The Dread Pirate Blackbeard ain't got nothin' on us!
Yesterday, a storm was a brewin', but that didn't keep Martin Funck and I from going out on our planned tour on the Staten Island Ferry. Not wind, nor rain, nor... I can't remember the phrase, but you get the point. We took the 1 line down to the South Ferry Station where the Staten Island Ferry awaited us. The Ferry is one of the great public benefits of New York City. It is a well kept barge that leaves every half hour from Manhattan and with relative speed transports thousands (if full to capacity) of people to Staten Island. It is just small enough of a boat to remember you are in water as it dips and floats into the docking bay, yet it is large enough to provide a firm footing while it cruises through the bay, slicing through wakes and waves instead of being bounced around my them.
About those waves...
The first one, pictured above caught me by surprise. Martin and I should have seen it coming though. We wanted to get good nigh-time shots of the Manhattan skyline in the background as we returned from Staten Island toward home. The second floor of the boat was packed with people trying to do the same with their camera-phones and i-pod touches, so we headed downstairs. Outside were only a few young tourists from Belgium huddled against the doors, as far from the edge as they could get, with their hooded jackets completely secured over their heads. Martin and I looked at each other with excitement, seeing all that space to take photos. We assumed that the bottom deck, exposed more openly to the recently broken rainstorm, was all that was chasing the cowardly land-lubbers upstairs to huddle around their ipods and camera phones. Well... there was a lot more than that chasing them upstairs.
No sooner had Martin and I set up shop for a wide-angle lens glory shot of Captain Cardon Ellis braving the unforgiving storm than, BOOM, the first of what would become periodic bursts of epic tidal waves hit the deck, roared upwards in a plume of glory, and attacked the bow of the ship with anyone else crazy enough to be in the deck with it. Yeah... that was us.
No comments:
Post a Comment