Pioneer Sails 1

Last fall I caught Pioneer from outboard; yesterday I rode Pioneer on its trip to welcome back schooner Anne and play with Erin Wadder.  This post is mostly intended to document the first part of that ride.  Before leaving the dock, captain and crew confer.

This seasoned crew greets passengers as they transition from terra to aqua.

After the vessel slips into the East River,  crew tidies docklines.

Crew on the halliards raise the mainsail; then

coil and hang these lines on the shrouds, to keep them from free to run, should an emergency lowering of sails need to happen.

Bow watch signals oncoming traffic.

Pioneer skitters down the Bay quite nicely for a hull that served as a sailing sand conveyance a full 125 years ago.  Imagine a 1985 Mack dumptruck racing around with paying passengers in the year 2110!!

The winds inspiring Pioneer to skitter and scud also propel these other sailing vessels yesterday,  Anne farther and an unidentified sloop nearer.  Can anyone identify the sloop?

Scuppers port and starboard get a thorough rinsing.

Reid and Anne engage in some performance artistry with Freja Fionia.

The sloop tacks past again, and Pioneer, belly

in her sails, plays along.

A followup post soon will document Pioneer‘s return to the dock.  For now, sharing the air and water with us was a crew setting out on a formidable journey as Reid concluded his.  Artemisoceanrowing intended here to leave the sixth boro for a ride across the North Atlantic all the way

to the UK.  To be followed.

All fotos by Will Van Dorp.  See you among the merfolk tomorrow!

Erin Wadder

. . . er “air” and “water.”       But with the Earth & Fire post last week, this had to appear, right?

Thanks to the tentatively definitive compendium on “schooner identification in the sixth boro,” I can without a doubt call the leftmost vessel Imagine and the rightmost Adirondack.  And for outatowners, that’s Hoboken in the background.

Just a glimpse of the spoon-bowed, yellow-sailed schooner raises my spirits from dragging along May’s rocks to June’s breeziness.

Notice how the profile of Escape Plan gets echoed here in the upper reaches of North Sea.

With the June breezes and right attention, even if just for a few moments, all my cares take wing and fly away . . .  propelling my spirit like a little sloop dallying about the start of the North River.

Seeing a yellow hulled sailboat, like Mamzel, powering upriver, one of many migrating mostly northward at season’s start conjures up one thought . . .  sailing . . . you’re doing it wrong.

Clipper City . . . sailing, almost doing it right, but

these ones got it:  Pride of Baltimore, Imagine, and Adirondack . . . back in 2008, air moving them through the water.

All fotos by Will Van Dorp.

Here’s an “erin wadder” post from last fall;  more soon.

And don’t forget the caption contest here . . . I’ve got some good entries but want some more.  Send’em in, please.