"At Sea in the City" by William Kornblum and "Manhattan Beach" by Jennifer Egan

I can't sail when it is this cold and the boat is winterized and on the hard, but I can read about the waters. Both of these are very well written with poetic figures of speech.

The first of them was lent to me by sailing friend Bennett. He thought I would like it and he was right. Mr. Kornblum is a professor of sociology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He lives on Long Island's south shore where he kept his boat, "Tradition" a 24 foot Crosby catboat built in 1910 and restored by him and his family. Quite a diametrically different craft from "ILENE," her lower boom extends aft of her stern and holds the bottom of her single quadrilateral tanbark sail. Her mast is only 26 feet high and even with a metal fixed keel that was added by a prior owner, her draft is only four feet. So she can go in shallower water and under lower fixed bridges as compared to my boat.
The book describes Tradition's last multi-day one-way cruise from the south shore, in Jamaica Bay, through New York Harbor, up the East River and out into Long Island Sound. This was at the end of her 17 years of service to his family. Some days of this cruise he was alone, while on others he was joined by, e.g., his wife, friends, and dogs. Each chapter describes a passage of the cruise and begins with a sketch chart of the area. Each contains bits of the history of New York and his personal memories of prior experiences in that place. Two of my favorites of his stops were (1) off Manhattan at 21st Street in the East River, where he worked at the cement plant located there during his summers while a Cornell undergraduate and where he anchored in ten feet of water for a late second breakfast, and (2) at Hallett's Cove, off Astoria Queens., where he anchored and dinked in to get his dogs. I had not known of either of these anchorages and believe they may be worth a try, though perhaps not suitable for an overnight stop with the changing of the tides.
Tradition suffered an engine failure and had to sail up through Hells Gate. This passage ended, when the tide changed, at a dock on North Brother Island. ILENE also suffered from an engine failure in these water, see blog posting in June 2016; neither boat suffered any damage.
I looked up the author and invited him for a sail: "your boat or mine"; it looks like I will have the pleasure of his company in May on ILENE.  Any New York based cruising sailor, or even one who does not sail here, will enjoy this book.

The second selection is a very enjoyable and easy to read novel by a prize winning author that my book group selected. Though not about sailing as such, it has a very New York water theme. Set in the late depression of the 1930's and WWII, its spunky heroine becomes a diver. This was before scuba, when the suit weighed over 200 pounds and air had to be pumped down by a grinder above. She worked at the Brooklyn Navy Yard and the book has 101 characters, several of them major characters. Egan takes the reader to much of New York and tells a story about the Irish mafia of that time period. How do such diverse elements fit into the same novel? If you read it, you will enjoy finding out.