticks out assists in steering the vessel. This is because when the rudder is turned, the part that sticks out at the bottom will be moved by the water that is rushing past the rudder and makes a kind of low-tech power steering.

Here the rudder has been sanded and epoxied between the pieces. Epoxy is strong stuff. It is not a glue, but a petroleum-based chemical resin mixed with a hardener. It costs $100 per gallon, and when mixed must be applied within 2 hours. (You can buy other types that set in as little as 15 minutes). When its sets it is harder than the wood itself. It looks almost like a coating of amber.

We created two keels, which are the skinny boards that stick below a boat and keep it moving in a straight line. They help to keep from getting blown sideways by the wind. This would be a big problem for us since we had so much freeboard above the water and so little draft below. We took a sheet of 1/2″ plywood and cut it in half. Each half would serve as a removable keel which could be raised and lowered in a slot we built into the outriggers. Here is a picture of one of the keels being stained before being epoxied to keep it hard and waterproof.

Reverse Gear/Front Wheel Drive

We were more like the Wright Brothers than Howard Hughes. Our paddle wheel was an elementary attempt at propulsion using the tools and materials we had available. It was only capable of moving at a slow speed and could not run in reverse. Nor did it have a “park”. If we wanted to prevent the wheel from turning we had to stick a pipe through its spokes the way you jammed a stick into the back wheel of some kid you didn’t like in sixth grade.

Likewise we did not have a reverse gear, but that would come in handy when anchoring. So Ben Maggi, our electrician, and I took apart a tolling motor. We mounted the propeller at the front of the boat. We then extended the wiring for the controls to the batteries up to the bridge. This was my first experience with electrical work. As usual, I made a layman’s attempt to draw what I wanted to achieve and showed it to Ben:

Ben made a more professional schematic and we set about buying the “double pole single throw” switches and the different gauges of wire. We ran out of wire at one point but we took 19 feet of an old extension cord which Ben took apart and used.

Then we ran the controls into the dash I had built at the front of the bridge, and we officially had a bridge-controlled reverse gear. We could also use it if we need an extra push going forward.

In the meantime Rob finished the doors to the bridge and we put in the chairs and bought the steering wheel. Rob also finished up the hatches he had begun on the front of the boat while Ben and I hooked up the navigation lights and the anchor light to the switchboard in the bridge. They will be powered by a bank of four deep-cycle marine batteries.

Successful Trial of the Paddle Wheel

Monday the 6th of July, ten days before our journey was to begin, I worked all day on the electrics and later Rob came down and we set to work on the paddle wheel. It had been damaged during a previous trial, with the spokes literally breaking in half and requiring hours of service. We realized we could only really get the wheel working if it was perfectly balanced, so we set up a table and made sure it was level, then using a level and a T-square re-aligned all the spokes on the wheel, and reattached them using wood connectors. Finally, when it was straight, we coated it all with epoxy for hardness and to make it waterproof. Then it was time to attach the “gear” to the paddle wheel–the gear is a bicycle wheel. Again, Rob is the guy with the attention to details in these endeavors, and he cleverly used a string and a pencil to draw a perfect circle around the axle of the paddle wheel where we needed to attach the gear.

Next it was time to mount everything again. It took two more hours for the two of us to align the engine, the intermediate axle and the paddle wheel all in such a way that there would be no wobbling when the engine was started, for that was what tore apart the wheel last time. At 8:17 pm Rob started up the engine and it worked like a charm. I marked thirty seconds on my watch as Rob counted the rotation of one spoke twelve and a half times, giving us 25 RPMs–pretty near what we calculated based on the RPMs of the engine (3000) and the size of the intermediate axles. We were pretty excited. If it all worked out, it was going to be some feat of ingenuity for an English major and student of Sociology. People should not be pigeon-holed by what they already know. A man who is a painter can also be a poet, and a woman economist can also practice carpentry. Sometimes I think it is more beneficial to try and learn elementary things in new fields than to increase one’s knowledge in an area where one already has expertise. A new idea, when learned, is not a unique addition to our bank of knowledge; rather, every association between the new idea and the myriad facts in our brain are themselves new concepts we have learned. It is the connections between facts and events, and not the facts and events themselves, that constitute ideas.

UPDATE JULY 13

Three days before our scheduled launch date we were finally able to move the boat to the river. It required substantial human resources and contributions from disparate parties. My father helped on Friday morning and afternoon to clean out the boat. I organized all the screws and nails and bolts, washers, nuts, pieces of pulleys, flanges, hand and power tools, and so on and categorized them. Todd prepared a list of 70 or so important items and we planned to record the location of each object, so that when a paddle broke off in the middle of the river, we would not have to scratch our heads and wonder where the red wrench went. Rob came down Friday after work and by then I had mounted the remaining outrigger and the support for the hinge which will connect the rudder to the steering system –which remained unbuilt. We worked until it became night, and then we bought out bulbs that screwed into extension cords, but it was still too dark to work. But my parents had a lot of Christmas lights in the basement so we strung those around, seeing as how they are basically extension cords with bulbs all over them. Then it was easy to see. Rob’s girlfriend Roxanne finished staining the room which housed the paddle wheel, so it looked like old rough cut stuff instead of plywood and 2X4s. It is amazing how much changing the surface of something affects the way an object feels. Rob and I worked until 1 a.m., moving latches and hinges on the windows. Then we went to sleep.

At 8 a.m. the next morning we had coffee and started to take the boat apart. My father set to work taking everything out the boat, no small chore considering what we’ve accumulated over six months. It was kind of like cleaning out a shed where one works on their lawnmower and bicycle. Its cool to pick up a big rusty washer and say “this went to the engine shaft” or “this went to the grinder machine” and think about how all those machines went together on a nuts and bolts kind of level. On the first boat we just smashed junk together with hammer. Now I could draw out the boat board by board starting from the number of barrels on the bottom (24) to the size of the gap between the deck boards (3/8″), then take a guest to Lowes and show them where every component was taken off the shelf. But that is all semantic memory stuff. What is even cooler was that I (and indeed, Rob) could explain why every piece was the size and shape it was, and what it was used for. Anyway my dad had to carry all that stuff out the cabin.

We covered the paddle wheel with another coat of epoxy. We got it mounted on and again, it started up easily and spun at the correct rpms. Although I used the American Sternwheel Association’s technical recommendations when designing the wheel and adjusting for its height, I was still nervous about using it in the water.

Nils Backlund of New Baltimore was instrumental in shipping the boat. First of all he allowed us to keep the boat anchored near his house and tied up to his peninsula on the Hudson. He provided a twenty foot trailer to convey the thing. He showed up at 10 am on Saturday, and by then Todd had shown up with his wife and his cousins Mike and Dan. By exerting more energy than we wanted to at 11 am, six of us lifted the bridge on the trailer and shipped it and the outriggers to Nil’s at the river.

The easiest route to the river was destroyed in a rainstorm, so we had to drive out route 61 and turn down Mill Road by Matthew’s point. It is a narrow road in New Baltimore with a steep drop off on one side, and the bridge was on the trailer in tow. It made it safely but I questioned if the main deck of the boat would fit without falling off the cliff. We brought the trailer back to load the main structure.

Then we experienced four hours where twelve different people tried to discover a way we could lift a 3500 lb, 12X24 ft boat on top of a trailer. (Only maybe 6 of us could really do heavy lifting). In this time we attempted to lift and pull; to jack up the boat around its entire perimeter in slow, 8″ increments until the trailer could be driven under; to simultaneously lift upon several levers while another inserted a brace beneath; to extend planks under the entire span and hydraulically lift the planks; to roll the whole structure on pipes; to slide it on beams; to pull with multiple persons upon the same rope attached to one point on the boat. Roxanne showed up with two pounds of ziti, bread and brownies and saved us from frustration. In the meantime Todd’s cousins had left, so we really had find some way to move the boar using some sort of mechanical advantage. I kept saying “just like the Egyptians built the pyramids,” to which someone would inevitably respond “you mean we’re going to use ten thousand slaves?” And I would say “No, we are going to let nature do the work for us. Lets try plan __” and fill in the blank with succeeding letters. That way it felt like something was succeeding.

Finally we got it loaded. We managed it by jacking up the center of the boat and using its own weight in the back to assist us in raising the front. We had to remove the paddle wheel and rudder. In the end we also had to remove 6 barrels so that it would sit on the trailer correctly. By 4:30 p.m. we were transporting it to the river.

We got it delivered down to Nils’ house without incident. His enthusiasm was a big morale boost, since it would have been very constrictive if he had been worried about scratching his truck or getting mud on his lawn. He said “man, this thing makes me feel like a kid again!” and my dad chuckled knowingly and even Rob and I chuckled because we’re just as afraid of losing our youth as older people are nostalgic about once having theirs. We did a little work while it was on the trailer in Nils’ grass staging area, then went home at dark.

The next day Rob and I went down to the river at 9 a.m. We started backing up the boat between a tree and a pile of cement slabs barely wide enough to fit the boat through without puncturing the barrels on something.

We got the boat and trailer stuck in an awkward spot and had to pull forward and back up again. The big dump truck which was pulling the trailer with the boat on top got spun its wheels on the muddy rocks and couldn’t move forward. So Nils chained a 4X4 pickup to the front of the dump truck and floored it while Rob floored the dump truck. But they only succeeded in throwing rocks and mud everywhere and digging into Nils’ grass. But then he suggested I chain my father’s pickup to the front of his pickup, which was itself chained to the dump truck which was pulling the trailer with the houseboat on top — how could I turn down that! Again we all floored it in a huge chained truck train spewing mud and and grass all over, but moved no where. My friend and former teacher Adam and his cousin Tyler showed up just as we had decided to chain both pickups independently to the dump truck and floor it in different directions, and soon enough through the foul smell of burned out rubber and the gritty grinding of the wheels we felt the dump truck suddenly get a grip and we tore a few feet up the hill. Then Rob got out and said “Thats the manliest thing I’ve ever done.”

Nils then backed up the trailer to the just before the waterline, at low tide. He did not want to get water in the bearings of the wheels of the trailer, as that degrades them. So we had to have boat off the trailer by the time the tide came back in.

Now we went back to the drawing board to get the boat off, because we couldn’t lift it.

“Archimedes once said, ‘Give me a lever long enough, and a place to stand, and I will move the earth,’” I announced with a four by four in my hand. The males used these to lift the front end, but it was no use. We tried rollers and everything else all over again, and again hours went by. When we finally succeeded (again by raising raising its midsection with a jack and using it as a fulcrum) a dozen hardworking people had spent an entire afternoon moving an object four feet down a hill. But in fact when the stern of the boat was beached on the rocks we lost our patience and the three trucks dragged the trailer out from beneath the boat. The barrels that bottomed out broke through our deck boards.

