A few days ago, Jae and I left Norwalk, CT very early in the morning to transit the western part of Long Island Sound, down the East River and eventually arrive at Sandy Hook, specifically Highlands, NJ. This passage was a first for us on two levels. First, we had never traveled south on the East River, and second we had never transited the East River without crew. The latter did not seem like a big deal to either of us after two months on the boat and two prior passages on the East River and after transiting the C&D Canal, the East River northbound, the Cape Cod Canal (up and back), Wood’s Hole, Quick’s Hole and Plum Gut (the scariest one even with the tide). But, the former required more planning and thought and is hardly a place to make a mistake. That would be embarrassing with all those people watching.
To explain the challenge, I need to start by describing the East River. I had always thought of the East River as extending from the Battery, at the bottom of Manhattan, up to about the Triborough Bridge, where one can turn east and exit into Long Island Sound. Like the Anacostia River in Washington, D.C., it is not much of a river, with no fresh water and an entirely tidal flow. I think of rivers as bodies of water that flow from some fresh water source to a large body of water, either a lake or a sea and that have a definite, unchanging flow, at least at their head. I am immediately suspicious when something that lacks those attributes is nonetheless named a river.
The definition matters because headwaters and a defined flow give a river its form, its shape. The headwaters of a river are the beginning of a journey for the water. A “river” like the East River has no headwaters; it is like a bathtub where the water sloshes back and forth with the tides, but does not go anywhere. Without that head, it has no shape, no definition and therefore is not a river. By my definition, a river that is entirely comprised of salt water is not a river. For example, the Hudson is a river with a freshwater headwaters and an established direction; the poser to the east is not a river. (don’t get me started on the Harlem “River”). If the East River is truly a river, then we could rename Lake Michigan as Michigan River. Why not?
The definition of a river is relevant to this post because it explains my uncertainty about the boundaries of the East River. And, without knowing the shape and extent of the East River, one is hard pressed to understand how to time passage through it to avoid any dangerous tidal currents. I had never thought about this issue coming up the East River from the south because one simply needs to arrive at the Battery two hours after low water and the tidal current will graciously sweep you up the river, paralleling the FDR, past Hell Gate, past the Throg’s NeckBridge and into Long island Sound. In those prior passages, we had run all the way out to Norwalk with a fair current and no difficulties whatsoever.
Here is the key complication for boats traveling in the opposite direction: right above the Triborough Bridge, just where you turn east for Long Island Sound is a fairly circular little body of water called Hell Gate, whose names is supposedly a corruption of the original Dutch name “Hellagat”, meaning bright passage. I had always understood that here at Hell Gate, tidal currents coming from Long Island Sound to the east and coming up the East River from the North Atlantic to the south, converge and oppose each other. Those two tidal systems are not only out of sync, but diametrically opposed. They are the true ying and yang, to-MAY-toe/to-MAAAH-toe, Mars and Venus. As a result, if you arrive at the wrong time, you are in a cauldron of swirling water, confused currents and perhaps in some real trouble, especially if a big freighter is in the neighborhood or some hotshot New York ferry captain. Not what I would call a bright passage.
Slack water at Hell Gate, where there are no opposing currents, lasts for four minutes. The holy grail of ying/yang navigation is to arrive at Hell Gate in that 4-minute window. In the modern era of GPS, that is not as crazy as it sounds. With our chart plotter, we can time our arrival to a designated place with nearly that precision, assuming we leave early enough and can slow down to time it right.
As we left Norwalk, I was very sure that we could hit Hell Gate pretty close to the four minute mark, which my trusty copy of Eldridge’s put at 11:18 on that particular morning. I was a macho enough captain that I wanted to be there at 11:18 so I could brag about it later.
By studying the current charts in Eldridge’s for the greater New York harbor, I could see that the current would be fair from Hell Gate down to the Battery and indeed, all the way to Sandy Hook, our destination. I confirmed this analysis by reference to one of the cruising guidebooks we have that offers detailed advice about a wide range of things a cruising boater would want to know. But that book also explained how the current would be adverse as we approached Hell Gate, specifically from the Throg’s Neck Bridge onward to Hell Gate. I was surprised to read this. If the two tidal systems oppose each other at Hell Gate, how could there be adverse current 7 miles east, especially since we would be arriving at the end of a flood tide (tide coming in) from Long Island Sound and the beginning of an ebb tide (tide flowing out), as we passed down the East River. Wasn’t that the whole point of arriving at Hell Gate’s slack water to be there for the four minutes when the two tidal cycles are at peace with each other?
