Blue Heron gobbles down a gopher

Post by Jessie Garza.

In Pursuit of Bluefish on Venerable Party Boat - NYTimes.com

In Pursuit of Bluefish on Venerable Party Boat - NYTimes.com:

by Peter Kaminsky

After a few days of compulsively checking the often reliable website noreast.com, I found that the fish stories had reached enough critical mass to carry a ring of truth. (First unbreakable rule of fishing: Never believe just one report.)

I booked a spot on the Flamingo III, one of the most venerable of the open-to-all-comers party boats that remain from the dozens of vessels that once sailed from nearby Sheepshead Bay to the inshore fishing grounds.

“Do I need my rubber boots?” I asked the skipper, Bob Wiegand. Captain Bob regarded my Top-Siders the way an artillery officer might size up a BB gun. “It can get pretty bloody,” he said. “I’d wear them.” Most of my fellow anglers wore boots and rubberized overalls, a sensible outfit for a visit to an abattoir and equally suitable to the landing and filleting of big bluefish.

Bob is the third generation of his family to ply our local waters. His son and first mate, Rob, sails with him. I learned in a subsequent phone call with the paterfamilias, Walter, that their family business had grown out of necessity.

“I was 10 or 11 — height of the Depression,” he recalled in the working-class accent of old-time Yorkville (think Whitey Ford and Jimmy Cagney, who hailed from that neighborhood). “Times were tough. My dad would hang out in the bars chatting up the patrons. He’d offer to drive then down to Brielle, N.J., in a secondhand funeral limo he had picked up cheaply. For a few bucks, a charter captain would take the passengers fishing, along with my dad, who got a cut of the fare and also fished for free. He’d sell his catch to restaurants.”

As he told his story, it occurred to me that if I were sitting in a bar at 2 a.m., and a stranger offered to drive me to the Jersey Shore in a funeral vehicle, I might have begged off.

The fisherfolk that morning were the typical party boat potpourri, including a retired corrections officer, two machinists, a Verizon executive, two firefighters, a fine arts photographer, and a smattering of sons and daughters, some of them eager to fish and others quite obviously coerced into quality bonding time with Dad. We made our way across Jamaica Bay to Breezy Point, where, on a moving tide, predators often lie in wait for struggling baitfish. But Breezy was becalmed, so we motored farther east, just off the surfing beaches of the newly hip Rockaways.

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Harvard Study: Aging Liberal Men Have More Sex than Conservative Counterparts | Alternet

Harvard Study: Aging Liberal Men Have More Sex than Conservative Counterparts | Alternet: "Harvard Study: Aging Liberal Men Have More Sex than Conservative Counterparts
One of the longest-running studies of adult development in history delivers four surprising findings."



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Hemingway's Pilar and Top Hat - Two Wheeler Playmates

Hemingway's Pilar - preserved in Cuba

At the foot of Cropsey Avenue in Brooklyn was Wheeler Shipbuilding.  They built pleasure boats and commercial boats.  During WWII they built 230 patrol craft and mine sweepers.  There was a line of pleasure boats called Playmates.  The most famous of them was Hemingway's Pilar, a Wheeler Playmate he commissioned.  A Pilar replica was built for `Hemingway & Fuentes'  an Andy Garcia movie (now filming)about Hemingway and his captain - Fuentes to whom Pilar was bequeathed.  Hemingway and Pilar did 40 days of submarine patrol duty in 1942 on the coast of Cuba, spotting only one sub.

Top Hat

Here at City Island Yacht Club George Ignatius Robinson had the same vision for his Wheeler Playmate Top Hat.  Robinson applied to the Coast Guard hoping to convert his sailboat - usually chartered for weekend cruises - into a patrol craft complete with foredeck mounted machine gun and depth charges.

Page 1 of George Robinson's application to the Coast Guard to convert
Top Hat from weekend cruiser to anti-submarine patrol craft.

Packard Heights Pond and the Green River Festival 2014

Hitch hiker

the mandatory summer festival rain

Norah Jones and Puss 'n Boots

The Charles W. Morgan cries "whale ho" again

Mystic Seaport Museum has restored the last surviving Nantucket Whaler, The Charles W. Morgan.  Long a member of its fleet, the ship is now seaworthy and under sail.  They met whales and loved them on the Stellwagen Bank off Provincetown, MA. - G

Ho hum, another City Island sunset

Evers Marina & Seaplane Base - the Bronx, NYTimes.com

Charlie Evers aboard Little Toot, at Evers Marina
and Seaplane Base, the Bronx

Charlie Evers can make it via seaplane from his marina in the Bronx to his lake house in Maine in two hours. - gwc

The Runway Is Clear - NYTimes.com:

by Corey Kilgannon



"If Willy Wonka ran a boatyard, it might be along the lines of Evers Marina and Seaplane Base, on the Bronx waterfront.

Its owner, Charlie Evers, 71, has lived his entire life, at least until recently, at the marina, which was founded as a seaplane base in 1937 by his father, Carl.

By the 1950s, the place had about 40 seaplanes and five ramps for them. By the late 1960s, seaplane storage and charter flights gave way to boat-slip rentals, Mr. Evers said.

But there is still an orange windsock fluttering up there atop a pole at the end of the wide concrete pier, here where the East River turns into Long Island Sound.

The marina still shows up on aviation maps as one of the last seaplane bases in the region. And there is still the four-seat seaplane that Mr. Evers keeps in a metal shed and tools around in once or twice a week.

The marina, located in the Spencer Estates section between Pelham Bay Park and the Throgs Neck Bridge, is dotted with repurposed items that Mr. Evers has found."



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BUZZARDS BAY 19

BUZZARDS BAY 19:





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Treating iron in well water

Mountain Empire Community College

Treating iron & manganese