The fabled East River access to New York Harbor and Long Island sound is the location for "Hell Gate", a confluence of the East and Harlem Rivers. In the chart above Long Island Sound entrance is at the upper right corner and Manhattan and New York Harbor is center left. In the 1850's one boat out of 50 that attempted to traverse Hell Gate would either be damaged or sunk.... roughly 1000 "incidents" per year! In the 1870s following the Civil War the largest explosive event at that point in history was conducted. 7000 holes were drilled in solid rock and 4000 charges were ignited, removing an island and deepening the channel. The explosion was heard as far away as Trenton New Jersey! Apparently in the 1870's Trenton was a quiet place. Tidal currents of 4 to 5 knots still flow through Hell Gate, changing direction with the tide changes twice each day. Even large tugs avoid Hell Gate at full tidal flow due to the whirlpools and standing waves that can exist. Youtube has some "shocking videos" of course.
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We went through at "slack water" when it was relatively calm. More like the first video than the second. I took some video and the Go Pro, uh, malfunctioned. OK I had it set up wrong so it took one second of vid that did not look nearly frightening enough.
City infrastructure, both old and new, span and line the river.
Sorry, the required cat picture of the day.... He says something about a contractual obligation on our part. Here we are "Thunder Way" (underweigh) southbound from New York Harbor.
AND of course you cannot post a NY harbor event without a shot of the, uh, Oh I can't remember the name of this monument...... The Green Lady or something.....
One standout trait of the east river and NY Harbor in general is a LOT of traffic! High speed ferries and uber rich person's powerboats and SuperYachts thread their way through the REALLY large traffic, like the "George Holland" six unit barge I will mention later.
I mentioned the George Holland.... so we basically attached ourselves closely behind this HUGE tug pushing six rafted up barges and followed him/her/them through the river, staying pretty close behind. The idea being that in order to run over US all those high speed vessels would have to run through the barges first! I would not normally chose to be close to a large ship or flotilla but this ended up working beautifully and we did not have to fend for ourselves with all the other high powered ships! George H is in front of us in the photo below. You can see his propwash just to our port side.Oh, I forgot to mention, I had a Fort Dupont board meeting JUST as we were transiting the most "dangerous part" of Hell Gate.... Claire had the helm and I did my best to disrupt the Webex call with impressive video feed of us charging at high speed through the narrow passages with the massive Hell Gate bridge overhead.
Arriving at Atlantic Highlands, Sand Point, just in time to force our way through a sailing regatta, scattering hapless smaller sailing vessels left and right JUST so Claire could get this obligatory Sunset Shot artistically framed by a surviving race boat.
That's it for today....
New Yorkers love Claire and Dave!
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