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April 2023

Shared Harbor Safety Day, May 20

Harbor Safety / /
The Harbor Ops Education Subcommittee is excited to announce Shared Harbor Safety Day on May 20th, 10am to 3pm, at the Downtown Boathouse at Pier 26 in Hudson River Park!   The links below all include the button to RSVP.  
 

Join us for presentations on commercial harbor traffic and NOAA’ s switch to electronic charts followed by Q&A. Share navigation tips with fellow boaters over lunch as we kick off National Safe Boating Week and the summer season!  

 
Additional details can be found on our eventbrite RSVP page.
 
Here’s a link to the Shared Harbor Safety Day flyer.
 
With great appreciation to our hosts and sponsor,

We hope to see you there!
the Education Subcommittee program planners
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Under the NY-NJ Harbor Safety, Navigation & Operations Committee, the Harbor Ops Education Subcommittee welcomes all boaters and marine operators to come together to make our shared waters and waterfront safer and better used.

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“I Was Never Able to Pray”

Art on the Piers / /
This past Tuesday, a notably tall, distinguished-looking grey-haired gentleman in his early 70s was standing on Red Hook’s Valentino Pier, a typewritten sheet of paper in his hand. He was dressed formally, in a dark suit and tie, in contrast to the dozen or so uniformed park rangers and young city government aides on the pier around him. The pier was decorated for the occasion with green and white New York City Parks Department flags.
 

What was the occasion? The unveiling of a poem, newly inscribed line by line along the bottom of the pier’s south-side steel fencing: “I Was Never Able to Pray,” by Edward Hirsch, who proceeded to read his work aloud to the Parks staffers and those few of us civilians who had fortuitously come upon this unexpected waterfront ceremony.

It’s a lovely and moving verse, well suited to be engraved on a Brooklyn pier. 
 
–Bill Orme
 
[Scroll through the photos below to read the poem]
1Wheelmedowntotheshore
2) where the lighthouse was abandoned
3) and the moon tolls in the rafters
4) Let me hear the wind paging through the trees
5) and see the stars flaring out, one by one,
6) like the forgotten faces of the dead
7) I was never able to pray
8) but let me inscribe my name
9) in the book opf waves
10) and then stare into the dome
11) of a sky that never ends
12) and see my voice sail into the night

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