We had just enough time to fix those boards, put two barrels on and tie up before nightfall.

The next morning I went down to the river at alone 9 a.m. because everyone else had to work. This had happened to the other side of the boat:

The tide was going out so I looked around for something to put beneath the frame of the boat so it would come to rest on supports as the water receded. I managed to make the boat come to a rest on six stumps as the tide flooded out. Then I crawled in the inch-deep water and the shale under the boat. I attached the remaining barrels–normally a two or three person job– under there by laying on my back in the water and holding up the barrels with my knees or shins, while holding a screw in one hand and the power drill in the other. Now and then a barge or speedboat would pass and douse me. But by 1:30 I had gotten 5 of 6 of them on and I felt pretty good. At 3 Adam came and we put the starboard outrigger back on. At 6:30 Rob came and we varnished and built a ladder for the bridge. The plan was for 8 people to meet at low tide on July 14th, two days before the launch, to physically lift the bridge on top of the cabin. It had to be done by 7 a.m. or earlier because that was when the tide would come in. Then, with the bridge attached, Ben would be able work on the wiring while I would hook up the steering wheel to the rudder.

Captain’s Log

I started keeping a Captain’s Log:

July 15th – One Day Before Launch

Everyone is very stressed out now. No matter how long we plan ahead and how many hours we work we always come down to the wire. The boat is in the water and half of the electrical work is done. The steering is not quite finished. The paddle wheel has not been tested in the water, only on land. The anchor light broke, we still need a number of supplies (but legal have all our safety equipment) and the frame and some deck boards have been broken. It is only half painted and the bridge is a mess of wires and tools. Nonetheless Rob and I will pilot the boat from New Baltimore to Albany tonight in order to get to Albany by tomorrow. Some amenities will have to fall by the wayside, and a lot of the piloting will be done by the seat of our pants.

We have only succeeded to the extent we have so far by forcing things through when others might hesitate. No amount of planning will suffice if one hesitates in taking decisive action spontaneously. We have managed to get this big boat in the water, having built a building not a boat, but it has come at the cost of a lot of cuts and scrapes, begging and borrowing. Yesterday we managed to break Adam Sutton’s truck window and contort the bed of his truck while tearing up Nils Backlunds lawn and breaking lights on the boat, but but we got it in the water.

July 16th – Failure

We had to delay because of engine and steering problems. Like the billions-dollar space shuttle that cannot launch because of a faulty “O-ring” we found our paddle wheel unworkable because of the failure of a certain nut and an inability to replace a specialty engine bolt on short notice. Without a usable paddle wheel our “reverse gear” trolling motor barely moved our ship, and into the kinds of headwinds one encounters in the Hudson Valley (there were whitecaps today) our boat was uncontrollable. We are planning to work on the vessel in dry-dock over the coming weeks to fix the list of broken structures and failed systems.

On Assiduousness

It has been an interesting couple of days, to say the least. Up and down the Hudson Valley a cold front, resting over the Great Lakes, has spewed thunder and watery refuse from the sky. The humans here, soggy like wet cats, are grumbling that they’ve been cheated out of their summer. The weather coupled with the collapse of the economy makes it seem as though the fates are aligned against mankind. It certainly felt that way to me on Thursday morning. But its not productive to dwell on self pitying thoughts.

Assiduity is an appropriate name for this adventure: hard work at a personal cost. And yet assiduous work is not work done under duress–it is not slave labor or work performed under threat of injury. Work done assiduously is work that costs one now, but which produces a greater good, if not for the individual, than for society. While we do the things that motivate us we picture the moment when our labor will produce its reward, and in that moment, the sweetness of our success–and indeed the toil and pain that led to it–will be two sides of the same reward. A reward without work is luck, not a prize. That is why it is important never to give up a thing. The harder it is to achieve, the greater the moment will be when you achieve it.

On Tuesday the 14th of July, two days before our scheduled launch, Assiduity was still in New Baltimore grounded on some large rocks waiting for us to put the bridge on top. At seven a.m. I met Rob, Adam and six other men to lift the bridge with our arms back onto the top of the cabin. Until we had done this we could not finish the wiring or steering systems, or put the paddle wheel on, because we needed the boat to rest on the ground while we lifted the bridge atop. Adam backed his 4X4 up to the bridge, and by lifting the front, and then the back of the bridge we lifted the structure onto the back of the truck. But in the process we smashed the rear window of Adam’s pickup and got broken glass all over Nils Backlund’s yard. I felt bad about that. I hate when good samaritans offer me help only to receive their own injury. Adam backed his truck with the bridge balancing on the back down the cobblestone “launch.” We put two-foot wheel ramps in front of the boat which Adam backed onto (raising the back of his truck in the air) until the bridge was right next to the cabin of the boat and needed only to be raised two feet and moved onto the top of the cabin. That last two feet took us more than an hour to lift. As usual we sat around trying to lift one corner, then use a lever at another corner, then tried to employ ramps and use 4X4s and fulcrums, but to little use. All the while we were in a dangerous situation wherein the bridge–about the size of a shed–rested above our heads half on the back of the truck bed (itself on two ramps) while we stood on the wet shore stones beneath it and tried to push it up. Our final plan was to have eight of us lift the end of the bridge closest to the boat while my dad slowly backed up the truck. Then we could rest the back end down on the boat and from there. We lifted the front of the bridge onto the cabin, but the truck jerked back and once again we smashed the back of Adam’s truck, and now the broken glass flew all over Nil’s boat launch. It also bent a lot of the interior of Adam’s truck.

The price for that little mistake: $3200. Good thing Adam has a low deductible. Nonetheless it was one more thing to go wrong and another expense less than 48 hours before we were supposed to set sail.

After we got the bridge on, six guys stood on the barrels that had pushed up the deck boards so Rob could screw them back down. We needed 450 pounds to submerge each barrel. Then most of the guys left because it was a workday and it was almost 9 in the morning. Here is how the boat looked that morning as it rested in the cove.

Ben, Rob and my dad stayed. Our goal that day was to finish the electrical work, float the boat and try out the paddle wheel. But as usual, everything took longer than inspected. Ben and I got the navigation lights wired and hooked up to a switchboard in the bridge. Same with the anchor lights. We got the VHF radio working but not the antenna. We extended the controls to the trolling motor to the bridge so I could turn the motor on and off from uptop, but then Ben left before we could hook up the alternator or wire the batteries in series. In the meantime Rob had put together our dinghy, but it was worthless because we had no oars to move it with. We attached the port outrigger. The tide was approaching its high mark around supper time, so we ate a sandwich and came back. Here is a picture of the dinghy almost built. (A dinghy is any boat used to convey persons or cargo from a larger craft to shore and back.)

As the sun faded and the incessant mosquitoes started snacking, we made ready to push our boat into the deeper water, assisted by the rising tide. This would be the first water test with everything put together. All day the boat had sat on the rocks of the launch. During the day the weight of the boat on the rocks bent the barrels and the starboard outrigger was broken but still attached. As darkness approached Todd arrived with provisions and loaded them aboard, while Rob put the dinghy in the water. The dinghy clearly was taking on water as soon as we immersed it in the water. By the time we got Assiduity into the deeper water it was 10 p.m. on a moonless, cloudy night. We anchored outside of Nil’s house and tied up to his flagpole ashore using a long line. Then we all went home nervous as hell.

The day before launch

The day before launch we had to pilot the boat under its own power up to Albany where we had planned a send off celebration at Alive at Five. During the day Rob and Todd had to work. I showed up in the morning to find the boat at Nils’ as we had left it. She sat steady in the water and seemed stable, even when barges and speedboats went by and sent their wakes to shore. As the tide went out I spent most of the day trying to keep the boat from snagging on rocks, but also I cleaned and organized everything and performed miscellaneous small tasks to ready the boat for our trip. For that night when Rob arrived would need to attach the paddle wheel machinery to the stern of the boat complete designing the steering system or wire the electrical equipment before we could launch for Albany.

With the evening anxiety condensed, like the humidity, into a constricting sensation when inhaling. It became that time of day where the sun hits the clouds but the earth is all shadows. Around eight Rob loaded all his supplies, and we put our coolers and fuel aboard. Around nine we brought the paddle wheel aboard and could see that the whole structure sat too low in the water now that the boat was floating, and not sitting on stumps in my parent’s yard. So we had to fabricate mounts that would raise the height of the paddle wheel axel by 9 inches, so that it would not have to move through so much water. It was thoroughly dark by the time we finished that. But here is a picture of the cob job mount we made which I took the next day. You can tell the paddle wheel had taken a lot of abuse and fixing.

By flashlights we began hooking up the steering system ropes, but we discovered a flaw in our design that required the use of something other than rope to transmit a pulling force over distance. This was another big problem but now it was getting late.

“I can fix this with chain and sprockets from a bicycle,” I said to Rob.

“We’re supposed to launch in an hour if we hope to catch the flood tide to help us get to Albany. Do you have those things lying around?”

“At my house I do. Listen, I’ll run home. I’ll get a piece of bicycle chain and two sprockets, and a finishing nail to break the chain.”

Rob nodded, “Wait, while you’re at your house can you get a tuna fish can and some aluminum foil so I can fix the engine exhaust system?” (Rob had designed a pipe system that brought the exhaust from the engine out the back of the boat so we didn’t suffocate. Before he’d made that improvement the whole boat became filled with clouds of carbon monoxide when you ran the engine.)

“Okay. I’ll be right back with a bike chain, two sprockets, a finishing nail, aluminum foil and a tuna fish can.”

“I feel like I’m on an episode of Macgyver,” my dad commented.

Dad and I went back to the house to get the things we needed. When we returned, my mother was on the back of the boat holding up the rudder while Rob sat in a dinghy trying to attach the rudder hinge bolts in the dark. It was about eleven p.m.

“I can’t get these bolts to go through,” Rob said as he bent over the back of a dinghy reaching into the dark water.

“Do you need a flashlight?”

“No, I think the wood got wet and the holes we drilled shrunk.”

“How about a hammer?”

“I’ll try it.”

I held the side of Rob’s aluminum dinghy while he hammered the bolts into hinge holes he’d drilled while in the water. When he bolted on the hinges we had a rudder. We then cut lengths of rope and ran them to the top of the rudder, then through some “eye hooks” up to the bridge. We didn’t have time to attach the ropes to the steering column, but by pulling on one of two ropes from the bridge one could turn the rudder to the port or starboard.

Then, just before midnight, we made ready to start the engine and test the paddle wheel. In the darkness on shore my parents, Nils and his wife, watched. Rob primed the engine and pulled the starter as the bioldiesel engine roared to life. But it was all ’sound and fury signifying nothing.’ The belts attaching the paddle wheel to the engine were too loose, and mostly slipped instead of turning the wheel. So, frustrated, we shut the engine off.

