Hudson Raft Project

Rob and Justin, the crew of the Crablegs, did not want 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 built the raft myself and two weeks before the launch I met 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 they would walk to Salisbury by that point, they promised. I met Scott and Josh in Connecticut and they came back and helped me finish the raft.

As soon as we put the raft in the water the paddle wheel broke. So by the first night we were back to having only a floating platform with no way to steer or propel ourselves. 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. Next 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 jumped in the river. We ran out of food and had to walk around some county roads in the middle of nowhere near Red Hook 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 with all our strength we could make a little progress, inches. We floated for two days near Ulster Landing with the same beach on the east shore and the same tree on the west. The Kingston-Rhinecliff Bridge rose from the river four miles downstream, teasing us to reach her.

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 to New York. 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.

This time I had tried as hard as I could to make it to Manhattan–drafting strangers for a crew, building the boat almost unaided, begging for materials from marinas. And wind stopped it all. It does not matter how much you want something, I learned, or how much effort you put into a thing. If you don’t have a good plan or good luck, you’ll just get winded.