I reread the passage in the book several times, parsing its words carefully, but coming to no better understanding. It seemed as though the short distance between Hell Gate and the Throg’s Neck Bridge to the east had its own tidal system, apart from the East River and Long Island Sound. Three separate tidal systems in such a short space? I could not accept that as being true and I had never read that before, nor had I experienced it in prior passages. While I am a pretty confident mariner at this stage, I never discount this sort of analysis in a widely circulated book like the cruising guide, but I was having difficulty giving it much credence. I knew we needed to go forward, but as I explained to Jae, there was a level of uncertainty about what we would encounter at the Throg’s Neck, which, conveniently, is where the river/sound really narrows and marine traffic really picks up. It is a lovely spot to get caught in a tidal rage.
By the time we left Norwalk that morning, I had checked my analysis of slack tide at Hell Gate more times than I care to share. I was sure that I had that right and that we could cover the 29 nautical miles from Norwalk to arrive within an acceptable window of the magical four minutes. But, I remained baffled about what to expect once we hit the Throg’s Neck Bridge, a mere 7 miles from Hell Gate. One great aspect of Sirius is that we have an absolutely kick-ass diesel engine. It is 176 hp and supposedly the best engine Yanmar ever made. Despite the massive, ponderous weight of Sirius, the Yanmar does a great job of moving us through the water. And the experts advise that you should run a diesel hard, so I knew that if the currents got strong, we could throttle down, act almost like a power boat and shoulder through it. I don’t like to think this way and rarely rely on the engine to bail me out, but it is nice to know it’s there.
All the way down Long Island Sound, in fairly flat water, I was looking at the tidal current indicators around us. They were all exactly as I expected, a slowly dying flood tide, sweeping us toward New York City. Scrolling ahead on the chart, I looked at current on the East River, just off of New York City. It showed strong currents flowing upriver, also just as I expected. As we got closer, they would taper down and by the time we arrived, they would have reversed.
As we approached New York City, I started looking at the area west of the Throg’s Neck Bridge, toward Hell Gate. It showed adverse currents of more than 8 knots on the chart plotter. I couldn’t believe it. Even Sirius’ beefy diesel would have real trouble fighting 8 knots. I looked at other tidal current arrows nearby and saw the same thing. Then I looked to see when the tide would change although I already knew the answer – 12:45, over an hour after we needed to arrive at Hell Gate.
I consulted the cruising book again, studying one completely enigmatic sentence that explains that because of adverse currents at Throg’s Neck, boats with smaller engines might want to wait until the current abated. I had no idea if this applied to us – did we have a small engine? Not by my definition, but what was the point of comparison: to a ferry? Why would anyone want to slow down and miss the magical four minute window at Hell Gate? On the other hand, 8 knots of current against you is serious business, even for the big boys in New York harbor and I did not really think we were a big boy.
Jae and I started watching the current speed indicators on the chart plotter like a couple of hawks. We saw other sailboats headed in our direction, which reassured us that we were not the only idiots headed to Hell Gate, against 8 knots. I admit that I don’t like to make mistakes by myself, so I liked having company, but my strong preference was not make a mistake at all. As we watched, the adverse current speeds dropped faster than I would expect. Eight became 7.7, then 7.2, then 6.9. But zero was not in our future because that would only happen at 12:45.
We did not want to loiter too long around the Throg’s Neck and jeopardize our timing for Hell Gate, but this seemed the bigger problem at the moment. Nonetheless, since the chart plotter was predicting an acceptable arrival time at Hell Gate, we decided to slow down and wait for the currents to die a little more. The other sailboats boats soldiered on, reminding me of the ending lines from The Great Gatsby, “so we bore on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” We hung back, hoping to avoid being borne back behind the bridge.