For a few minutes we sat there with that feeling you have as a kid when you really want something and your parents tell you no, and the reason is “because we said so.” Now, with our eyes puffy from tiredness, we started to take the engine off its mounts, by flashlight, and then we moved the engine forward to increase the tension on the belt. Then at 12:30 a.m. we started up the engine again, which was very loud. It sounded like a running wood-splitter loosely nailed to a dock. Now a nut came off one of the wheel axles, the wheel wobbled and the belt flew off the engine. Annoyed again–and now worried we were keeping Nils and his wife awake by starting the loud engine so early in the morning, we tried to assess the problem: When we made the belt tight we increased the tension on a certain belt on a certain axle, which now had a tendency to unscrew itself when the engine was running. Nils suggested I get another nut and put it on the same threaded axel. So I took the culprit nut off and my dad and I drove to my grandfather’s house, who has a bucket of nuts in his basement, and, using flashlights, looked through this bucket and his shed and on his snowplow and even on the wheels of my dad’s truck to find a matching nut. I thought of going to Lowe’s but it was closed since it was after 1 a.m. now. We found plenty of nuts that were the right size, but none which were threaded properly. Can you imagine the frustration we felt held up by a single nut and searching sheds at 1 a.m with a flashlight? We went back to the river and I conceded grudgingly that we would not be able to launch that night. Instead we made plans to get up at five a.m. and use the flood tide, in conjunction with the trolling motor, to get us north from New Baltimore to Albany.

“Is that motor enough to get you out of trouble if you find yourself in the middle of the river being caught by the current?” Nils asked.

“I’m not sure,” I said, “But I’ll keep a line from the boat to shore until we’re sure.”

“I think that’s a good idea.”

So Nils went to bed and my dad left. And Rob and I sat by the river and he said something like “I can’t believe this ___” and I said “Happy birthday to me,” because at 12 a.m. I had turned 25 years old.

Rob slept in the cabin and I tried to sleep in the bridge but the mosquitos were just plain malicious. There was a blight in 2009 that killed many bats, and bats eat their weight in small flying insects every day. I’ve seen the bugs bad on the river before but this was a unbearable. When I tried to sleep it sounded like my head was inside a wasp’s nest. I was sweating but I brought my sleeping bag up around my head and even wrapped a jacket around my face like a mummy. You could still hear them buzzing through the cloth, and feel them landing on my lips and cheek, biting my neck. This above all else made me boil. At 2 a.m. I told Rob “I’m sleeping at my house, I’ll see you at 5″ and took off walking up a hill about a mile and a half to my parent’s house. It was straight uphill on dark country roads with no cars and one or two street lights. As I walked a weird numbness settled over my eyelids. My eyes puffed as though from allergies. The crickets screeched in darkness where the sky was indiscernible from the black foliage that lined the road. Each tired footfall echoed eerily. I did not feel annoyed, or happy or anything. I just walked, looking at the night and hearing each step. My head had worries in it, about the launch, about what it meant to be 25 and pursuing the same goal I was after at 21, but these were in the peripheries of my attention. I had this strange thought that here I was, and this is existence. The thought occurred to me that I was lucky to have legs, and how difficult it would be for me to be happy without them. It was my birthday and I was twenty five and I was walking in pitch blackness listening to crickets, having just worked on a homemade boat with a paddle wheel and a wood stove, and I had legs. Is that good or bad? It just is, I thought. I crawled into bed for two hours of sleep and my cat Sheba uncharacteristically slept in my armpit. That was nice.

July 16th– scheduled launch day

It was difficult to get up in the dark at 5 that morning after only two hours sleeping. I made a cup of coffee and flipped on the weather channel only to see isolated and scattered thunderstorms for the next 5 days, and as usual, wind coming from the south and southwest. I walked back downhill to the river as the morning sun evaporated the darkness and dew. I walked past a house where roosters and hens were waking up and agreed that cockadoodle doo is really what it sounds like roosters are saying. I also thought that if I ever have a neighbor with a rooster I’m going to drive a monster truck over his house because they are so annoying.

I got to the river and woke up Rob. We started untying our lines from the shore. It was just about low tide so the water would be coming in from the ocean and pushing us toward Albany soon. We pushed off from shore and switched on the trolling motor, which seemed to move us at about a mile an hour through the slack water outside of Nils’ house. We executed a turn to get our bow facing upstream and pointed north. We used the motor to get out into the middle of the river, where there were ripples from the wind. We hoped that the south wind would be enough to push us north. But would you believe it? The wind was actually blowing from the north to the south–perfect for getting to Manhattan but terrible for getting to Albany. With our little motor we had all we could do to stay still in the middle of the river. By now Nils had woken up and he came out of his house with a coffee mug and called to us from the dewy shore.

“Is it slack water?”

“Yeah,” I shouted through cupped hands. The dew sat like steam just above the water. “Just about to be flood tide. We’re hoping it will take us north!”

“Are you going to try your trolling motor?”

“We’ve got it on!”

“It’s on now?”

“Yes!”

“Oh, man.”

We sat there with our motor on doing nothing but wasting batteries for another fifteen minutes, and then I decided to take us back to shore where Nils stood. It took us ten minutes just to get from the middle of the shore to Nils’, exactly where we’d started from at 5 a.m., but now it was almost 7. The boat was that heavy. Nils brought ought a bucket of nuts to see if one would work on our paddle wheel. Nope. Then he took a look at the wheel himself.

“I’m still trying to wrap my mind around how this works. It seems to me like another nut might work if you can find one. But then again maybe not now that I think about it. Maybe you need to use a chain and sprockets.”

“The problem is finding a twenty five inch diameter sprocket,” I said. “I spent a week in May trying to do that and that’s why we went with the bicycle wheels and belts.”

Rather than smash our faces against the the stones of Nils’ embankment, as we wanted to do, I called my mother and she brought us back to my parents house, where Rob and I made a breakfast of eggs and bacon and ham.

“Man, I can’t believe this,” Rob said.

“I know.”

“There is no way we’re going to get that paddle wheel fixed today.”

“I know. And there is no way we can get through this wind with just the trolling motor.”

“Well, Nils said we could borrow his gas outboard. How do you feel about putting that on and using that to push us?” Rob said at the breakfast table.

“Ah, man! We can’t do that. If we could have done that we would have been done with this trip three years ago. The whole idea of it is to not use fossil fuels. We’ve got to find some way to do this with renewable resources or mechanical advantage or something.”

“Yeah, you’re right.” Rob tossed his egg sandwich onto his plate.

“Believe me I’d like to put a jet engine on this thing and rip the sucker to pieces I’m so sick of this trip.”

“What if we get a prop and attached the engine to the that?”

“We could–but we still have to replace that specialty bolt in order to connect anything directly to the engine. And we don’t have a prop or an axel. And its not nearly as cool as a paddle wheel.”

“True. Its too bad we can’t just find a diesel outboard we could put the bio fuel in.”

“Yeah but the cheapest one I could find was 8 grand and — at the time — that was more than I planned to spend on this whole trip. Damn it!”

“Man… This is the first year everybody has been encouraging and supporting, instead of making fun of us. Man, I got a week off. I’m down to do whatever you want. You want to just untie this thing and see how far we float in a week using the tide? I’m down.” Rob held his sandwich in his hand without biting it.

I took a bite of my english muffin.

“Thanks man. But then we’ll have the boat someplace where it will be a pain to get it out, and its frankly a danger to take that thing on the water since we can’t control it.”

“We could take row boats. That rowboat Nils has glides through the water pretty easily. Its still a pretty substantial accomplishment to row from Albany to New York City. We got halfway there last year in a boat that was 750 pounds. Plus we’ll get in mad good shape.”

“That could be fun another time,” I said. And then I had an idea. “I do kind of like where you’re going though. What about this? I’ve got that Sunfish in the woods behind my parent’s house. Its got a mount for a sail. What if we take a the barrels off the outriggers of Assiduity, take a couple of two by fours, use some decking from Assiduity, and make a raft that floats atop the Sunfish and the barrels? We can use our oar locks from the dinghy that sank, and we can build the whole thing and ship it up in my dad’s truck to Alive at Five!”

“So after all the work we did on the boat we’ll be back to a design that is essentially a square with a sail on top and a set of oars?” Rob tossed his sandwich back on his plate.

“Well the goal is not to get to New York City in Assiduity, its just to get to New York City. What do you say? We can have this thing built by noon and shipped to Albany. Easy! Of course we’ll have to see if Todd is in.”

In a manic state we dragged out the Sunfish from the woods. Then we went down to the river and took a hammer and drill to Assiduity. We pried off the deck boards on the outriggers and threw them ashore.

We worked feverishly as it began to sprinkle. We unscrewed boards on the outriggers which held the barrels under water, and these boards shot up in the air when the screws let go, because of the buoyancy of the barrels beneath. We cut through the lines on the port and starboard navigation lights. We threw the barrels ashore as Nils came out.

“What’s going on? You’re stripping the thing?” Nils said.

“We’re making a smaller boat out of this one to make our trip with.”

“After all this? Sheesh.” Nils watched askance as we removed boards from the boat and started carrying them to the sunfish. Todd arrived with coffee and I filled him in on the plan. He was blown away by the idea of taking apart Assiduity and made many suggestions that ultimately would not get us to Albany within five hours. So we worked, trying to push a square peg in a circular hole, putting together this makeshift raft as Todd and Nils stared at us wondering what we were doing, and the weather deteriorated. As we worked the sky began to blacken and rain and the wind picked up. By noontime there were whitecaps blowing up the river. The wind was lifting up the water and throwing it upstream now.

When I caught sight of this I suddenly felt a drop in my stomach. I stood and looked at the waters getting whipped up by the wind. Rob and Todd put down the circular saw and measuring tape. We all looked; the Hudson was like the Colorado as it rushes over rocks. “There is no way we can row through this,” I said. “Do you agree Rob?”

“Yes.”

“And this is how it will be the next five days.” The wind and the waves blew into our eardrums so that we had to shout to hear each other. I lost my temper and yelled obscenities. Then I composed myself and said “Okay, let’s start calling people so they don’t show up at Alive at Five just to see us.”

