The canoe paddlers on a 1,500-mile circumnavigation of the Northeast have braved lightning, the Russian mafia, and speeding powerboats.
The speed limit on the Shinnecock Canal, in Hampton Bays, is five miles per hour, which a group of hardy paddlers in a thirty-one-foot canoe were improbably exceeding the other day, when “the shit went down,” as one of them, Ryan Ranco, recalled. A powerboat named Just Chillin’ appeared from around a corner. “It was in our lane, on the left side of the canal,” Ranco said. “We kind of had a little game of chicken going.
Undeterred, the paddlers proceeded west, eventually reaching Great South Bay, and paused at Fox Island, where a bolt of lightning struck the ground less than a mile from where they were huddled, beneath the canoe’s hull. Soon, after a harrowing passage around Breezy Point, amid four-foot swells, they were at Brighton Beach. “Russian mafia,” Ranco said. “We slept with one eye open, in shifts. All these Russians are asking me who’s paying their tax. I just walked away.
Ranco, a forty-two-year-old carpenter when not afloat, was recounting this at the Nyack Boat Club, where he and the other paddlers had tied up for the night after a seventeen-mile ascent of the Hudson, from Inwood. It was day forty-one of a uniquely looping voyage, a fifteen-hundred-mile circumnavigation of the Northeast that had begun in Old Town, Maine, on the Stillwater branch of the Penobscot River. Ranco is a member of the Penobscot tribe.
Wilkinson’s wife, Janet, and children were among the picnickers, having driven down from New Hampshire to check in on the group’s progress, and to belatedly celebrate Father’s Day. The host sailors, meanwhile, swooned over the visitors’ derring-do while occasionally noting their own feats , and wondered how canoeists heading up the Hudson might find their way back to Maine.
Rain and more lightning were in the forecast. On the plus side, this augured fewer yahoos in powerboats to contend with as the Hudson narrowed, beyond Haverstraw. But the storms also thwarted the ambitions of a waterborne pilgrim who might have crossed paths more amiably with the determined canoeists.
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