dmccarty_at_us.ibm.com wrote: > > |I do all I can to stay out of channels. The best protection (and often the > |most interesting cruising) is to stay in water suited only to a kayak or > |canoe. They can't hit you if they've run aground! > > I hug the shore in high traffic areas. I figure that if they hit me they are > then going to hit a strip of very rough land and then the forrest. But this > DOES NOT ALWAYS work. Last year I was almost run over not once but twice at > almost the same spot! I was really hugging the shoreline, about 15 feet out > when a powerboat came in and decided he wanted to beach his boat. This reminds me that one of the greatest dangers of traffic for kayaks is not so much out in the channel where you know the margins because of buoys and have a pretty good field of view but rather when boats are entering or exiting marinas and commercial slips. I always make a note on my chart or in my head of where all those crux points are and am intensely alert while approaching them. The trouble here in New York City is that with the revival of the port for pleasure, tours and ferries, new ferry and tour slips are being created all the time and it is hard to keep up with them. Last year, a friend was paddling back from the Statue of Liberty to the Downtown Boathouse in Manhattan and proceeding up the Jersey shoreline. He spotted a Circle Line tour boat coming along from the Statue or Ellis Island and stopped to let it pull into the Morris Basin where its slip is. Or _was_ : the tour line companyhad changed its slip to outside the Morris Basin to a new slip right where he was dutifully and responsively giving the tour boat the right of way. It kept blowing its horn at him until he backed up some more. Then he saw the tour boat pull into its new slip right where he had been. I took a walk along the Jersey shore across from Manhattan a few weeks ago with the Shorewalkers. As the name implies, the objective is to walk the shore. I spotted several ferry slips that operate only during the week that I had not known about before. I could imagine the confusion a paddler taking a vacation day might run into with them. There are no hard-n-fast rules for dealing with marine entrances and commercial slips. All you can do is be alert, slow down, peer into the opening, etc. Waiting for the horn to blast doesn't work much. The operating rule seems to be to blow the horn as the vessel starts passing the pier head, which is pretty late for a kayaker who is coming along and hard to spot by any stern spotter or the person on the bridge of a large cabin cruiser. ralph -- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Ralph Diaz . . . Folding Kayaker newsletter PO Box 0754, New York, NY 10024 Tel: 212-724-5069; E-mail: rdiaz_at_ix.netcom.com "Where's your sea kayak?"----"It's in the bag." ----------------------------------------------------------------------- *************************************************************************** PaddleWise Paddling Mailing List Submissions: paddlewise_at_lists.intelenet.net Subscriptions: paddlewise-request_at_lists.intelenet.net Website: http://www.gasp-seakayak.net/paddlewise/ ***************************************************************************Received on Wed Jun 02 1999 - 11:42:26 PDT
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