People thought I was kidding when I vowed to recreate one of history’s most famous journey’s—not Lewis & Clark, not Amelia Earhart, but Barbra Streisand’s Funny Girl tugboat trip in New York Harbor. I intended to take our boat to the Statue of Liberty, climb out on the bow and sing Don’t Rain on My Parade.
Then Bonnie and I planned to keep a promise made a decade ago in Fire Island. Back then, we saw two women having cocktails on their boat in Cherry Grove and said, “Someday that will be us.” And now we had the chance to prove it.
“You’re taking that little boat in the ocean? To New York?” folks said, laughing.
And when they heard that our friends Bob and Larry—men who’d never spent one night on a small boat, much less ten— were joining us, they were sure we were making it up.
But we were prepared. Each couple was permitted a reasonable amount of clothing, toiletries, food, and drink. The guys did great limiting themselves on clothes and toiletries, but I’d never seen that much yogurt in my life.
Robert’s eager anticipation seemed based on the thrill of seeing New York harbor as well as the challenge of keeping the boat really, really clean for the next ten days.
Larry was worried about keeping busy enough, so I gave him the task of ship’s accountant—calculating the amount of boat gas and associated expenses needed for our travels. Then I made him swear to keep the total to himself. The golden rule of boating is NEVER, under any circumstances, divide the amount you spend in a season by the number of days you use the boat. Former boaters are in rubber rooms from coast to coast from doing that equation.
Our ship’s log tells the tale.
Day 1 (July 3) – Rough start. Worst Delaware Bay crossing ever. Wind made five foot waves, drenching us and our new red shirts, dying our white shorts pink. Robert crawled across the deck to get Larry a life jacket. I requested one too but he didn’t hear me for strains of There Has to be a Morning After in his ears. When the worst was over, we almost injured ourselves rushing for the vodka.
Made it to Cape May for crustaceans to go, and toodled up the Intercoastal Waterway behind Jersey towns of Wildwood and Stone Harbor. Collected ourselves and cooked a lovely lobster dinner at a marina in Avalon. It’s 70 degrees and windy. No A/C needed tonight—just open up those hatches and breathe!
Day 2 – Yeah. And inhale a lung full of gnats. Robert woke us up coughing and slamming the hatches. Too rough for ocean route today so we continued on the Intercoastal through the great black fly fields of New Jersey. No wonder the houses have no decks. As we were swatting, shooing and snapping the flies to death with towels, it crossed my mind that the backwaters of New Jersey may have given birth to the Macarena.
Arrived at Barnegat Bay marina 5 pm. and fired up the blender while Robert and Bonnie hosed sea spray off the deck. We’re exhausted and ready for sleep. In the distance we hear fireworks, but we’re too tired to care.
Day 3 – Gorgeous. Cruised calmly up the Jersey shore past long white beaches, Ferris wheels and roller coasters of Ocean City N.J. Small planes trailing ad banners buzzed overhead as we raced north. At Asbury Park, we saw something in the distance.
“Is it a tanker with smokestacks?”
“I don’t think so,” said the captain, squinting into the haze. “It looks like buildings.”
One more look and I got goose bumps—the twin towers of Manhattan’s World Trade Center rose on the horizon. But it was just a tease, as the towers disappeared when we veered west around Sandy Hook, N.J.
At a marina, we relaxed, read and napped, waking at one point to hear some seafarers behind our boat asking each other what kind of yacht club flies a rainbow flag. An exclusive one, I thought.
After yet another fuel fill-up, we capped the day watching fireworks on the beach.
Day 4 – We did it! At 11 a.m. with a clear sky and barely rippling water, we cruised under the Verazanno Bridge and right up to the towering Statue of Liberty. As her inscription says, “Give me your tired, your poor....” Well, here we were. Awesome.
At first, feeling very insignificant amid the tour boats and tankers, I was more like Yentl arriving with the immigrant tide than Babs defiantly singing on the front of the tug boat.
“You’re not really going out front are you?” asked Robert as the boat bounced and pitched from the wakes of passing tankers.
“I came all this way and I’m gonna do it,” I said, a poor, tired, huddled mass, inching my way to the nose of the boat and humming “No-body, no no-body, is gon-na rain on my.…”
We all took turns hanging onto the bow pulpit for photo ops and Captain Bonnie stayed calm even when the Staten Island Ferry threatened to crawl up our stern.
Then we cruised around the tip of Manhattan, under the Brooklyn Bridge and up the East River for spectacular views of the City skyline. A thousand Kodak moments later, we docked at the 23rd street marina—in the shadow of the Empire State Building, lit up red, white and blue for the holiday.
After venturing to Times Square for dinner and returning to our boatel, those patriotic lights were the last thing we saw, out our porthole, before falling asleep.
Day 5 – We wanted to wake up in the city that doesn’t sleep and here we are. But we didn’t know that Sinatra’s next lyrics about “king of the hill and top of the heap” referred to our dirty laundry. It threatened to sink the boat. We’re debating sending it home FedEx.
It rained this morning and it turns out that London Fog is not foul weather gear. Yogurt is holding out. We’re all still friends. And to think there were skeptics. Tomorrow, a short run to Fire Island. Hey, if we can make it there, we’ll make it anywhere.
Day 6 – Okay, so it was a little hazy on our way down the East River, but not what I’d call bad weather—until we rounded Coney Island and carefully ventured into the ocean. Suddenly, a thick fog completely socked us in, making it difficult to see the front of our own boat much less Coney Island. We would have stuck to our plan to hug the shore, only we couldn’t find it.
Then we heard the chilling moan of a foghorn. Omygod! The Titanic?