* * *

From the top of the cabin looking past the bridge:

Looking past the captain’s chair and dash out the front of the bridge, standing next to the navigator’s table:

For better or for worse I feel that spite is the primary thing that motivates me. A couple of years ago I was working for a temp agency and didn’t own a car. I had to walk 15 minutes in the January snow to the bus at the corner of Lark and Central, then the bus dropped me off on Wolf Road and I had another 20 minute walk through the snow to an office, but I only owned a threadbare blazer instead of a winter coat. I actually came to enjoy that walk, because after a while with a snotty nose and a sore throat and watery frozen eyes and wet feet I started to feel proud of my ability to keep walking. It was that sense of spite borne of determination that I abstracted from those walks and which I try to bring to anything I work on. It would take another paycheck and another month to get Assiduity functional, but it was 95% completed, I thought, and any runner knows not to slacken pace until they pass the finish line. I felt desolate on the day we’d scheduled to leave, my birthday, being broke, owing people money, having bruises and cuts and bites, my apartment a mess and my car out of gas. And yet I was better off than I was on the same days the year before, when I was floating on a boat with broken oars, burnt, sunburned, sick and sinking. A lot of the time people fail through a lack of character. Thus my favorite quote from George S. Patton: “Success is how high you bounce when you hit bottom.” We would get the boat fixed, I thought, and we would in Manhattan before the leaves changed to orange and yellow.

AUGUST

So we worked. I worked every Monday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday for four weeks. Rob came down on weekends and after work. We kept the boat tied up at Nil’s house, but we made slow slow progress.

Propulsion

I joked to Rob when we worked on the paddle wheel in my parent’s yard that we were on “Plan E” the night we got the wheel spinning. A month later we were on “Plan O.” We fixed the problem which prevented us from launching on July 16th [a specialty nut that unscrewed itself when the engine crankshaft rotated]. But then the belts began to slip. So we tightened the belts and fixed the slippage problem–but then the belts melted. They were special-order belts that cost fifty dollars a piece, so replacing them every five minutes was not possible. Lesson: this is why no one makes belt-driven paddle wheel boats.

But you know what? They don’t make paddle wheel boats, period, except for novelty, these days. It is an inefficient technology that was rendered moot by the development of the screw propeller. So we took the paddle wheel off the boat after all and set about finding a way to attach a propeller to the crankshaft of the engine.

Propeller vary by diameter (size), number of blades, and pitch, or angle of each blade. Boats that plane and go fast use high-pitch propellers, while pontoon boats and house boats use low-pitch (flat) propellers of the largest size the engine can handle. But using a propeller too large for an engine can wreck the propeller.

We got a propeller for a large electric motor from a marina, and we went to the hardware store and bought pipes and pipe reducers because the diameter of the crankshaft was too large for the propeller. We spent a day hooking everything. It worked great for thirty seconds and then the propeller loosened and turned independently of the crankshaft. We tightened the bolt holding the propeller to the crankshaft the next night but it still slipped. Finally my father and I worked for 5 hours and fixed the propeller so it wouldn’t slip. We tried out the propeller while we were still tied to shore, and it moved us against the tide, which felt great.

Here is a picture of the engine with the propeller while the boat was beached in the slip at Nils Backlund’s house.

Outriggers

The outriggers had originally been mounted in such a way that the barrels underneath them sat six inches deeper in the water than the barrels beneath the main section of the boat. This, I believe, is what snapped them. So we raised the level of the outriggers. We also put in vertical posts which would help brace the outriggers.

We were going to construct the diagonal braces so that they butted right against the cabin. But we realized we wouldn’t be able to open the windows if we did that. So we built the thing, and then we tried to put down the windows, and we felt like morons.

So on the one hand our windows were obstacles if we opened them. That’s the “glass-half-empty” way of looking at it. The “glass-half-full” way of looking was that now we have a patio table.

Glass half empty, glass half full, either way we only had half a glass now, and that sucked.

Steering

After we finally got the engine working we built a new rudder. The old one was too small, too heavy, and the hinge on it broke. So I built a new one out of a piece of plywood, a 2×3, two eye-hooks, two oar-lock mounts and some left-over bolts.

The mount worked great but the rudder didn’t steer us. We could only move in straight lines. (Actually, wherever the wind pointed our bow). We tried assisting the rudder using two electric trolling motors pointed sideways and providing 70 lbs of thrust. That worked great until the wind blew or the tide changed, at which point the electric motors became totally ineffective.

As our new launch date approached I went down and took more pieces of plywood and made the rudder about three times larger. We didn’t care how anything looked by then. We just wanted to be able to move through the water and steer.

The Voyage of Assiduity

Since we put the boat in the water a month before I had been saying to Rob: “Tonight we are going to pilot this thing across the river and touch that red triangle,” referring to a red buoy across the river from Nil’s house about 800 feet away. Probably twelve times I thought we were ready to touch that red triangle and then something would go wrong with the steering or propulsion that prevented is from attempting a crossing.

Monday, August 10th was a deadline. It was four days before we planned to launch again. This time if something went wrong we could not try again a few weeks later. If we could not pilot Assiduity even across the river and back we were in serious trouble. So even though the boat only had only one outrigger, and we had to steer it from the back using a tiller, and the exhaust system on the engine was not complete, we had to give it a try.

Rob and I met at Nil’s launch at 6:30 p.m.. It was overcast and starting to sprinkle. My father stood on shore as we untied our mooring lines. This would be the first attempt to move the boat without a 100 foot line tethering us to land. Every time we had tried to pilot the boat until then we’d ended by having to pull ourselves back into Nil’s cove because we couldn’t operate under our own power.

Rob stood in the back of the boat ready to start the engine by pulling on its starting rope. Here he also had access to the rudder, which has not yet been hooked up to the bridge. Meanwhile I stood at the bow of the boat where I’d mounted two trolling motors. I could operate one of the motors from the bow of the boat, the way you are supposed to operate a trolling motor. But we had extended the wires and controls of the other motor up to the bridge. So I had to climb up to the bridge to turn on that motor, and climb down to the front of the boat to operate the other. We used the electric motors to pull us out of the cove, watching the chain-link-covered rocks on the shore slide backward at a half mile an hour.

The conditions on the river were ideal for a crossing attempt. As almost never occurs, there was no wind and it was slack water. The water was a sheet of glass reflecting the sky and upside down trees, and then little ripples as it started to drizzle harder. We knew the tide would soon begin ebbing so we pointed our bow just north of the red buoy across the river, and Rob pulled the engine cord. The engine banged to life with a big cloud of white smoke and I saw the little pieces of debris on the river’s surface slide backward faster. Rob tried out the rudder and it steered us effectively. So far, so good.

After about eight minutes, just as we reached the middle of the river, I heard the engine go silent. I looked back to ask Rob what was the matter. Apart from the smoke that was coming out of the exhaust pipe and making it hard to breathe back in the engine room, he said, the vibration of the engine was making all of its nuts and bolts shake loose–the bolts attaching the engine to the deck, attaching the exhaust system to the engine, and the bolts holding the engine itself together. But to we had to prove to ourselves that we could touch that red triangle, so we let the electric motors pull us at a quarter mile an hour.

We were only able to move and steer because there was no wind or current. I became nervous when I looked downriver and saw a tugboat growing in size. We started up the engine for about thirty seconds to help the trolling motors get us out of the path of the approaching tug and then Rob shut the engine off.

“About every nut on this thing is rattling loose,” Rob said. So while I continued to steer at the front Rob took an adjustable wrench and tightened all the bolts. “That will give us a good thirty seconds of propulsion before they loosen again,” he said.

Now we were within two hundred feet of that red triangle and it started to rain harder, and the tug looked like it would pass close behind us.

“Lets get this thing to the other side of the river and stay at that buoy until the tug passes,” I said.

Now, from the western shore, from which we had set out, I saw a man in a red kayak get in the water and start paddling across the river toward us. In eight or so minutes he was upon us, passing, in my opinion, dangerously close in front of the tug.

“Are you alright?” the man shouted from his bobbing kayak.

“Yeah, we’re taking the boat out for a test run.” I yelled back.

“I don’t know if you knew there is a severe storm warning. You might want to get to the shore in front of you and hunker down.”

“Thanks,” I said. “We’re just going to that red buoy a hundred feet away until the tug passes, then we’re going back to the other shore.”

“Okay,” the man said, “just be safe. You know in the rain sometimes the commercial traffic, it can’t see you.”

“Thanks,” I said. The man turned his kayak around and started back as the tug droned by in the middle of the river. A man in the pilot house on the tug waved to us. As the wake of its waves sent our bow rising just a little out of the rain-speckled water I reached out and touched that red buoy. “Success!” I shouted to Rob, who was in the back tightening bolts. “Now lets get the hell out of here.”

Now the wind was picking up, and it was starting to be ebb tide. We agreed we would use the bio engine to get us back to our cove on the west shore as quickly as possible. So we used the electric motors to turn us around and Rob pulled the engine cord. Again it roared to life and sputtered white exhaust.

We picked up speed as the rain pattered down. I saw lightning flashes over the hills of New Baltimore. When we were halfway across the river the engine stopped and Rob ran out of the back. A plume of black smoke billowed upstream. Rob coughed and spat into the river–he’d killed the engine as it was rattling apart.

We could only use the electric motors and move slower than one could doggie paddle back to our safe harbor. But now I was nervous because our boat began sliding downstream with the tide, and I could see that we were going to miss Nils’ slip and be adrift.

“We have to use the engine!” I shouted to Rob.

“The exhaust canister just fell off,” Rob said. “I have to tighten the mounting nuts, everything is shaking loose.”

“We have to use it or we’re going to get pulled downriver!” We were a hundred feet from our slip. Nils and my father stood on shore with concerned faces as we started sliding downstream. I ran to the back and held the engine steady while Rob pulled on its rope. I had to hold the engine because all the screws which had attached it to the deck had worked themselves loose. When it started the engine shot backwards and Rob held it in place with his foot. “We’re almost to Nils’, just a few more yards!” I shouted over the engine noise. Then the exhaust pipe banged and rattled loose and fell into the river and the whole room filled with black smoke. We couldn’t breath; we could hardly open our eyes. Rob killed the engine. I ran to the front of the boat and saw my dad and the shore slipping upstream. But we were in swimming distance, so Rob held one end of a hundred foot line and I jumped into the water and swam to shore, and we pulled in the boat by the rope. The whole exhaust component on the engine had come loose, and the propeller and shaft had been shot into the water.

“Well, that was sort of a success,” Rob said when we were back on shore.

That was three days before our launch.

A Change in the Plan

The next morning, two days before we were to set sail, I had a realization: I got a little off track designing Assiduity as a transportation vehicle to New York City.

Has that ever happened to you? That you’ve invested all your resources into a thing, contingent on which rests plans and goals and daydreams and sometimes even night dreams–and you find yourself fixated on what you want rather than what you need, to the point where what you want is detrimental to what you need? That’s what happened with the fifth raft design.

She contained a wood stove and three rooms and lots of superfluous components. Certainly I was glad to have that, but it would not work as a means of conveyance to New York City, and that is the goal. It was underpowered and awkward to pilot. In order to keep our eyes on the prize we needed to make a new boat, and do it within 26 hours.

We hit the drawing board to bang out a new design. I joked that we were like the scientists in Apollo 13 in that scene where the Houston engineers all meet in a conference room with the exact supplies the endangered astronauts have in space, and set about designing a whole new propulsion system on the fly.