Ahead I could see on the computer that Hell Gate currents were quickly moving in our favor, but we still had 7 miles of adverse current before we would get there. We dawdled a little longer and I reread the cruising book section again and looked in vain for guidance from Mr. Eldridge and Mr. Fitzgerald. Finally, when the current got down to 4 knots, we decided it was time to go under the bridge.
While there is a pretty healthy bend in the water at the bridge and of course the watercourse is narrower there, there is nothing really very dramatic about this point to the naked eye. But, we went from a favorable current, albeit weak, to a strongly adverse one in just a couple of minutes. Our big Yanmar diesel was now working pretty hard, but we were keeping a very reasonable 6+ knots of speed and the magic four minute window remained very attainable.
Up ahead, I saw on the chart plotter a current indicator showing only 2.2 knots against us. I immediately interpreted this to mean that the current was dying. And we were almost through the worst of it. We started gaining a little speed. Then another current speed indicator farther ahead showed 4.5 knots against us. How could that be, I wondered. We plowed ahead. At this point we were committed and Sirius seemed to be handling the currents pretty well.
While keeping a sharp watch for other boats, our eyes remained glued to the chart plotter. We passed the other sailboats we had seen and entered the homestretch for Hell Gate, right on time. The currents continued to fluctuate between 2 (acceptable) and 4 (unacceptable) knots. I reread the enigmatic passage in the cruising book and this time I noticed its description of the East River as a 14 mile long tidal strait. I had seen this before, but had never paid much attention to it, always thinking that it was 14 miles from the Battery to Hell Gate, the point at which the two tidal systems collide. Now, I started to wonder exactly what was 14 miles long and I realized that it could not be 14 miles from the Battery to the Triborough Bridge.
I then realized that despite the book’s description of Hell Gate being where Long Island Sound and East River (puppet of the North Atlantic) meet and collide, we had just experienced that collision 7 miles east, at the Throg’s Neck Bridge, which is in fact 14 miles from the Battery by water (most assuredly not by car).
For me, the allure and peril of Hell Gate had always been that it was a very precise impact zone between two tidal systems. I have never seen it at full froth (perhaps Google has a picture of it – I will look), but I imagined it to be a seething, writhing monster that marked the end of the so-called East River. What was the big deal if you faced 8 knots of adverse current near the Throg’s Neck Bridge? Didn’t Throgs Neck’s 8 knots trump Hell Gate’s measly 4 or 5?
Clearly, I now realized, the cartographers who chose names for different bodies of water had decided that Long Island Sound ended at the bridge and the East River began there. There is no apparent reason for this arbitrary decision. Long Island Sound runs east/west; why not have it continue until it runs into Manhattan and can no longer run west? Despite its name, East River is known as a north/south body of water that marks the east side of New York City. It is the East River because it is on the east side of New York City, not because of its direction. It should really be the North River during flood tides and the South River during ebb tides. The water that actually stretches east from Hell Gate has nothing to do with it. But, this gets us back to the definitional problem – the East River is not even a river.
So, I pondered, where do these two tidal systems actually collide? And how could Hell Gate deserve its name, if it is only masquerading as the impact zone. It appeared to be incorrectly named as well.
More generally, where does one thing end and another thing pick up? I thought there was a nice bright line between the North Atlantic tide system and the Long Island tide system, a precise point that, if navigated in a timely fashion, allowed one to sit astride and tame two such powerful systems. I should have known better. If astronomers cannot agree on where the solar system even ends or whether there are more planets in it, then I guess the precise end of the East River will remain imponderable too.
I am OK with that result. No thanks to that stupid cruising book which did not parse either the ambiguities of the East River or whether it is even a river, but instead blindly accepted Mr. East’s vain naming of the river after himself when it actually runs north/south, not East at all. Everyone can see that. He fooled no one when he tacked on the extra 7 miles to the east, in a foolish effort to justify its name. This just proves that it has no business being called a river when it has no discernible beginning or end and just sloshes around like a bathtub.
For my part, I now know that coming from the east, I must expect adverse current west of the bridge until I reach Hell Gate, after which I will have a bright passage down or SOUTH on the so-called EAST river.
And that is exactly what Jae and I did, ripping along at 11 knots past Manhattan, until we were spit out below Governor’s Island, south of the Battery. I am just glad we did not have to pay a toll on the East River. That would have pissed me off.