Douglas Arvidson is a past winner of the WICE/Paris Transcontinental International Short Story competition. His short fiction has been published in Paris, Prague, and in literary magazines in the United States and he was recently invited to be a staff writer for the Prague Revue, a cutting-edge, online literary journal (http://bit.ly/1mMT6ZC). The novels in his fantasy series, The Eye of the Eye of Stallion, include The Face in Amber, The Mirrors of Castaway Time, and A Drop of Wizard's Blood. His new novel, Brothers of the Fire Star, was selected as a finalist in the ForeWord Reviews 2012 Book of the Year national awards and as a finalist in three categories in the 2013 New Mexico-Arizona Book Awards: Action Adventure Fiction, Historical Fiction, and Young Adult Fiction. It has become part of the pantheon of Pacific literature and is now included in school literature programs. Brothers of the Fire Star is an adventure story set in the Pacific during World War II and concerns two boys of different races and cultures who escape the island of Guam in a small sailboat when the Japanese army invades. They must then struggle to survive as they master the secrets of the ancient Pacific navigators. Appropriate for young adults as well as adult readers, Brothers of the Fire Star is available on Barnes & Noble, Amazon.com (http://amzn.to/1j3axVk) and Crossquarter.com. Visit the author's website: douglasarvidson.com



Saturday, June 6, 2009

We Give the Bronx a Goodbye Cheer and Down the East River Through Gotham We Go

My son, the yacht captain, gave me this hat with ironic instructions to pose with it as we went by the Statue of Liberty. Here it is, Eli. We had a good laugh, too.

New York Harbor is all about dodging big, big, big stuff--like the Staten Island Ferry--two of them, going in opposite directions.

Here's the U.N. Sadly, it looks shabby and unclean and needs a good scrubbing. I remember it from my high school days when it was new and spiffy.

You gotta keep an eye out behind you. Here the going was clear.




Here is the Throgs Neck Bridge--the entry to the fabled East River. The whole story goes like this: We've been on the boat for two weeks now and one week of that we were socked in by rain and/or repairs. When we got going we had no wind, so we motored all the way up to Orient Pt and then down Long Island Sound to City Island, at the head of the East River (not a river, really--a tidal estuary). Then it rained again and we had more repairs and we were thankful for the nice folks at the City Island Yacht Club where we picked up a mooring and got our soggy selves straight, including a day trip into the City.


On a promise of fair weather, we left this morning and tackled the heretofore dreaded and forbidding East River. While holed up at the City Island Yacht Club, with rain pounding on the cabin top, we went over the Eldridge tide/current book a hundred times, debated and argued (you've got to get the currents right in the East River) and apparently got it straight. When push came to shove (when ebb came to flood) we had a great trip down the estuary and were dumped out in happy and fine form into New York Harbor a couple of hours later.


With the tide/current with us, we then motored across New York Harbor and under the Varanzano Narrows Bridge doing 8+ knots and now are in our next nice yacht club in Sandy Hook, N.J.


Tomorrow we'll try the 64-mile stretch down the Jersey coast to Little Egg Harbor. Trying to reach Cape May by Monday night--but really, no rush.
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1 comment:

  1. ClaudiaJune 6, 2009 at 6:27:00 PM PDT

    Just FYI: Varazzano Narrows Bridge is named for first European to navigate into New York Harbor and also where the New York Marathon begins. Do you still run Doug? How 'bout Terry? 'Course, that's probably too much like work now that you're retired and sailing huh?!!

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