We designed this new, sixth raft. It was to be quick, maneuverable, light, sturdy, capable of sail and propulsion by rowing, and able to bottom out and be transported by land or sea.

Here is a sketch of her. She is similar in design to our 2008 attempt [Excelsior].

AUGUST 12th

The choice to build this new vessel was a matter of necessity. As always we were doing what we could with what we had and Frankensteining a vessel to suit our purpose. But there was no way that Assiduity would have made it to NYC. As I learned in our attempt to float across the river and back Assiduity simply has too much freeboard above the water and not enough power. In that one hour trip our engine exhaust blew off, our propeller fell into the river, and I had to dive in the water and swim to shore with a rope in my hand as it floated downstream in a lightning storm. All to go 800 feet–while New York City is 150 miles or 750 times that distance.

We could allow ourselves to get so attached to one idea that we lost sight of what we are really trying to do: float to Manhattan without using fossil fuels. Some people suggested we “just take out Assiduity and see where it takes you,” but what good would that do? After four unsuccessful trips I knew that this one would have ended in the biggest disaster yet. Wherever we ended up–and every second we’d have been on guard and worried about damaging other boats or being blown in front of commercial traffic–we’d have had to secure a tow back to New Baltimore. Why do a thing just to fail? That is foolish. And yet we could not delay our trip because we had only one week when the whole crew participate. Nor did it make sense to me to delay for a year in order to force a flawed design. “Discretion is the better part of valor.”

So we had 36 hours to build our sixth raft. I got all of the components put together: two aluminum canoes, a sunfish, oar locks and oars, masts, rigging, chocks and safety equipment from Assiduity, and two sheets of 3/4 inch plywood that will serve as the raft platform.

* * * * * * * * * * *

The 2009 Hudson Raft Expedition

The 2009 Hudson Raft Expedition ended without reaching Manhattan. We made it as far as West Point in the new raft before we were forced to throw in the towel. Although the entire year could be seen as a tremendous waste of resources (we built a vessel costing nearly $10,000 only to use a different vessel three days before our launch) and a failure, since we did not make it to Manhattan, yet this was my favorite of the five attempts I’ve made to reach New York. As Rob said when we were trapped on some boulders aside railroad tracks for 18 hours near Newburgh, “I feel like this is going to be one of those experiences where you come back and see everything a little differently.” That is the point of going away, physically or mentally–it is like shifting positions when piecing together a puzzle. The new perspective is key.

Salinger has an odd story called De Daumier-Smith’s Blue Period about a young man who travels to Canada to study fine art by living with an austere Asian couple in a reclusive villa. You wonder what the point of the story is as you read it–it seems to be all about nothing. Then on the last page Mr. De Daumier Smith tells us that he learned his lesson and from now on he’s going to spend his time studying “that most interesting of all summer-active animals, the American Girl in Shorts.” Sometimes on these trips of ours I’ve found myself getting a little too focused. We get to a point where we are putting off our enjoyment of everyday things. That is assiduousness, of course, which is why the vessel was named Assiduity. But if life is all about happiness in the end (I don’t know if it is or not) then sometimes assiduity can be as detrimental to completing the puzzle as sitting in the same chair and not moving around. In short, it is great to have goals, especially ones that lead you to adventure and learning. But it is also great to have friends, to drink, to be with your family, pick a flower, fall in love and enjoy the happenstance that our limited time on earth comprises. One must find the fulcrum that balances these two human drives, toward success and toward peace.

So, as I said before, we had to design a totally new raft from scratch because Assiduity could not be piloted. We used pieces of things we found in the woods behind my house and left over from the construction of Assiduity. We went with a minimalist approach.

Rob and I worked until after dark on Wednesday night the night before setting sail. Then my friend Brianna and I put the boat together on Thursday morning. The goal was to make the boat transportable by truck and able to be put together without using power tools. I’d read a book on Polynesian sailing canoes and from there I got the idea of putting the boat together with rope lashing. It worked great. Older sailing books I got from the library have chapters called “Rope…is called Line” and start out by saying “line is used to transmit power over distance,” but that is too narrow a description. In Polynesia they use it for lashing and that is an underused use of line. Its sturdy, strong, it flexes, and you don’t need to use screws or bolts or even hand tools to put pieces together.

Launch Day

We transported the boat, which we named The Mother of Inventions, since it was built out of necessity, to Albany. We put the boat together on the ramp that the Albany Aquaducks use for their amphibious tours. Todd could not participate in the voyage because his house flooded. So Rob and I put the boat together with the help of a small crowd. Brianna made an offering to Poseidon by pouring some whiskey over her bow into the water. When we got the boat together and gave it a test run she worked perfectly. She glided over the water, drawing at most four inches, and it was easy to steer her and turn her about her center point.

At nine o’clock, as the sun descended behind the buildings and bridges of Albany, we pushed off from our dock at Alive at Five. Finally, we were on our way. What a liberating feeling to be moving through the water at last! We paddled past The Barge restaurant as it became dark. There, a bunch of drinkers and dancers yelled funny things down to us. There was the familiar refrain that “Hey! Its Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer!” Then we called Rob’ girlfriend who snuck an 18 pack of Coors Light to us at the Corning Preserve, even though personal supplies or alcohol are banned, because we simply could not launch without beer.

The Mother of Inventions moved easily through the water compared to our other rafts. A few paddle strokes got her up to a mile an hour or so even though we were fighting both the tide and a little wind. We breezed beneath the Dunn Memorial Bridge into the Port of Albany with its trains and piles of metal and warehouses. Above us the night sky darkened to moonless black with a million white sprinkles. On such nights I like to imagine that there is a bright light in outer space, and the sky is a black tarp with little pinprick holes in it. We paddled on and marveled at the ease of our progress, passing huge tankers and barges loaded with cranes and trucks. As we passed “Warehouse 4″ in the Port a pickup truck stopped on shore and the driver got out and yelled to us through cupped hands.

“What are you doing out there?”

“We’re piloting this boat to Manhattan,” I shouted back. The man looked at us like we were secretly terrorists.

“Well, make sure you stay back from these docks 400 feet.”

“Okay,” we shouted.

“The Coast Guard has cameras and they’ll come out if they see you closer than 400 feet.”

“You got it, buddy,” we said, and paddled on. We passed enormous, unlit, permanently moored barges rusting away. We passed those moored barges less than fifty feet to starboard. Being next to something that enormous is a little frightening. You had to think that if that hull suddenly sunk it would pull you under with it. And the water at 10:30 pm is black and depthless, like a sea of crude oil. Who knows what creepy things are rusting away a few feet beneath you in the black. We passed a huge tanker with a bulbous bottom which was being loaded with scrap metal. It had a bridge the size of an apartment building and a rudder a storey tall. The tanker must have been empty because it sat far above its waterline. For a lifeboat a submarine-looking contraption was tied with cables at an angle to the tanker’s deck. The night was turned to day by a dozen floodlights as trucks drove up ramps to load scrap metal aboard her. Then ten minutes later she was behind us and it was dark again.

Rob had to work on Friday morning, so I dropped him off at the mouth of the Normanskill Creek, where our third raft was destroyed, just south of Albany. He walked through the woods to route 144 where his girlfriend was waiting to pick him up. I stayed out on the boat, alone, and used the oars to propel me south. I had the tide on my side from eleven until five a.m and my goal was to reach Henry Hudson Park seven miles downstream from where we’d launched. It was peaceful at first, if a little lonely rowing solo on the river at night. As I rowed out of Albany a light caught my eye through the trees on the east shore. It looked like a fire or a huge orange beacon. As I rowed astride a clearing where big power line towers left a treeless swath in the forest I saw that the light was a huge orange halfmoon, just above the horizon and amplified by the atmosphere.

As the hours passed the rowing became monotonous and sedating. I struggled to keep my eyes open. Because I was rowing I had my back facing downstream, my face looking up river where I had just come from. I kept glancing over my shoulder to make sure there were no boats in front of me. In the blackness I kept note of the blinking red and green lights, but not notice enough. For at one point I suddenly saw that one red and one green light were not blinking. And as I perked my ears I heard the low droning of a diesel motor and the sound of a hull moving through the water. It was a barge that was moving north and it was right on top of me. I jumped to life and rowed hard and fast. In my effort to be quick I jerked one oar so hard that I pulled the oar lock out of its socket, making that oar useless. As the barge drew even closer I reached over with one hand to get the oar lock back in its socket, telling myself to be calm but quick and not to panic. I got the oar in and rowed out of the way of the huge black mass, which sounded its horn. Its wake passed beneath me like an ocean wave. Then I said aloud to myself, “Okay Dallas you have to be more alert than that, Jesus Christ.” After that I squinted into the distance in front of me after every few strokes. In all six barges passed me between midnight and six a.m. and I became adept at noticing them before they got too close.

There was a little wind but not enough for sailing, so I rowed throughout the night. I made it to Henry Hudson Park and Campbell Island and kept rowing. I wanted to find a place I could tie up to a dock but I had another two hours of tide and did not want to squander it. In the distance I could see the lights of the bridge that connects Selkirk and Castleton and I made that my night’s goal. I passed beneath its stone supports a half an hour after sunrise. By that point I couldn’t even rest on my elbow because I would immediately fall asleep, and even as I rowed my eyes would droop and I had microsleeps until I jarred myself awake. By 7 a.m the tide was coming back up the river and I was exhausted but there was no where to tie up. I was on the west shore alongside the rotting posts that dot the river, erected by the Army Corp of Engineers when they deepened the river channel in the 1920s. I couldn’t row any further. I put my anchor on one of those posts and laid back for a nap.

Friday, Day 2

I woke up a half hour later because the wake of a barge sent the boat smashing into the dike posts. That wouldn’t do. So I brought the anchor back aboard and rowed further. Now I was fighting the tide trying to find some place to tie up–a beach, a dock, anyplace I wouldn’t be smashing against rocks and logs. When you are tired and run-down the monotony of a thing is frustrating. But soon I reached Schodack Island State Park where there were some aluminum docks. There was a sign on them that read, “docks are for launching boats only, no docking,” but I needed a place to tie up. So I threw a line from my boat around the dock cleat and leaned back, falling asleep instantaneously in the gray morning fog.

I woke up to the sound of a man jumping from the shore to one of the aluminum docks. He was docking a blue sailboat to a cleat just a few feet away from me. The man saw me and I nodded to him but fell asleep again lying on my back with my face to the sky without a sleeping bag. It was cold and dewy. When I woke up again a few minutes later the man had secured his boat to the docks. When the man saw I was awake he started shouting to me asking about the boat. He was a really friendly man, thin with short white hair, a carpenter by trade. He had sailed in his new sailboat north to Albany, the farthest north he’d ever been. He came over to my dock and asked me about my trip and we talked about sailing, politics and small talk. I started eating a breakfast of granola, a piece of pepperoni and a Gatorade. Then a man in a kayak paddled in from Selkirk and he took a picture of the raft for his Facebook page.

