The Boat Show and The Harlem's "Winter Cruise" to the Met Museum of Art

Here is the snappy new professional looking display for our booth at the show. Nice, with lots of literature on the table explaining our programs. But the big advantage of the new display is that it rolls up into a small cylinder that, when empty, serves as a base for a table, and which, when full, we can bring through the front door instead of having to deal with ornery and expensive employees of the Javits Center who we had to use to bring the old display in from the loading dock.

Also a nice larger display screen, lower left. on which lots of photos form a slide show.
The best part of this year's show, for me, was that Lene came along, staffing the booth with me and others on Thursday from 4:30 to 9 pm. Fact is that everything is more fun with Lene, and whenever I drag her out to do things with me, she ends up having a good time too. I had signed up to do a double shift that day -- noon to 9, and it is a sign of the strength of our Club that I wasn't needed that much.
It being a weekday, traffic was light and so I wandered among the other exhibits. Regrettably, except for a sailing kayak by Hobie Cats, this was exclusively a power boat show, so there was nothing of interest among the many boats.  I did contract with PlasTeak, a purveyor of faux teak decking material, for  a piece of their plastic to cover ILENE's swim platform, the only ratty looking part of the boat. They will supply material for me to make a pattern, the piece itself, the glue to affix it and technical advice. Last year I dealt with their competitor, but they never returned my calls or did the job. I think poorly of that competitor. all told, the show was rather boring, but it serves our Club's recruitment efforts. More members spreads our fixed costs among more folks, lowering dues.

Much more fun was our visit to the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art, to see a group of art works related to boats. The maximum number of folk they allow in a tour is 25 and we had that number signed up but late defections reduced our group to 18.

Planning this year's expedition was the most difficult yet, and I hope not to exceed the record. Four prior plans as to where to go had to be scrapped, as did two prior plans for lunch.
A, viewing of maritime Act auction as Bonhams; B, The Russell Jinishian Gallery of Contemporary Marine Art;
C, India House, a lunch club near the Battery which has maritime art; and D, The former Customs House and the Cunard ticket office, which have murals.
As for lunch, we started at the Petrie Cafe in the Museum, and reserved at one outside restaurant before we found our home in another.

We started our tour in Egypt, almost 4000 years ago, with these models of papyrus funeral sailing barges for the Nile, found in a Pharaoh's tomb during the 19th century. This one is being rowed on its way home, against the prevailing wind. The large white vertical appears to be a boom and mast gallows. another model showed the mast and boom set up for a square rigged sail. Some of our better sailors figured our how they steered this barge, which had eluded me.

The Met has a terrific collection of late 19th century oil paintings in a semi storage area of the North American wing, which was focused on New York harbor."The Emporer" was painted for the captain of a Tugboat, extolling the power of his boat. That's me reading its title, printed all the way across the bottom. Incidentally, most of the photos in this posting (all the good ones) are by Chris Wentz of ZSails, who is not a Harlemite but has attended our last two excursions.

"The Cloud", evokes the mood of an impending storm on a dark night, being interpreted by my friend, Greg. He is an artist and professor and really knows about art, though he modestly chides me for telling people this. He agreed to come along to plan our trip and pointed out a lot of the things we otherwise would have missed and enhanced our visit.

We saw old Dutch Masters who painted at the other Haarlem, the one in Holland, painted during the period that New York was New Amsterdam.

France was represented by Courbet. After a lively discussion, we agreed this was after a shipwreck.

And England was represented by by Turner"s "Whalers", painted for a wealthy whaleship owning patron who refused the painting after it was done -- too violent! The black blob, the whale's head has just stove some boats, lower right.

And we went to Papua-New Guinea to check out this fifty foot dugout canoe, built in 1960 by named native craftsmen, used as a riverine cargo barge, and purchased by a Rockefeller for the Museum. It looks primitive but is the newest of the works we viewed.

 And most of us stayed to enjoy lunch together at nearby Via Quadronno.

Next I'm offering a potential follow up visit for those who expressed an interest but were unavailable on Feb. 4. Maybe there will be a response.
If not, there are summer and winter cruises to help plan and if my sprained wrist ever heals there is plenty of work to do on ILENE.