After the second trip I sat around brooding for a couple of weeks. Prior to the demise of the Crablegs 2.0 I was optimistic that, if you put enough effort and time into something, you could accomplish it out of a shear strength of will. After the second disaster, I told my friend Jess, “you need more than enthusiasm to succeed, I guess. You also need knowledge that is applicable to your goal and the challenges in the way of achieving it.”
A good portion of the motivation for the first two rafts was a desire to prove to my girlfriend that I wasn’t full of hot air; that I was sincere in saying I would build a boat to float to Manhattan. Also the desire was there to prove the same to my friends and family. After the second trip my relationship with my girlfriend ended sourly, my car died, my computer died, and I moved to an apartment that looked like something from Berlin in April ‘45. I had to borrow money from five friends and about all of my paycheck went to rent or paying them back. All of my close friends had the post-college blues. Thats the syndrome where you get broken up by your girlfriend of a couple years and she’s dating someone else a month later while you’re hitting the sauce every night and wondering why you spent thousands of dollars to be broke, unemployed and alone.
I saved a couple hundred bucks painting walls and took off to try and hitchhike to New Orleans. I didn’t make it there–no one picks up hitchhikers anymore, at least in the northeast. But I did get to meet all kinds of interesting people in Delaware, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Brooklyn and Maryland. In Virginia Beach I ran out of money and sat on a beach one night, listening to the sound of the surf and watching the stars. It hit me then that a man can’t expect other people to see through his sorry state to the potential he has inside. It is just unreasonable to expect others to think, “wow this guy hasn’t shaved in a couple of days, has a no money, no plan for the future…but he has potential!” It might be true but you can’t expect people to see it. After that night I couldn’t wait to come back and get working again, writing, and building the third raft. I planted a trash can in the middle of my apartment and my roommate and I cleaned for days, painted, organized. I got a job tutoring and cutting wood and paid off all my bills. And by hook or by crook, I was going to make it to Manhattan.
The mission took on a new sense of importance. It was the thing to do. It was the only thing to do, and any task that impeded the project would be postponed or terminated.
First, I drew up a new plan. The “Manhattan Project,” as it was to be called, would have a cabin big enough to sleep in, with screened-in windows to protect us from horseflies. It would float on foam, instead of barrels, so it couldn’t sink and could be shaped into pontoons to be more hydrodynamic. It would have a fifteen-foot mast so we could sail when the wind was blowing in the right direction, and it would have an electric trolling motor charged off of a solar system beforehand which would give us twenty miles of progress before the batteries died.
This was a big boat and I’d need a crew to help me steer it. The major motivating event came when, after I’d gotten two docks from the Boat House and started building the raft, Rob agreed to join the project once again as navigator. Rob has a wealth of practical knowledge in areas like math, knot tying, and sailing, which I lack. Meanwhile I try and provide the driving force without getting caught up in details. We were helped out by our raftmate from the Crablegs, Justin Reuter, as well as Carmine Berghela. In the meantime I got five free books from the Albany Library about seamanship, costal navigation, and the practical skills of a deckhand.
Rob got the idea to make a triangle sail instead of a square sail, and to put it on a jib (a pole connected to the mast by a hinge and attached to the bottom of the sail) so we could tack and benefit from sideways winds.
We got the thing built and had to have our buddy “borrow” a crane from his job and load the boat onto my uncle’s trailer. It was so heavy it looked like it would break the axles. It must have weighed more than 2000 pounds. As we drove at three miles an hour to the boat launch at Coeyman’s Marina, Justin had to scale the mast with a stick in his hand and push up power lines so we could pass underneath. At one point a man came out of his house screaming and threatening to call the cops if we didn’t get “this, this, this, monstrosity out of here!” and we had to take a handsaw and cut off half the mast so we wouldn’t hit any more lines.
After much toil we got her in the water.
The good thing was that the boat floated great and we had a week to test her out before the launch. The bad thing was that now we had a giant liability anchored unguarded in hostile waters. First, during a storm one night, the boat got washed up onto a brick pile by an old factory north of Coeymans. When we took a canoe to work on the boat we found her fifteen feet ashore and we worried the water wouldn’t rise high enough again to dislodge her. But the next day I came back in the morning and using high tide and a system of levers I got her floating. I anchored The Manhattan Project downstream next to a dyke which would prevent beaching again. But this time the police came in the night, left a note that we had to move the boat or they would towed it, and they tied it to a tree. Unfortunately when the tide went out (before we’d seen what they’d done) the boat, tied to a branch at high tide, was lifted out of the water and broke a piece off our stern before snapping the tree’s limb and bringing it down on the cabin, damaging that too. So we brought the boat downstream a couple of miles to Cornell Park in New Baltimore, and there someone cut our lines and set the boat adrift in the river. I came back with a canoe and brought her back to shore and tied her up again, but later the same day they or someone else cut the lines again, and it was only through a frantic effort that we canoed out to the drifting raft and got her under our control just before it was to smash into the dozens of expensive yachts at the Shady Harbor Marina.
