NYCkayaker Critical Mass/City of Water/war canoe?

[bonnie13 at earthlink.net]

Did anybody else hear anything about a war canoe that actually ended up running into some sort of trouble & needing help from the safety boats & coast guard? 

Tim's smart with his idea of if anybody wants to organize a critical-massy thing (ah, but then CM is not Organized, right?), it should be somewhere where if conditions get rough or anything turns weird in any way, it's not in the middle of shipping traffic & is somewhere that even the least-skilled paddlers there can get to safety without too much trouble. Cars can stop, barges can't, the wind & the current won't.

Everybody remember the big Governor's Island flotilla where a (totally forecasted) cold front ended up blasting through right in the middle of the event & a few skilled paddlers suddenly found themselves responsible for getting a bunch of scared novices in sit-a-tops off the Upper Harbor? Maybe people had that in mind when they asked for some overkill on this one. 

I of course wasn't there 'cause I managed to miss the sign-in deadline (the whole tale of woe is on my blog if anybody wants to read it, http://frogma.blogspot.com/2008/07/paddling-on-air.html ) but I did attend an early spring planning meeting & I really thought Carter & Ray had a pretty good plan - seemed like they were taking some good precautions to make sure even if things turned really rough, it wasn't going to be a repeat of the earlier flotilla fiasco.