We paddled out from East Patchouge to Watch Hill then over
to Davis Park for a drink at the Casino. It’s
very definitely the “shoulder season” out here and not so many people around.
We were VERY lucky with the weather this weekend. It was
supposed to be really bad, and rained
very hard all day on Friday, all day throughout the city and Long Island, but I
had planned to go to a friend’s house
for Saturday and Sunday on the Island, so I went anyway, and it didn't rain at all, a bit overcast, basically perfect paddling weather.
We didn’t get on the water until about 15:15 and got over to
Watch Hill in an hour. I wanted to go to
the bar there, but held-off until we went to the Casino in Davis Park, which I had been promised was "much better".
The bar really reminded us of a place in Metuchick RI
out on the beach where we had been after a kayak class. There was bit of surf,
but we had walked through the island from the bay side so we didn’t have to
deal. When we got cold we went inside.
For the 1.5 hours we were there these guys were tuning up
for a “show” but they never started playing. Just test 1 2 3 4 and a bit of
wasted away in Margaritaville we never heard and actual song.
We paddled back across the bay into a beautiful sunset.
We
hadn’t seen the sun all day, just the sunset. It never rained on us, but we saw
and incredible rainbow, and it was the first time I saw an entire rainbow. It
started from the mainland of Long Island and
went all the over to the South of Fire Island, and you could see both halves of
it, I have never seen that before, and maybe never will again. Here are the 2 halves; it took up almost the entire horizon.
Then it got dark. Very dark.
We were surfing wind waves, and had a very loose compass
course, by the time it was dark we weren’t sure where we going. We reached land,
and decided to go East, when we didn’t find anything after 10 minutes we went
West, then eventually we decided to go back East. After a while, 15 minutes, we
found a familiar landmark and we realized we were very far East near Bellport,
so we went there which is where the kayaks live and took a cab back to the put-in.
Truth: I was cold and had been drinking, so I don’t
remember.
The tides were perfect for an afternoon paddle, high in the harbor was around noon, we got on the water around 2:00PM so we had a nice ride out in the ebb.
There was a good amount of swell and we got some nice rides.
We started off with the smaller waves, and then I foolishly went way over to the East where some big dumping waves were breaking. These waves are actually pretty big, the picture doesn't do it justice...
I got one or two ok rides off of it, then got trashed twice in succession. I drank a bit of water on the first one, even though the water was cold and violent it was still a lot better than worrying about the rocks and reef in PNG. After that I went back to the smaller waves....
The water temp was 68 degrees, and it was overcast, so once I was wet it was a bit chilly. I only had a reed top and and a very light paddling jacket.
We stopped for lunch after about an hour to take a break and have some wine and lunch. Then we paddled back to the car.
There was an amazing view of the sun breaking through the clouds. The pictures were ok, but it was really amazing live.
Truth:
It is disappointing when you expect something and then it isn't there.
I went for a paddle in the Hudson with an Outer Island from New York Kayak Company, I am in their club, so I can take any boat if its available.
I went North to meet-up with some friends from Pier 96, then we went up to Edgewater to have a picnic lunch. I was very lucky to snag a bottle of wine from the deli before we left. They still flaunt the liquor laws when you get out on the fringes in NYC, and 12th Avenue is the fringes...
The river is still filthy from the Hurricane. It looks like chocolate milk, worse than it is even in the spring after the snow melts.
We had a nice relaxing lunch, and I wanted to just lie down for a snooze. These guys were cooking up some kind of crazy soup the whole time we were there. They were very old-school, just a blackened pot, a bunch of driftwood, and all kinds of meat and vegetables, but they did have a corkscrew, so that was really good for us.
After lunch we went across the river then up the Harlem against the tide to catch some friends on a circumnavigation around Manhattan. We found them a few miles in, and had a nice ride with the current back downtown.
I was pretty pooped by the end of the day, and I gave my shoulder a good work out. It continues to get better and better.
We saw a nice sunset, but its clearly not the South Pacific any more...
I went with a bunch of friends to do a swim support for the Stonewall foundation out on Fire Island.
It was a hoot to get out in the water, but I had a bit too much fun the night before so I wasn't feeling completely "fresh" in the morning. Here I am staggering up the beach trying to get ready....
tim vs the morning morning is winning.
this dude was ready to go.
The swim was uneventful. My swimmer was very strong and did a great job. He started in the last section, but passed-up a lot of the other swimmers who had started in earlier heats. I made it to the bloddy marys before most of my friends. I was feeling better after a drink, a bagel, and some medicine.
I need to get some new black paddling gear this looks a little too flowery.
We tooled around some other parts of FI, and went over to another bar in the Pines for a refresh before paddling back to the shore.
My shoulder felt awful by the end of the day, but it felt better the next morning, maybe I just need to work it a bit more. Lifting the boat up at the end of the day was terrible.
Truth: The picture didn't come out and I forgot it....
I joined the New York Kayak Company club and paddled a tide race Xcite out and around to see all the old sites.
I went from Pier 40 to Pier 96, then back down, and across to Valentino Pier to my old Red Hook location.
All the public kayak programs were going really well. I was rushing to get to Red Hook, but of course they didn't need me at all. I bought a T-shirt and the only thing I could do to help was to ride a bike up to staples to make copies of the wiavers for them.
I liked the tide-race, but without surf or shallow water, I couldn't really test it out very much.
My shoulder is getting better and better, but it isn't completely fixed yet.
I went along with Kate to a place on the PNG mainland near the city of Lae called Kamiali a wildlife management area. She had to meet a researcher who was working there, and we had heard so many terrible things about Lae I wanted to see it for myself what all the hubbub, or was the ewwweee?, was about.
