MANHATTAN ISLAND sure looks different if you’re doing six knots through New York Harbor on a Colgate 26 racing sloop on a breezy summer Sunday. You can smell not a single pile of rotting trash outside McDonald’s and feel not a single blast of furnacelike heat from a subway platform. This serene, stark postcard image may be illusory, but it’s also an illuminating reminder of what we so often hear but rarely absorb: New York is a city of islands and rivers. But with Olafur Eliasson’s four “New York City Waterfalls” dotting the waterfront, all eyes — and more bodies than usual — are on the city’s rivers.
Summer is precisely the right time to get on a boat in the city. And while locals might head out onto the Gowanus Canal or Jamaica Bay or the Bronx River, visitors can probably best spend their money on a trip on the East River or New York Harbor. Alas, sometimes that can cost a lot of money.
On the expensive end is a two-hour, $125 trip on the Compass Rose, that Colgate 26, based out of Liberty Landing Marina across the Hudson in New Jersey and under the command of Capt. Matthew Carmel. (There’s a water taxi that makes the short run from the Manhattan side north of the World Financial Center near Vesey Street for $7.)
An afternoon on the Compass Rose is the rough equivalent to getting invited out with a friend who loves boating. The ship is small and slick, fitting a maximum of five passengers and packed with GPS display and digital gadgets: unlike the huge schooners that dole out wine and cheese, this feels like a boat you yourself could own someday (but probably won’t). And for added fun, Captain Carmel asks you to man the tiller or trim the sheets or do other things involving vocabulary you won’t immediately understand. In between, he’ll entertain you with stories like the time the Hasidic Jew requested a trip with no women aboard, which the captain did not guarantee; that day two Norwegian lesbians came along. Your group will probably not be quite as interesting, for better or worse.
On the expensive end is a two-hour, $125 trip on the Compass Rose, that Colgate 26, based out of Liberty Landing Marina across the Hudson in New Jersey and under the command of Capt. Matthew Carmel. (There’s a water taxi that makes the short run from the Manhattan side north of the World Financial Center near Vesey Street for $7.)
An afternoon on the Compass Rose is the rough equivalent to getting invited out with a friend who loves boating. The ship is small and slick, fitting a maximum of five passengers and packed with GPS display and digital gadgets: unlike the huge schooners that dole out wine and cheese, this feels like a boat you yourself could own someday (but probably won’t). And for added fun, Captain Carmel asks you to man the tiller or trim the sheets or do other things involving vocabulary you won’t immediately understand. In between, he’ll entertain you with stories like the time the Hasidic Jew requested a trip with no women aboard, which the captain did not guarantee; that day two Norwegian lesbians came along. Your group will probably not be quite as interesting, for better or worse.
See Also www.nytimes.com/travel
dt. 14.07.2008 edition
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