The Water Log

When wind and tide conspire, a 10-foot rowboat fights to break even

Bronya Weinberg pulls two oars through the choppy Hudson with all the might her petite body can muster. The fiberglass dinghy starts forward, then slows until the next stroke drags it northward again. Soline McLain, Weinberg’s rowing partner, keeps the course using a harness and yoke the two have rigged up to the rudder. For twenty minutes Weinberg keeps it up, face glistening and triceps straining, while McLain holds due north, altering course to northwest every few minutes to avoid being swamped by wakes from ocean liners.
The ten-by-four-foot dinghy gets frequent visits from concerned coastguards because it’s by far the smallest vessel on the water. But “they like our life jackets,” says Weinberg, and “they like that we’re not far from home.”
“Home” is Pier 40, located where West Houston Street meets the Hudson River. When McLain turns the boat back toward the pier so they can switch rowers in the quieter waters, they are still exactly parallel with Pier 40. Like a high school physics text book problem with a too-neat answer, the fat little boat’s forward momentum has been completely negated by the pull from the south-running tide and the push from the wind, coming from north-northwest at ten miles an hour.
Weinberg and McLain expected this: Weinberg had copied the expected hour-by-hour levels of the tide onto a pink index card, along with the direction and strength of the wind and the time of sunset (to make sure they’d be back before dark). They knew the tide would be at its strongest at five in the afternoon, when the water from lakes and mountains to the north would be rushing down to the ocean. Still, they had to get their daily workout in between four, when McLain, a 26-year-old paralegal at a small law firm, was able to slip away from work, and 6:49 p.m., when the sun would set. What’s more, they relish the struggle with the elements.
In an only-in-New-York moment, Weinberg – who gives her age as “over 40” – and McLain struck up a friendship a year and a half ago when they met through Floating the Apple, a nonprofit with a boathouse at Pier 40 that takes people out rowing, and discovered that in addition to an interest in rowing, they shared a passion for aerial dancing.
Weinberg had been an aerial dancer for thirty-five years, specializing in the Spanish Web. She once “danced up and down the S.S. Peking,” she says, spinning around as high as 60 feet above the deck, attached to the rope only by her own limbs. McLain, who studied English and Anglo Saxon languages and rowed crew at Oxford, had just gotten into aerial dancing on a fixed trapeze through her roommate.
The two started rowing together on a little skiff up in Nyack that had been sitting unused on land for years. They converted it from a sailboat, named it the Cape Dames, and outfitted their rig with thole pins and thole rings in lieu of oarlocks, fastened collars onto two plastic oars so that they wouldn’t slip, and fashioned a harness and yoke which would make it easier for the coxswain to control the rudder.
Two months ago their boat was delivered to the 79th Street Boat Basin. They got it to the dock on Pier 40 in fifty minutes, and their daily routine of rowing for as many hours as possible began. These sessions are serious – equipment onboard includes a strobe light, radio, and miniature fog horn in an aerosol can – and they are also seriously chatty. The two women have a million things to talk about, like the case McLain is working on, which coastguards are cutest, and their joint ambitions, of which they have many.
One of their plans, still in the “conceptual stage,” is an aerial dance performance that would take place in a boat, with audiences looking down from various bridges. “Imagine seeing a boat come by with aerial dancers,” says Weinberg, who considers it the most natural idea in the world for a performance piece.
Another of their plans – to circumnavigate the island of Manhattan – is less nebulous. In fact, they’ve both done it a handful of times in eight-person boats through Floating the Apple, but this was to be just the two of them in the little boat they built. McLain wrote up a press release peppered with exclamation points announcing that their “Power Row” would take place on Saturday, September 23.
At 7 a.m. on that gray morning, the two set out from Pier 40 on what they hoped would be a five-hour, twenty-six mile trip. They rowed south against tide and wind, past the financial district, almost to the tip of the island. The wind from the south kept getting stronger until the women were struggling just to keep from being pushed backwards. What’s more, the wind speed was supposed to double from nine or 10 miles an hour to nearly twenty by the afternoon. Tired and disappointed, the Cape Dames turned back – but so did the much sturdier Floating the Apple boats on the same mission, which made them feel better.

-- Becca Tucker

Posted by Tucker on Monday, October 23, 2006 at 1:36 PM | Permalink