“Do you have a blog about this?” he asked. I told him the address to this site.

“See he knows all the right questions,” said the carpenter with white hair in a sad voice. The man in the kayak smoked a pipe as he sat Indian style on the dock. That seemed to me a serene sort of existence.

I bid the men adieu as the sun became blazing hot. At 10:41 in the morning I set off to try and make it to New Baltimore, where Assiduity was moored at Nils Backlund’s house, and where I would meet Rob that night 17 miles south of Albany and nine miles south of my current position. Without any wind to hold me back I watched the shrubbery on shore move backward in a long green conveyor belt. I rowed on. I passed the Lafarge cement plant where two identical sister barges were being filled with cement. I passed the old Powel and Minnock Brick plant, the last brick plant to operate in New York State, which is now some sort of international trade zone. I started having fun in the early afternoon sun around Coeymans Landing. Instead of rowing I kicked my feet and moved forward. The eighty degree water was refreshing in the afternoon heat. I was getting sunburnt but I didn’t care, it felt nice after so many days of rain. I donned a life jacket and jumped in, floating next to the boat as the tide propelled us both south. I passed Barren Island between Coeymans and New Baltimore–this island was an amusement park into the early 1900’s to which regular day cruises would sail from Albany and Catskill on steam propelled barges, and it was the site of an artillery piece erected by Kiliaen Van Rensselaer to charge a tariff on passing ships in the 1660’s. It was also the spot where I kissed my first girlfriend looking at the Hudson from the cliffs at sunset in 2001. I floated on and rowed, and when I arrived at Nil’s house he was out in his yard with a camera recording my arrival at 1:50 p.m.. I tied up The Mother of Inventions next to Assiduity, and then I walked up the hill to my parent’s house and slept for four hours.

When Rob showed up at 8 p.m. that evening we made a few repairs. We organized our supplies each into one canoe. Rob brought some 2×2s to strengthen the oars which were a bit flimsy. He brought more rope because we’d used all of ours in lashing. He brought more food, and a small tent we could sleep in, which to me was the best improvement possible. By that point my back and shoulders were very sore. My left hand had bad blisters on it, my right had regular ones. But Rob also brought a pair of rowing gloves for me that would come in handy. We met a few friends at Shady Harbor for a drink and shoved off into the night at 10:30.

This was the most beautiful night of the trip. There was no wind, an anomaly on the Hudson. In New Baltimore there is no city glow to diminish the brilliance of the celestial sky, and the moon had not yet risen. Save for our navigation lights and a house here and there ashore, the only exception to the pitch darkness were the blinking buoys and the millions of stars.

“There is the milky way,” said Rob pointing to a concentration of tiny dots that traverse the center of the sky.

“I never knew what that was,” I said. Then Rob pointed out the constellation Leo. “That’s a lion, right?” I asked.

“Yeah. What amazes me is that these ancient cultures picked out these shapes and agreed on them. I mean, that’s a lion? That is kind of a stretch. Orion? I mean its there once you see it but how did they ever some up with such things? That tiny group there is the seven sisters.”

“I always thought that was the little dipper,” I said. We floated in silence for a moment. “It’s funny,” I said. “You kind of always picture the Indians and any other ancient culture as barely scraping by for an existence, spending all of their time scrounging for food and stuff. But right now we are doing exactly what mankind has done for millennia: look at the night sky and wonder at it. And it is extremely enjoyable. I wonder if it was more impressive to them, who couldn’t understand it, or to us, who understand the universe and still are awed by it.”

“We think we understand the universe,” Rob said.

“True.”

We paddled on and passed Rattlesnake and Coxsackie Islands, where we’d tied up the first night of our first trip on the Crablegs in 2006. I took a nap as Rob kept us straight. We passed Bronck Island where we spent a tide on the Excelsior expedition in 2008. As the tide went out a thick fog rolled in. First the stars disappeared and then we could see ourselves entering a wall of cloud. It became so thick it was like we were in a dream or we were crossing the river Styx into Hades. We found a small cove by an old mill and dock from a century ago, all decayed now and covered in vines and leaves. We slept under the early morning sky and we were very happy with our progress.

Saturday, Day 3

We woke up and got moving at 11:00 am Saturday morning. We stretched and marveled that we felt “100 percent.” Rather than only packing beer and Nutrigrain Bars as I had done the year before, Rob and I made a concerted effort to remain healthy. After all, we were the engines for our boat, why shouldn’t we maintain ourselves? We’d brought Gatorade and water, meat, pop tarts, snacks, coffee-we had enough food to make normal meals on a Coleman stove, and that would turn out to be clutch. It would prevent the kind of decay of morale that set in on the very first night of the trips on previous years.

We set off into the hot afternoon sun. Rob donned long pants and long sleeves, with lots of sunblock, while I worked on my tan. I sweated buckets out there. In the hot afternoon the sun hit you from above or it hit the water and refracted onto you from below. We were passed by a couple who have built their own sort of raft atop metal pontoons. But theirs is a mobile concession stand propelled by a gasoline motor, on which they sell “River Dogs.” Their boat is complete with a picnic table and benches at the bow. They were on their way to Catskill when they passed us, and they gave us each a beer, a bottle of water and an ice cream sandwich, which we devoured. Then we passed Middle Ground Flats, a string of islands and shallows that separate Hudson on the east and Athens on the west side of the river. It was here in 1845 that the steamship the Swallow ran aground in a snow squall, with loss of life. Here I spotted the blue sailboat of the man with the white hair I had met the previous day at Schodack Island State Park. From across the water I heard my name being spoken, so we paddled across to him and wished each other well. After the Hudson Light House we passed the buoy where the first raft had sunk, and below that near the power lines we spotted a strange looking raft propelled by two rowers. They looked like they were struggling near the shore.

“Let’s overtake them!” I shouted to Rob, proud of our raft’s superior agility. We paddled toward them and shouted “Ahoy!” The boat was piloted by a father and son. It was made of floating foam with a platform atop and lattice work for railings. They were contestants in the annual Wacky Raft Race from Athens to Catskill the next day, and they were practicing.

“She’s named the Independence,” said the father, pointing to a ‘76 flag they had flying above them. “We wanted to do something historical since it is the 400 year celebration and all.” We wished each other a safe journey and parted.

As we approached the Rip Van Winkle Bridge the water began to get low. For the hell of it, and to cool off, I tied a line around my life jacket and jumped in the water. I swam on my back and jerked us forward with each stroke. Then I found I could just touch the bottom and propelled us by making long leaps as though on the moon. When we got under the bridge we paddled again, staying clear of a barge passing between two pillars on its way north. Then we rowed to Dutchman’s Landing on the north side of Catskill Point, anchored our line in the mucky waters where we had watched the Wacky Raft Race in 2008, pitched a tent, fried some steaks which we ate with our hands and teeth, drank a beer, and slept for four hours.

We set sail again that night at 10:30, taking advantage of the slack water before it was actually high tide. Before we could get going though, our anchor got caught beneath the water. As you can see, the shore where we stayed was dotted with large rocks, and the line became wrapped around on of these. In the darkness Rob felt around with his foot until he was able to free the line after ten or fifteen minutes of struggle. We tied up for a half an hour only a quarter mile downstream, by the mouth of Catskill Creek, waiting for the tide to change because the wind had picked up and made it difficult to paddle. But then the wind died and we had another beautiful night, passing the creek, the Ramshorn-Livingston Preserve, and the odd Inbocht Bay and Duck Cove–two weirdly circular islands with long piers extending halfway into the river from the west shore. Periodically as we paddled we’d hear the sound of a train horn, then watch a spotlight on the east shore, and then we’d see a six car passenger train fly by. At one point that night we were paddling as a train sped by and a large tanker passed us, and all that motion mixed with the silence and open space under the night sky was awe inspiring. Then we spotted the Saugerties Light house, a single white blinking light in the darkness. We passed this, our goal for the tide, and paddled another mile and a half south to Cruger Island where we pitched Rob’s tent right on the deck, and fell asleep around 5:30 a.m.

Sunday, Day 4

We were very happy with our progress on Sunday. We were a full day ahead of schedule, but that was about to change. When we set sail on Sunday morning a periodic wind made it difficult to paddle. By now we had been paddling twelve hours a day for three days, and our arms and shoulders were sore. Nonetheless we had been able to rest and let the tide propel us now and then. But starting Sunday that luxury evaporated. Now, if we wanted to move forward we had to paddle and if we rested we watched our progress fade and we’d get pushed backwards. The Mother of Inventions only sat about four inches in the water, so the tide had no effect if there was wind. That meant that we would really benefit from a north wind if one were to materialize, but in the meantime we had to fight for every inch. In order to rest that afternoon we piloted ourselves into a sea of floating lilipads where the wind would not be able to push us back for a few minutes.

The wind limited our progress so that we were only a few miles south and the tide was nearly over. We were in sight of the Kingston-Rhinecliff bridge where on the second raft trip a south wind had trapped us for four days before forcing us to give up the trip. I was determined not to let that happen this time. I put a rope around my life jacket and pulled us through the waist deep shallows and floating grass. At first my legs ached, but then I leaned myself forward and fell into each step. The water was shallow enough that I could wade through the muck right under the center span of the bridge. I got a little skeeved out as I approached the bridge, my feet sinking to my calves with each muddy step. I started thinking about the things that were on the river bottom and worried I would step on a piece of broken glass thrown from the bridge. Then my mind got distracted and I thought what if I step on like, an over-turned car or a body? I tried to put that thought out of my mind. Once we were past the bridge I hopped back aboard and we paddled again. But now the wind was really picking up. We wanted to make it to Kingston just a mile or so downstream, but we couldn’t. We got as far as a little pebble beach a quarter mile downriver and were forced to land there. By then the wind was really whipping, so we ate a meal and pitched a tent while we waited for the next tide.

It was dark when it was time to set sail again, and the wind had not lessened. This forced us to change our plan some. Normally we floated in the middle of the river where the current is strongest. But now we were forced to make tactical choices based on the weather and terrain. It was necessary to paddle along the west shore where we were protected from the south wind by the Kingston peninsula. Nonetheless when we stopped to tighten our rowing gloves or drink a bottle of water we lost ground. We nearly exhausted ourselves just getting to Kingston a mile downstream. Then to get around Kingston Point we had to paddle to the middle of the river, then we rowed hard to cross to the east shore where we would be protected from the south wind by Sturgeon Point. Then it was back across the river again because of a bend, Hemlock Point, and then back to the east shore again as we passed the Esopus light house. From there we hugged the east shore, finally coming alongside Esopus Island where we had been forced to stay for three days in 2008. There we tied up and anchored. It was a great comfort to have Rob’s tent and know that when we were exhausted we could go to sleep without being eaten alive by mosquitoes.