It didn’t quite live up to our expectations because we didn’t see any actual crime or dead bodies, but there was definitely an “edge” to the place. Maybe the most noticeable was when we walked around in town by ourselves outside the hotel gates or armored van and people starred at us like we were in a remote village where they don’t get any white people. The crafts for sale on the street were very inexpensive, and I had to keep my eye on Kate around the deeply discounted puppies.
We were met by the airport car service, Guard Dog Security. These guys are a real hoot. They have capitalized on the crime hype. Everybody is so terrified they pay 96Kina for a ride from the airport instead of 20Kina on a PMV. They wear military fatigues and were supposed to be armed, but they weren’t. We gave the guys some biscuits, and if they had guns, I bet they would have let us shoot them if bought them more bullets. They did drive really really fast, and the windows were covered in a wire mesh.
I absolutely love their logo, it is a little head of doggie, in the yellow shield. Look closely you have seen this before….
That’s right it is a direct takeoff of the US 101st Airborne logo, Air Cavalry, like in Apocalypse Now, but they have substituted the horse for a dog. We also like it because the dog looks like Stinky! We suspect he is not sharing his royalties with us.
We departed and left from the lovely Eye Grease Market for the ride out there. As in my last post "Eye Grease" is supposed to mean beautiful, it wasn’t. It was muddy, scary, and filthy.
The boat ride out and back was really long, over 2 hours, it would have been a lot longer but the boats have tiller steered 75HP engines on them, so they move pretty quickly. The drivers have huge overdeveloped left arms. There aren’t a lot of people living along this coast, and the scenery was amazing. I was huddled under a tarp, and didn’t take any pictures because of the rain.
The lodge was ok, a bit rundown, but after a few years in PNG it doesn’t seem so bad. It must have been really nice at one point; unfortunately it has been decaying ever since it was first built. It is now only used by visiting researchers, but was supposed to be a tourist lodge, that never happened.
Seems like it was built by some silly Canadian CUSA volunteers as a development project, but they didn’t set-up any business model to lure tourists. It is such a hell boat ride from a hell city that no tourist in his right mind would come here anyway. The diving isn’t great because some muddy rivers enter into the sea in the village. They should have spent the money putting in a float plane facility.
The locals use a lot of sailing canoes in this area, and all of the sails are made of traditional mats which is really unique. In Alaotau we only saw one traditional sail out of hundreds.
There was a lot of activity in the village because a big-wig had died so they were getting ready for his mat-mat funeral. We bumped into group after group of women and girls on the beach hauling wood for the BBQ, the men were probably all out fishing, and carrying wood is wok blong meri anyway...
In one village on an island we found this giant pile of coral.
They are harvesting and drying it to make the lime for Beetlenut. This pile is basically one full boat load of coral. It sits out in the rain and sun and gets a bit bleached, then they process it. It was hard to get anybody to describe the processing of it, or the amount of money they could make because they seem to know the white people don’t approve of killing and grinding-up coral, but kate did get a video of a guy describing the entire process.
The people in this area don’t chew coral lime, they only chew with lime made of shell. The coral lime is supposed to be very “hot” or strongpela, and they sell it to people in the highlands.
To make it into powder they burn it in a bamboo fire. Then rinse it, then cook it again in a pot, and it breaks down into a very very fine dust.
The 2 videos at the bottom show a lady rinsing it, then cooking it the final time. Its hard to see in the video but it basically just cooks to dust. The weird thing is that the shells look really dirty, and they don’t clean them very well, but when it finally breaks down in the last stage it turns pure white. Its almost like magic, the black stuff just disappears.
This was the coolest house ever. The corner closest to the front shows the vines going into the ground, then they have trimmed it like a giant topiary. We couldn’t get a straight answer from the guy how long it had been growing, but we suspect he has rebuilt the house underneath it once or twice. This traditional houses only last 5 or 10 years.
Not sure if it will come out, but I made this map to show Kate’s replacement where the house is. Maybe download and blow-up the picture if you’re really curious.
Here are two pictures from Kavieng that snuck in this post. This is a pile of clams I got at the market, it comes in a basket woven out of a palm frond. 6 Kina, about $2.50.
This sunset picture is from a kayak trip I did a few weeks ago.
I had a pretty bad bike wreck and hurt my shoulder this week, so no kayaking for a while. I was riding to work in the dark really early in the morning and I went down trying to get around a mud puddle. I am still worried about it, but after 4 days it seems to be getting better, and hurts less than it did before. I still can’t easily lift my arm over my head, and certainly couldn’t carry my boat to the water, much less paddle it…
This picture was from my phone, and it didn’t really come out, but it is pretty funny. There are two articles about Bouganville, a semi autonomous part of PNG that is half in and half out of the country after they had a little war in the 1990s. The area is very poor, and just generally a mess after the insurrection.
The top article talks about how they local government is meeting with a Chinese government to get an investment to rebuild the main city into a “model” city, sort of like that place in the Truman show. The Chinese will invest 1.5 Billion Kina and build the city something like that.
The other article on the same page talks about a protest they recently had in the same city where the local people wanted to get rid of the all the Chinese merchants running the trade and food stores, and how several of the stores had been destroyed or looted. The people had signs saying “Kong-Kong Get Out”.
Both articles carried quotes from Government officials, but not the same official. The one government official for the racists protest was basically acknowledging that the government was looking into steps to “preserve local business enterprises” basically supporting the racist looters.
What isn’t said, but the subtext is, that this island contains one of the richest copper mines in the entire world, that’s what the war was about. So the Chinese government might give them their Truman show city, if they can get a real good deal on all the copper.
