Grey and overcast was the Saturday afternoon, with clouds spitting down little flurries of rain over the 20 or so enthusiastic souls who had gathered at the bank of the Rondout Creek for the chance to sail as passengers on the good sloop Clearwater.
Hung with shroud and ratline, the mast of the replica Dutch cargo ship climbs 108 feet toward the sky. Standing close enough to the mast’s shadow, a photographer would struggle to capture the entire length of the mast in a single frame.
The occasion being the vessel’s first sail of the season, the Clearwater is a painted wooden emblem of a philosophy of environmental mindfulness and serves as the deck of an education organization set up by Toshi Seeger and her husband, noisy folk-hero banjoist, tireless advocate for the tired, poor and huddled masses Pete Seeger.
Traveling up and down the Hudson River, now to Albany, now to New York City, the Clearwater’s mission is to draw attention to clean-water causes while calling out and heaping scorn upon those who dare to pollute these waters.
To be called a sloop just means that a sailboat only has one mast. From the single mast you can get two sails going, jib and mainsail. And then to be gaff rigged, you need to fix a spar jutting out, up near the top of the mast. To this pole of wood is the head of the main sail bent.
And not just any sail. With over 3000 square feet of fabric, that mainsail allows Clearwater to boast one of the three largest sails in North America. A top sail could also be added to the rigging if it suited the captain’s fancy. But today it does not.
The boat boasts a retractable centerboard weighing between ten or three tons and as big as a barn door, lowered and raised with steel rope rolled by a winch. And so much for all that.
Seventy tons heavy, one mast. Three sails. The Clearwater.
The friendly propaganda one listens to at the outset is reminiscent of amusement-park banter. On a sailboat, there can be risk of injury and death. The jib boom is long and heavy like the trunk of a red oak tree. However unlikely, the realities must be communicated quickly to the initiate, and the message must be understandable.
“The first rule on board the sloop Clearwater, is that we have to stay on board the sloop Clearwater.”
“This is a sailing trip, not a swimming trip.”
Where the lifejackets are. What the lifelines are meant for. Where the lifelines aren’t, and why
Then the vessel casts off its docking lines and motors out to the Hudson River proper before raising its mainsail, an endeavor any able-bodied passenger is enlisted to take part in and stand in a line heaving and ho-ing the ropes to hoist the gaff up the mast, and thus stretch the enormous sail until the luff is tight.
To encourage them, co-captain Liam Henrie leads a work song attributed to black stevedores in the Georgia Sea Islands. These are the words he sang: Pay me Oh pay me, Pay me my money down, Pay me or go to jail, Pay me my money down.
Backed by the Weavers, Pete Seeger himself scored a hit with the live recording of the song in 1955. Class solidarity was achieved that morning for the length of time it took to haul the gaff up the mast.
The boat took the wind in its sails easily, and the vessel set off at about a five-knot clip.
Captain for the daytrip Rory Kane said that a flood current was carrying the boat north. “The current is with us right now,” said Kane, “So I’m considering just tacking and sailing back south.”
Second mate Robin Nevin had been tasked with working the hand winch to lower the centerboard. “If you’re familiar with other sailboats, they often have a fixed keel,” Nevins said. “Which is sort of a fin that is down all the time. We have a fin that we can put up, which was a key thing for the Hudson River sloops because it’s so flat and muddy at times.”
Because of the angle of sail that we’re at in the current and the wind, says Nevins, the captain basically wants some resistance from side slip, preventing the vessel from getting shoved too far into the lane.
The way the river is, just directionally, said Kane, the wind can pretty much either come out of the north or out of the south.
“Right now we have a nice westerly,” he said, “which is pretty cool. As we’re tacking back and forth, the biggest hazard then is the shore.”
The captain offers an old sailor joke. Wherein the person steering the boat, a coxswain or a helmsman keeps asking the sailor on bow watch for details. “He asks the guy on a bow watch, ‘Are there ducks over there?’ And he’s like, ‘Yeah.’ What are they doing? And he’s like, ‘They’re swimming.’ All right, A little time passes. He asks again. ‘Are there ducks over there?’ ‘Yeah.’ ‘What are they doing?’ ‘Swimming.’ A little time passes. He asks again. “Are they are the ducks over there?’ He’s like, ‘Yeah’. ‘What are they doing?’ ‘They’re walking.”