The guys studied the nautical charts and navigation instruments. “We’re okay, I know where we are,” said Larry.
We didn’t have the heart to tell him that our knowing where we were wasn’t the problem. Please let whoever blew that foghorn know where we were.
So we sounded our own deafening blast every 30 seconds, stayed as still as possible and wished we had bought radar instead of matching shirts.
And just when it got so creepy I thought I’d scream, an enormous tug boat trailing a thick tow line appeared. It was hauling a barge the size of Pittsburgh and was just a hair-raising 75 yards to our side.
My eyeballs changed sockets as it passed by us and I practically peed myself. Bonnie was struck dumb. “Anybody else mess their pants?” I cheerily asked. “That was close. Just a little farther and we would have been in that tow line....”
“But we weren’t,” said Robert, happily. You gotta love that attitude.
As the fog lifted we saw other small boats but still no shoreline. “We’re here, we’re queer, but where are we?” somebody muttered.
Before I could suggest otherwise, Bonnie hollered to a passing fisherman “Which way to Fire Island?” I thought she should ask for directions to the Rockaway Channel and leave it at that.
The unsavory-looking boater pointed sort of East and we took off before he could see the guys’ pink shorts.
Still fogged in, we inched along the shore, with dozens of jetties coming into focus in the nick of time for us to avoid crashing onto the rocks. Somehow we found the channel and puttered past the Fire Island Lighthouse toward our destination. Our three-hour hop had become a tense six-hour ordeal by the time we reached Cherry Grove—but the welcome made it worthwhile.
We docked at tea time with dragged-out queens frolicking and the speakers at Cherry’s bar blaring I Will Survive. It didn’t take long for us to tie up and mix cocktails to the sound of I Like the Night Life and YMCA.
If there were two women at the bar watching our happy hour on deck and saying “someday that will be us,” I had two words for them: “Get radar.”
So we took a water taxi to the Pines for a luscious dinner, shopped at the local Gay Mart and headed back to the boat. The piano bar was going full blast and the Ice Palace promised dancing ‘til 4 a.m. We were all asleep by 10:30.
Day 7 – Took a lovely walk through the Grove with its grid of boardwalks, unfurled rainbow flags and houses named Think Pink, Peckerwood, and YMCA annex. Perfect beach day and entertainment—swimwear is optional in Cherry Grove, although not for us, thank you very much.
Late in the day folks warned us that a big storm was brewing and the marina was a notoriously unprotected harbor.
We battened the hatches, put all our fenders out, tied the boat as tightly as possible and got the hell off—some of us more successfully than others.
With no finger piers alongside the boat and just a deteriorating foothold board along the seawall, every debarking was a crapshoot. We all share the humiliation of the one of us who took a header into the water as an entire Fire Island happy hour crowd watched and hummed It’s Raining Men.
Then, from a restaurant overlooking the slip we ordered an exquisite meal, watched the boat blow back and forth, and repeated, “What the heck, we’re insured.”
At the next table, a woman and her husband eyed the predominantly gay crowd, including some large and lovely drag queens. The man leaned over to the four of us (seated across from, not next to, our respective partners) and said “pretty strange crowd, if you know what I mean....” wink, wink, wink, followed by a Beavis and Butthead laugh.
“Yeah, and we fit right in,” Larry said proudly. The man swallowed his shrimp, tail and all.
The sky turned black, but then the wind backed off, a few raindrops fell and it seemed we’d dodged the bullet.
Later, we sang show tunes at the piano bar, caught the Ice Palace drag show, and returned to the boat under clearing skies and calmer water. Now we’re gently rocking in the slip with hopes for good weather tomorrow.
Day 8 – The storm was not over. At 1:30 a.m. the boat started to pitch and roll, waking everybody up so we could hang onto our bunks. “My God, we had sex three times and we didn’t have to move” said Larry.
At 4 a.m. most of us were up watching for flying cows or trying to hold onto the evening’s expensive dinner. By dawn we couldn’t wait to get the hell out of what was arguably the worst marina (albeit the best music) in the world.
“Don’t you guys try to shave or it will look like M*A*S*H in here,” I warned, casting off our lines.
Miraculously, as we neared the Jones Beach inlet to the ocean, sun and blue sky reappeared, turning the water absolutely flat. We set our heading for Asbury Park, N.J. and the four of us settled into doing what we did best: Bonnie cheerfully at the helm, Larry navigating, Robert obsessing over dirty footprints on the deck and me writing it all down. It was so gorgeous out, that the fact that we were out of site of land for hours on end did not bother us at all.
Finally we could make out the shore, bee-lined for it and pulled into a marina with wonderful facilities, showers and a pool. I’ll take clean bathrooms over Donna Summer and the Village People any day. Tomorrow: Atlantic City.
Day 9 – The good news is that it was another perfect boating day for our cruise to Harrah’s Marina. The bad news is we used all our luck on the weather. Bonnie and I escaped from the casino with just enough cash to get us home.
Atlantic City may be gaudy and ostentatious with its Trump’s Taj Mahal and 100’ yachts but it’s New Jersey all the same. It did our hearts good to see folks on the half a million dollar yacht next to us beating their monogrammed towels at the black flies.
Day 10 – Another gorgeous day. This time, Delaware Bay was a lake. As our happy crew, dirty laundry, and leftover yogurt returned to port, we bid a fond farewell to Fay, Bonnie, Robert & Larry’s Excellent Adventure.
It was thrilling and exhausting—and if we learned anything, it’s this: a boat’s radar arch is not merely a design feature, London Fog is not really foul weather gear, and invest in fly swatters.
But nobody, but nobody, rained on our parade.