Hudson Raft Project

The crew of the Crablegs were disinclined to join me after the debacle of the first expedition, so I had to find a new crew. Actually, every person I knew was disinclined to join me. So I found two guys who were walking the Appalachian Trail. I met them at a party in Vermont and they told me that if I picked them up in Salisbury Connecticut in exactly one week they would join me on the trip. They had no phones but that was where they would walk to by that point. I met Scott and Josh there and they came back and joined me on the trip. 

As soon as we put the raft in the water the paddlewheel broke. So by the very first night we were back to having only a floating platform. I paddled so hard on the first night I fell overboard and lost my cell phone and binoculars. In a rainstorm a few days later we got blown out to the center of the river and had to be towed to shore by a good samaritan. In the process of being towed, waves broke over our deck and washed away our map and tide chart. We had three days of over 100 degree weather, but it didn’t feel very hot because the wind continually blew at us and we could jump in the river. We ran out of food and had to walk around some county roads in the middle of nowhere before we found a farmer’s market and got some corn on the cob and apples to eat. But the wind kept blowing north. It blew so hard it blew us backwards. If we paddled we could make a little progress, but it was inches. We floated for two days near Red Hook with the same beach on the east shore and the same tree on the west. 

During the days the horseflies bit incessantly, brought out by the hot weather. It was like something biblical. To escape them while we docked during flood tides we sat in the water up to our necks. At night we had a camp fire and got drunk, and when we tried to make it south the next tide, the wind was still a wall preventing our passage. After ten days we were not yet halfway there. In a very depressed mood I called my parents to pick us up, hungry, burnt, bitten and dispirited. 

The next day I dropped off Scott and Josh in Salisbury Connecticut again so they could continue their trip to Georgia. I was once more a captain without a crew or a ship.