Second mate Robin Nevin lowers the centerboard
The keel for the Clearwater was laid down, construction begun in October 1968. The boat was launched on May 17, 1969. Those were the years that the Summer of Love had built at that strange intersection of history where an anti-war movement found itself heavily laced with acid and the celebration of casual sex.
The Woodstock music festival was just three months away from committing rock-and-roll history, and here was Pete Seeger sailing around and trying to get everyone’s attention to clean up “the foully polluted Hudson River,” in his words.
Fast forward 55 years. Since 1984, the Hudson River has been classified by the EPA as the largest Superfund site in the United States.
While that’s not the kind of information any Hudson Valley chamber of commerce is likely to highlight, for the executive director of the Clearwater David Toman it’s exactly what he needs people to know. “It’s the largest PCB Superfund site in the country,” says Toman. “A lot of people don’t realize that. So it is obviously very much still an issue”
Probable human carcinogens, PCBs are linked to other adverse health effects, like low birth weight, thyroid disease, as well as learning, memory, and immune-system disorders.
Two capacitor manufacturing plants maintained by the General Electric Company in Hudson Falls and Fort Edward, have discharged as much as 1.3 million pounds of polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) directly into the Hudson River over 30 years. While GE stopped dumping PCBs by the end of the Seventies, PCBs are forever chemicals, meaning the pollutant created in the river wasn’t going anywhere.
In 2002 the EPA issued a decision calling for the removal of the PCBs from the river bottom. The key objective of the cleanup remedy was to lower PCB levels in fish tissue. Though benchmarks were set that year, the dredging of river bottom sediment didn’t start until 2009, which is how we all got here now, worrying about the Hudson River as a Superfund site.
“The research that was done over the past five years indicates that the dredging work that they did that they were hopeful would help remediate the problem, did not meet the goals or the expectations,” Toman said.
The fish are still tainted with PCBs. The chemical is still present in the sediment.
Eating fish caught in the Hudson River is definitely not a good idea. Every subsequent tainted fish eaten adds to the infinitesimal amount already present. As the amount of the chemical increases within the body, so to do the chances of adverse health effects.
“Clearwater did a variety of studies, angler surveys where we actually were asking people across the region who fish, if they eat the fish,” said director of environmental action for the organization Jen Benson, “and we know that there are there are populations across the region that rely on the Hudson River as a primary source of protein.”
Women of childbearing age and children should never eat fish from the Hudson River, she said.
A moment of silence was announced aboard the boat, not necessarily closed-eyed and solemn.
Along with the suggestion to honor those native Americans colonized out of the Hudson River Valley by the European settlers, the passengers were invited to contemplate what they would for an undisclosed amount of time, which as it happened was broken by a ukulele rendition of a John Prine song, led by onboard program director Chloe Grey, in which the chorus goes: Father, forgive us for what we must do, you forgive us and we’ll forgive you, we’ll forgive each other until our face turns blue and we’ll whistle and go fishing up in heaven.
A little later, completing a long circle in her own life, a woman named Allison Leyland took hold of the tiller, another spar of wood maybe eight feet long, to steer the boat.
“So I was in high school in Beacon,” said Leyland, “And I used to help out at the Strawberry Festival. And Pete Seeger would come down and do singing, to raise money for the Clearwater sloop, and it was all about cleaning up the Hudson. This must be 1970, 1971. I graduated in 1973
So I haven’t been back here in like 50 years, and I just happen to have seen this and it’s like, Yes, I can sail on it. It’s pretty exciting.”
If the character of the crew and mission of the Clearwater operation demonstrates anything, it is that the earnestness and sincerity of the Seegers lives on and the mission of the Clearwater continues unflagging.
Clearwater offers a variety of programming during sails from the LGBTQ+Allies Youth at the Helm, (Queerwater) to the Sailing Classroom program, environmental education is always a feature, inclusivity a key component.
For a chance to experience the adventure on the river and familiarize yourself with the mission, Benson suggested a voyage on April 25th. “We’re doing a sail with this really wonderful writer and activist, Li An Phoa, who wrote a book called ‘Drinkable Rivers: How the River Became my Teacher.’ And so she’s going to be sailing with us on April 25 at 5 p.m.”
For information on programming offered during the sails check out:https://www.clearwater.org
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