I took all but the last two fotos here between 1230 and 230 today at Pier 66, where Elizabeth and I met Rick of Old Salt for lunch.  Good company, tasty grub, wild weather, diverse traffic describe the lunch;  see if you agree.

First Robbins Reef passed southbound,  some swells washing the stem bitt.

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Spartan Service pushed oil upriver.  I’ve never previously seen Spartan.  Weehawken cliffs make up the horizon.

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Bandersnatch (a sailboat converted to a powerboat?)  of Charleston heads south, a great Lewis Carrollian name for a snarky hybrid.

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Lunch over, we were packed up and ready to head out when the skies opened, water washing off the roof atop us like snow past Bounty‘s bountiful figurehead, whose garments then clung to her body.  The bowsprit just beyond Bounty belongs to Bel Espoir 2, of Brest.

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Rain reduced visibility to less than a mile at this point.  Notice here as Adirondack powers upriver, the tower at the Hoboken Terminal is barely visible; the menacing point… resembling thunderbolt, is Bounty‘s martingale.  And the crew and passengers huddled in the yellow slickers give the impression of all members of the same religious order, reminiscent of one of my favorite all-time Bowsprite drawings here.  Rain then

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tapered off as Dutch ketch Saeftinge, Falcon, , plowed northward.  Imitating Hudson?   Geer is a tiny village less than 20 miles south of Amsterdam.

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Falcon moved a light barge on the hip,  southward past the Lincoln Tunnel vent.

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Speaking of Bowsprite, here’s a tribute foto, with two visitors–Bel Espoir 2 and Bounty–as backup.  Strangely, I was seeing shadow and still covering my camera from rain as I took this.

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By the time Erie Service headed past, the air felt positively (negatively?) tropical.

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The next two fotos were taken yesterday.  As the western sky over North Hoboken reddened, I couldn’t resist hauling out my camera.

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Cameras are vision-aids for me.  The more I looked, the more what I saw on the French three-masted schooner intrigued me.  Note the “collage” through the glass on the aft end of the cabin.  Would this combination EVER appear on an American vessel?

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All fotos by Will Van Dorp.

By the way, I just got an email from Rick in which he swears he saw an old man in a strange large vessel made of gopher wood and pitch and carrying a lot of animals, pairs male and female,  as he ferried over the Hudson to Hoboken.  I watched what Rick drank at lunch, and he consumed in moderation, so . . .  draw your own conclusions here.