River Day 5

I still find it strange to call this Day 5 of River Day:  I’d feel better calling it hours 97 through 120 of the Day.  Regardless, Day 5 ended in the former capital of the state of New York, a city today of 22,000.  Saying Kingston lies about 80 miles north of the Battery does not address how different it feels from New York City.  And yet this brings up  Heraclitus:  No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.   In other words, the water in Kingston today will flow through the sixth boro maybe only a few dozen hours later, so . . . by my own fuzzy logic, Kingston could be considered part of the sixth boro.  Here’s Cornell and Governor Cleveland, equally at home in Kingston’s Rondout Creek here or the Upper Bay of NYC.

From a distance, the Day 5 flotilla looks similar to other days, a stretched out procession impossible to photograph well in its entirety.  From a different perspective, I wonder whether during the upriver trip of the Half Moon 400 years ago, canoes may have accompanied it for parts of the way:  use your imagination here to transform fiberglass runabouts to canoes.  The shore here may appear today as it did in Hudson’s day.

Onrust, Governor Cleveland, and John J. Harvey are in this procession for the duration,

as is Clearwater, here with the sloop Woody Guthrie.

More Woody Guthrie soon, I promise.  By the way, the singer Woody used to live on Mermaid Avenue in Coney Island, location of the mermaid parade NEXT weekend!  That’s cutter Ridley in the background, named for a turtle!

Meet Owl, who came to greet.  Anyone help with info on Owl?

So did a host of small steamers, a unique throwback to an earlier Kingston.

Also, this cabin cruiser sports an exotic propulsion system:   an outboard clamped onto the swim platform;  now that’s something you’d never seen 80 miles to the south.

The same is true for Willi Bohrmann.  More Willi fotos tomorrow.

Even the wildlife came along the creek, as had deer of 100 generations earlier when Hudson first sailed in.

Thanks to Jeff for this concluding foto for today:  a cyclopean tugster happily perched on tugboat Cornell.

All fotos except the last one here by Will Van Dorp.

For a different take on the end of Day 5 of River Day, see Old Salt here.