Monday, Day 5

By Monday morning we were in sight of the Mid Hudson Bridge at Poughkeepsie which marks roughly halfway to our goal. It is about 75 miles south of Albany. But now the weather changed permanently for the worse. It was still in the nineties in the afternoon and we were sweating profusely. Even I wore long pants and a white jacket now because I had been scorched by the sun, which I began referring to as the Tyrant of the Afternoon. But the wind was the prime antagonist. We were forced now not only to hug the shore, making our trip longer because we had to meander, but we were forced into making short sprints to spots and then to hold ourselves via an oar to the shore to prevent us sliding backwards while we rested. The first place we stopped that morning was in Hyde Park where we met a family out for a morning trip to the river. A man in a vegan shirt saw us land and he and his two young boys came over to the pebble beach where we rested. The boys were interested in the boat and the trip. They asked “are you on the internet?” and when I said yes one of them said, “wow, are you famous?” and I said “no.” “Will you be famous if you make it where you’re going?” he asked, and we told him we should take things one step at a time. Then he said “wow you have pop tarts!” We took a picture of their family for them, and they took a picture of the boys on the boat, then we set off for another sprint.

Now we made it a little ways down stream. It is here that the river begins to be straddled on either side by railroads with no way to get in or out of the water except a marina here and there. On the east shore Amtrack and Metro North have their passenger lines, while the west shore is dominated by freight. At our first opportunity we rested at a dock built in 1912 by an abandoned rail station. As we were leaving from there a man and his silent female companion motored up next to us and he talked incessantly.

“Wow thats a great boat, okay, okay. I saw these two kids who converted a small sailboat into a sculling boat, okay, and they are rowing from New York to Florida, okay, okay and they make 30 miles a day they said.”

“That is crazy,” I said. “How will they counteract the ocean currents? Did they bring a line long enough to anchor in the sea?”

“I don’t know but they said they moved along well. This is great though, your boat. Okay, you know, it is just great this boat you have built.”

“Thanks,” I said as we paddled away.

“Pray for our country guys because we’re in trouble. Obama and Bush are part of the same criminal cartel. This country is going to hell in a hand basket, okay, okay.” We rode on in silence as the guy kept talking about random things that did not follow from what he said before. Finally he motored past us and almost as an afterthought he shouted back “Go to Rogers’ Point. The marina on the next bend. They’ll take care of you, okay. Umm, free food!”

“Thanks,” we said.

We did stop at that marina because we needed a place to rest as we fought the wind. Our suspicions were confirmed: the guy was a nutcase. Nobody gave us food at that marina. They had a soda machine that was out of every kind of soda except Sprite, and they were out of ice. Later the man and his silent female companion passed us coming back upstream and he shouted something we couldn’t understand and laughed to himself. I guess it takes all kinds of people to make up a world.

Next we stopped on the shore by a bunch of big boulders by the railroad tracks. We were making no progress in the headwind. Yet we could see the Mid Hudson Bridge tantalizingly close. In frustration I grabbed a hundred foot line and went to shore. There I started climbing over the sharp, slippery, mud-covered rocks and pulling the boat along while Rob used a pole to keep us from grounding out. We moved at a snail’s pace, but we moved, and that was the important part. The most demoralizing thing on these trips is to stay still. As I pulled the boat from the shore, cutting up my feet because I only had sandals and these had holes in the soles, I shouted to Rob, “when I said I wanted to take a raft to Manhattan, I meant I wanted to ride on it, not pull it along with me as I walk and swim. Boo.”

After a while the wind died a little and let us paddle again, and we passed the Marist and Vassar rowing docks just north of Poughkeepsie. There we decided to dock for the tide, and we called Rob’s father who brought us some supplies. He even stayed with the boat while we went to town in his car and ate some McDonald’s. The cold air conditioning in his car felt like some luxury only a king might have. Then we took a nap and waited for the next tide, which was to come around eleven at night.

Poughkeepsie was the Hell of our previous trip so I was eager to get out of there. We set out that night and made moderate progress at first, passing beneath the railroad bridge which would open that October as the longest pedestrian foot bridge over the Hudson, and then under the Mid Hudson Bridge itself with its colorful glowing lights and its signs high up that say “Life is worth living” followed by a suicide hot line.

Just as we were passing the bridge we heard voices ashore. There was a tall cliff there and looking up we saw a half dozen kids drinking atop it. They shouted something down to us and we shouted back. They were friendly and asked us about the boat. Then they asked us if we wanted a beer and we shouted “yes!” So they threw us down two Pabst Blue Ribbons. These landed in the water with a big clunk and we had to paddle to them and grab them from the water. That was fun. The cans got mangled from the force of the water, and I opened mine and it sprayed everywhere. We bid them farewell and they reiterated for us, “This is Poughkeepsie! Po-town!” with pride. Rob took a sip of his beer when we were a ways away.

“What blue ribbon did this beer win? The East Chenengo county fair?”

“Yeah, it beat out mud and swamp water which placed second and third, respectively.”

As we paddled on we made it past a little outcropping where a “discharge facility” is located, whatever that means. Periodically a siren would sound and the water would bubble beneath the plant.

“Let’s give that a wide berth,” said Rob.

When we were past that plant I told him, “we are now further than we have ever been. This is where I gave up last year and walked back toward Poughkeepsie on the railroad tracks. Now we are in unfamiliar territory.” We only made it a little farther, to a cove on the east bank just downstream. I knew the coves were there, having seen similar coves upstream the previous year. Here we tied up to shore and slept for the night.

Tuesday, Day 6

All night the wind pounded us. We felt and heard the sound of the boat grinding on the shore rocks. In the morning we got up around 10 a.m. but we had not slept well because of the noise and anxiety. That morning it seemed that the wind was coming from the east so we tried to sail. But by trying for two modes of propulsion with our boat (rowing and sailing) we limited the effectiveness of either method. We could make no progress sailing, and we actually got blown backwards. When we made it to shore, every second losing ground, we were exactly at the spot where I abandoned the 2008 Excelsior boat. I scanned the shore to see if there were any remnants of that boat, but I could not find any.

“Well, we’re no longer further along than we have ever been,” I said. We anchored and rested for a half hour before we decided to make a temporary tactical retreat. We allowed the wind to move us back upstream a quarter mile, onto a beach where at least we could wait out the wind on shore. We lost a whole tide that afternoon and we were no longer ahead of schedule. For twelve hours we slept, walked around the railroad tracks, ate and talked. Trying to sleep in the tent in the afternoon heat was like trying to cool off in a greenhouse. I listened to the weather report and was hopeful because there was broadcast a storm from the east that night, and if that came and we got a whole night of sailing we might really make some progress. However that night the wind did not change and we were only able to make it a mile or so downstream. It was good just to get away from the bad luck spot we were in and be back in a position where we felt we were further along than ever before. We made it just past a mining facility with four barges moored to the shore and big tractors and bulldozers doing work in the night. We threw an anchor and slept just south of that facility in the wee hours of Wednesday.

Wednesday, Day 7

Morale was still high on Wednesday but a realization was setting in that we might not make it to Manhattan. We had fallen a day behind schedule and every weather broadcast brought bad news about the constant southern wind. In an attempt to tack Wednesday morning our rudder fell off; after that if we got the opportunity to sail we’d have to make do using a paddle as a rudder, which would be difficult to hold straight while watching out for a swinging boom. I was contemplating asking someone to bring down the electric trolling motor and batteries, which would give us 12 miles of propulsion before they died, because that would put us back within striking distance of our objective. But as it was we were only able to paddle to the town of Wappinger in Dutchess county by the end of that tide, maybe four miles downstream. We landed in the best spot we could find, a pile of rocks by some railroad tracks that was close to route 9D. There, Rob’s father again met us with ice, Gatorade and other supplies we needed to fix some things on the raft. We couldn’t bring a lot of heavy supplies in there, and if we had used the motor we would have been ticketed for having an unregistered vessel, as happened to me in 2007. Rob’s canoe was taking on a few gallons of water by now so his father brought a bailing device made of a Clorox bottle and that worked reasonably well. I put the tent up on the boat to try and sleep in the evening, when the bugs started biting, while Rob walked along the road to town to find a socket to charge his cell phone. The wind kept blowing from the south. So passed Wednesday with little progress again.

Thursday, Day 8

At 1:30 a.m. on Thursday morning we set out from Wappinger. The wind had died a little but our best bet was still to hug the shore by Chelsea before making a break for Newburgh and the bridges there. Even though the wind died the water was in a state of motion south to north against the tide. We realized that the water itself, having been whipped in that direction for days, was now being carried north by inertia even when the wind ceased and the current moved against it beneath. Finally the wind died completely and the waters calmed as we approached Newburgh. The bridge transformed before our eyes from a string of white lights to a huge superstructure. As we paddled to it in the night huge sparks of flame fell from the bridge down into the water below. As we got closer we saw trucks and men working with blow torches riveting the metal high above us. This was at 3:30 a.m.. Later we found out a woman had jumped from the bridge to her death in the river at 4 a.m., only a half hour later. What if we had seen her jump? We passed the bridges and got a quarter mile down stream, and the the current moved us. For the first time in five days we could stop paddling without losing ground. As the night wore on we crossed Newburgh bay and tried to determine by the lights ahead of us and the map which way the river bent. In the darkness on the water it is very difficult to tell what is what. We made our way around Bannerman Island–you might know this island if you take the train from Poughkeepsie to New York. It looks like a castle that had a couple of hand grenades thrown into it. Actually, it was an armory built by a Scottish American in the early 1900’s. Bannerman bought up a bunch of surplus war supplies from the Spanish American War and used the island as an armory. The deep water in the channel allowed big boats to come right up to the island. That was until an explosion ruined the place. Now Bannerman Island is one more vine-covered asterisk of history. Its Indian name was Pollepel Island. Anyway just when we passed this island and rounded Breakneck Point the wind smashed into us again and we had all we could do to paddle to shore without being thrown backwards. In front of us we could see the lights of West Point, which we hoped to pass that afternoon. But for the time being we got close enough to the shore to drop an anchor and we ran a redundant line to a tree just in case. Then we tried to sleep atop the boat, which pitched up and down as though it was moving ten miles an hour through the water — because by staying still it was moving that fast relative to the waves– and that made it very difficult to sleep.

That tide had ended around 6 a.m., so by noontime the tide was high again and it was time to try to set sail. But the waves were still white capping north and any attempt to paddle into it would have resulted in us being blown back. So we sat there. I took a picture of our flags blowing in the wrong direction.