Our plan was to leave from Alive At Five on Thursday, June 28th, 2007. My friend Jess’ father had a fishing boat and he agreed to tow me from New Baltimore to Albany the day before the launch. I think when he saw the size of The Manhattan Project he had second thoughts. I transferred to his boat and we tied up the raft and he started towing me at about five miles an hour. Even at that slow speed the raft had waves crashing over the deck, while the weight of the thing kept dragging Jess’ father’s boat on a tangent off course. As we gurgled past Coeymans Marina the skies darkened to a sickening brown-gray. Jess snapped this photo with her poloroid:
It so happened that three storms converged on our location that day from the north, south and west, and sent little vortexes down the river. All at once the water got chopped up into triangle slices and gusts of wind picked up items on the deck and sent them overboard. It became very dangerous even to be on the river, let alone towing a 2000 pound raft. In order to allow Jess and her father to get back to Coeymans quickly, I agreed to untie the raft in a natural, uninhabited harbor on the east side of the river. I untied the raft just as a wave sent the boat lurching forward. Holding the weight of the raft in my hand, I got jerked overboard and ruined my cell phone. But the water was shallow enough that I could wade to shore, so I shouted for Jess’ father to get out of the area before the wind blew him too close to shore and made him bottom out. I tied up to a tree and got inside the raft to wait out the storm, drenched.
That night when the storm passed I had become beached again. When high tide came it was about ten at night, and I knew the only way I’d make it to Alive at Five the next day would be to try and pilot the boat alone upstream that night. I made use of the trolling motor and a nice southerly (from south to north) wind to make it to Henry Hudson Park that night at about three in the morning.
The next day I tried to make it north to Albany, about ten miles away, but the wind had changed and prevented much progress. My watch had gotten ruined when I fell overboard, but by my estimation, by about three p.m. I was only about three miles upstream. After an hour more I was desperate to get to Albany. I stuck a red tee-shirt to an oar and tried to flag down boats but no one would stop. Frustrated as hell and having not eaten in a day, I laid back on the deck and wondered what I would do. Then an old man in a tiny bass boat showed up and I offered him $100 to tow me to Albany. He declined the money but said he’d tow me anyway, and as we passed the Normanskill Creek and I could smell the trashy smell of the Port and see the outline of Corning Tower I jumped up and down on the deck and clapped.
The man dropped me off at Alive at Five in front of hundreds of people who moved en mass to see the strange vessel I was on. As I was preparing to take the canoe to shore though, some police came over and wrote me a ticket for having an unregistered vessel. But then I got to shore and about six people bought me beers which my throat absorbed before the liquid hit my stomach. I met my crew and Rob shook my hand firmly and said “I can’t believe you made it. No one had any idea where you were. We definitely thought the trip was off.” We took a picture and rowed out to the boat where we weighed anchor and rowed downstream to cheers.
I had used all the battery power to get upstream the night before. We also hadn’t had a chance to put any provisions aboard the boat. So we made the decision to tie up the boat in what we thought was a secluded spot on the Normanskill Creek and recharge, resupply, and have a good night’s sleep before setting sail officially on Saturday morning. But when we came back in the morning, finding our way through the woods to the spot we’d tied up, Rob said something that perked my ears.
“Hey, look at this,” he said, picking up a torn American flag from the ground. “We can put this on our boat and have two American flags.” I got a vague sense of distress when he said that, and we doubled speed to the side of the creek.
When we got there the boat was missing. There was a smoking campfire with our melted walkie talkies, our lanterns, and our camping chairs. Across the creek our canoe sat ashore. In the river there floated a poncho and a life jacket, bobbing slowly downstream.
My first thought was that if my boat was smashing against someone’s million dollar yacht, or if some speedboat had crashed into it during the night as it floated unlit, I would be to blame. Of course also I was afraid our trip might be in peril.
We had no choice but to call the police. They showed up and took pictures next to the camp fire with little plastic numbers. There was a uniformed officer as well as a detective. A while later the boat police showed up with our raft in tow. The windows and screens were broken off, the sail was torn, our paddles were snapped in half. When I went aboard I found our duffle bag of clothes missing, as was my book on seamanship, our motors and batteries and, worst of all, a notebook I’d filled with essays, journal entries, and poetry from my trip down the east coast earlier that year.
“Well. The third time is obviously not the charm,” I said bitterly. “This trip is over.”
The police told us we had to remove the boat from the premise because they couldn’t tow it anywhere. The problem was we were at the edge of the woods where there were no roads to bring a truck back. So Rob and I got a mini-keg of beer and spent the next day breaking the boat apart board by board and burning it in a huge bonfire. As black smoke billowed into the sky, Rob said, “so much for helping out the environment with our raft trips.”
Once more I was a captain without a ship or a crew. As I watched six month’s work and two year’s goals go up in smoke, I was also a person without patience.
3 responses so far ↓
1 Mom Trombley // Jun 1, 2009 at 11:55 am
Dallas,
I could not believe how much your mind-set had sunk as you relayed the story of what had happened and I tried to process what you were saying. I knew of no words that would console you as I listened in disbelief to what you were saying. The mere thought that someone would derive pleasure from distroying the hard work and dreams of someone else not only made me sad for you, but angered me beyond belief. Knowing how hard you had worked on this, and your determination to succeed, frightened me that now you had to distroy what was left. I can honestly say, this was the only time I was truly afraid for you and didn’t want you to be alone. My stomach remained in knots until I heard from you later that evening, a little tipsy but in better spirits. Thank God for your friends as they provided a blanket of support for both you and Rob. When you announced that you were not going to try again, I knew that your faith in the human race had been shaken. Honestly, I quite agreed, but decided to keep that thought to myself as my heart ached for you.
2 Joseph // Aug 18, 2009 at 2:04 pm
What bastards!
3 Dan Vining // Aug 30, 2009 at 5:19 pm
“We can put this on our boat and have two American flags.”
That sounds like something I would say right before a disaster. I’m getting a better sense of the enormity of this whole adventure, now.
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