Most of the time the wind made the flags into hard rectangles pointing northward. Then all of a sudden as we sat huddled in the tent trying to generate a plan we felt a crash. We jumped out to look around and saw ourselves crashing on the shore rocks. We had rode on the anchor all night and that broke the anchor line. Luckily our shore line held, but now we had nothing to prevent us from crashing on the rocks. We tried to prop poles up to hold us off the shore but that did not work. We threw rubber fenders over the side but that didn’t work either. The mast got caught up in some overhanging trees and that helped a little.

“This sucks,” I said.

“I hate to go backwards but this is a terrible position to spend a tide,” Rob said. Nonetheless we decided to wait out the wind and see if it died before the tide was over. Unfortunately by the time the tide was over the boat had become grounded on rocks, so we could not even if we wanted to.

We tried to slide the boat off the rocks but it made a screeching, cutting sound. Now it was about four in the afternoon and we knew we couldn’t go anywhere for at least ten hours. So we walked ashore and found a path that led to the base of a cliff with a bunch of broken glass. We followed it in another direction and found an old building, covered in vines, like a temple in an Aztec jungle, which read “New York City Water Supply.” Every window in the building was cemented over and there were big holes where someone had tried to smash through. The whole place was covered in graffiti.

“Must be an old aqueduct,” Rob said. Then we found another path that led through the cliffs and we found an outcropping where we could look out over the water. We sat there for a little while, then made our way back to the boat. We decided the only thing to do was to build a fire out of driftwood, cook the leftover chicken breasts, and get drunk. We built a fire and a grate of sticks which we put two chickens breasts atop. Rob found a wooden sign that said “bridge DANGER construction” which we put on top of a couple of rocks for a table. We sat on our life jackets and leaned against logs. Rob had a bottle of rum and I had a bottle of whiskey, and we sat there staring across the river until one of us would say, “To Christopher Columbus! There was a man!” and drinking from the bottle.

“Wait, I meant to say, ‘To Henry Hudson, there was a man!’” we drank again. “You know, Hudson wasn’t successful in his trip either. He was trying to find the northwest passage.”

“Yeah and he made more than one trip. He was even less successful in Hudson Bay, when his crew put him in a life boat and said ’see ya!’ What a way to go.”

“Hey, to Robert Juet, Hudson’s first mate!” I lifted my bottle. “There was a man!”

“To Robert Juet!” Rob shouted, and we drank. Rob gazed downstream toward West Point. “You know, it crazy to think that soldiers in the Revolutionary War probably camped right here where we are.”

“To the soldiers of the Revolutionary War!” I said. “There were some men.”

“To the soldiers of the Revolutionary War,” Rob said, and we drank. This kept up for some time. Then we ate our chickens as it became dark and the tide started to come back in. We went aboard the boat and napped in the tent as she rested on rocks. That night, when the tide had put out our fire and covered our camp, the wind did not die. In fact it blew exactly as it had blown all day and the previous night, like we were watching a video loop of a south wind. So we couldn’t go anywhere again but tried to sleep as the boat was being slammed all over the place.

“Dude do you want to try and paddle someplace, any place?” Rob said at three in the morning. “I can’t sleep like this it is driving me crazy.”

“I know,” I said, “I can’t sleep either, but where are we going to go? We can’t go downstream where we want to go. We don’t have an anchor line to avoid rocks. We’ll be in just the same position somewhere upstream if we leave now.” So we stayed up through the night. It was like trying to sleep on a bucking horse.

Friday, Day 9

When we wandered out of the tent, having not slept, on Friday morning, and the wind was still blowing from the south at fifteen miles an hour, the question hung in the air as to how long we would sit on the shore before admitting defeat. I wanted to wait until Saturday at least. I got up and made a fire again and we had a breakfast of marshmallows.

“You know in the south they call these mallows,” Rob said.

“I thought it was pronounced marshmellows, like because they were mellow,” I said. The quality of our conversation had declined. We mostly moved around each other kind of going through the motions of cleaning the boat, making a camp, eating, but mostly silently and perfunctorily. It sort of felt like you had a fever or had taken medicine that made you drowsy.

“Want to climb those cliffs again?” I said to Rob.

“Not really.”

“Okay. Well I’m going to do that to pass the time.”

So I started off in a bad mood into the woods. I explored the New York City Water Supply building and found a path that lead deeper into the woods. This path led over the railroad tracks and up a steep embankment. I kept following it in my linen pants, sandals and canvas jacket. It meandered further and further in land.

The sun grew strong and I started to sweat as the grade of the path increased dramatically. The path disappeared. Now there were only boulders, some of them spray painted with a white dot. I couldn’t walk but had to climb on my hands and knees over these boulders. I’m not a mountain climber, but as I watched my brown sweaty hand land on this rock, then another, and pull me up, I felt like a man making a trip to see a Tibetan monk high up in the mountains of Asia. I climbed on, sweating buckets, now and again slipping. When the trees would clear I’d find myself on a precipice overlooking West Point to the south all the way up to Pollepel Island and Newburgh to the north. I tried not to look behind me or down. I really wanted to make the top of that mountain, which I had seen years before from a boat and marveled that anyone might climb. The path wandered this way and that, then I lost the trail and just started climbing up the rocks. I figured I just needed to keep going uphill and that would lead me to the top. And when I reached the top, breathing heavy and dripping wet, it was a cathartic experience. I snapped this picture of myself. As you can see, the sun and lack of sleep and bathing had left us pretty haggard.

After I snapped that picture I sat down and looked out over everything. I realized that I had jammed a month’s worth of summer vacations into the last nine days. I had paddled, sailed, camped, swam, roasted marshmallows, climbed a mountain. It was pretty obvious that we would not make Manhattan–the south wind was projected to keep up for days and we had to return by the end of the weekend– but that did not seem to matter. We had had a great trip, I had met all kinds of interesting people through trying, if not success, and now I had two boats Assiduity and The Mother of Inventions. I managed to have a story I wrote published in Boating on the Hudson Magazine, which was a goal of mine for years. So there is a lot to look forward to, all as a result of determination.

I felt great as I climbed down the mountain. I met Rob who was sitting on the shore looking out over the river. We decided to give the river until the end of the night to see if the weather changed. We tried to sleep in the tent but it was hot and we were crashing on rocks because we didn’t have the anchor. Then we changed our minds and thought, “look at this wind. If we spent 12 hours sailing north instead of south we’d be almost home and we could show people the effect of the wind.” So we thought about turning around and sailing north, when snap! the rigging on the sail broke and the mast fell over.

Now with no mast and no rudder we couldn’t sail. Worse, the wind seemed to be picking up. When I turned on my phone I had text messages and voicemails about a hurricane from the south and some cold front which was dousing Albany and moving toward us. So I called John Vargo, the editor of Boating on the Hudson, who told me that if I needed help on this trip to give him a call. He told me that he had already asked Lex Filipowski, whom I had talked to briefly by email before the trip, to come out and tow me. That was fortunate because the sky was turning dark and the whitecaps were increasing on the water. Lex called and told us he was leaving from Newburgh and he would tow us to Cold Spring a mile down river. He would be at our position in half an hour. So Rob and I made ready two tow lines from the front of each of our canoes, packed everything down so the wind wouldn’t blow it off the deck, and when we saw Lex’s boat approaching we paddled out to the middle of the river so he wouldn’t bottom out on the rocks near shore.

In the middle of the river we shouted over the sound of the wind to Lex that we had two tow lines we could throw him. He and his son Liam grabbed the lines and secured them to the stern cleats on Lex’s boat, and he began to throttle downstream. First we went very slowly because Lex did not want to splash us. But then I saw him point to the sky behind us and looking back it appeared to be nighttime just a mile upriver. Then Lex opened up the throttle some and we got spray all over us as he tried to beat the storm to Cold Spring.

Now the blackness gained on us, accented by white flashes, and everyone was nervous. From behind us pleasure boats overtook us in their effort to beat the storm to the harbor. But we could only go so fast. We watched a cloud of rain make everything upstream disappear. Then we felt a shock wave of cold air that made us shiver, and a moment later, big cold drops began to fall. Lex sped up now as the harbor was in sight, nearly sending the back of our raft underwater. We feared the tow might rip the boat apart but the lashings held. Now it turned to a downpour with heavy waves and hard wind and rain, with waves moving north and south at the same time and making the water unpredictable and boiling. As we motored into the harbor people were running on the docks to any shelter the could find, and the dock master there, who had been alerted that we’d be coming, shouted “are you crazy! What are you doing out there!” Lex motored toward the shore, then untied our tow lines so our momentum and our paddles would carry us to a beach while he docked. The sky opened up and flooded everything as we ran to a pavilion for cover. Five minutes later a bolt of lightning thick as a telephone pole shot from the sky and made everyone cover their ears. It struck a mooring buoy not ten feet from where we had been just a few minutes before.

When the storm subsided Lex and his son walked us to town so we could get a slice of pizza while we waited for my father to show up with his truck. Then we took The Mother of Inventions apart piece by piece and stacked her parts along a picket fence at Cold Springs Marina. Two hours later my parent’s arrived and we loaded up the truck. The final trip of The Mother of Inventions was at 70 miles an hour up the thruway back to New Baltimore.

Epilogue:

After failing a fifth time to reach Manhattan I returned home to New Baltimore. Assiduity was still tied up in Nils Backlund’s slip. I had the boat towed behind my friend’s pleasure boat from New Baltimore to Campbell Island, where the owner said I could tie up my vessel indefinitely.

It took almost five hours to tow the boat the seven miles upstream, because she was so heavy. I tied up the boat on the island, hoping she would not be destroyed by vandals as had happened to The Manhattan Project. It made me nervous to just tie Assiduity up to the river bank but there was no where else I could keep her.

A month later disaster struck. During high tide one night, Assiduity floated up onto an embankment. When the tide went out, her starboard side rested on the river bank, while nothing but descending water supported her port. When the tide ebbed, she capsized. When I came to check on her (as I did daily from Henry Hudson Park across the river through a pair of binoculars), I saw that her bridge was swept away. I canoed over to her. The cabin was destroyed. All the electronics equipment was at the bottom of the river. All the tools were sunk, as was the engine, the wood stove, the batteries and everything else except the base of the boat. As I stood on the skeleton a barge passed and I saw where the equipment had gone: the barge sucked all the water from the west shore into the channel, exposing ten more feet of beach, before sending all the water back again in a big wave after the barge passed. So anything that had sank to the river bottom had floated away or been sucked into the channel…just like every other artifact that lined the Hudson for thousands of years.

At times I felt that this trip was an albatross. But soon I hope to check “build craft and float to New York City” off of my list of things to do. Then this trip will have been a defining adventure. Maybe some day I will be telling this story to my grandchildren as they wiggle and yawn and incessantly send holographs of themselves to their friends on Saturn. And this will all be like a children’s story from long ago, or the flash of a firefly on a summer night.