A tremendous amount of time has gone by since I last updated this blog. And a lot has happened. I’ve still been drawing these birds, and I’ve still been tossing the bottles. I suppose I always was the sort of kid to work hard on the cover, but not the actual book report…

At any rate, bottles have been tossed, and bottles have been found. For instance, this one –

I tossed a bottle in Red Hook. This was in… 2011? Yeah, November 2011. Keeping with my theme of non-linear blogging, this was before the two Miami bottle I wrote about but not the THIRD bottle there. Which I’ll write about next. Clearly I should not be in charge of an actual ship’s log. This launch was from Valentino Pier. There’s always people fishing here.

Strange to think that this toss was also pre-Hurricane Sandy by a year. This spot a year later would be underwater along with almost all the rest of Red Hook. This neighborhood was very hard hit, and the clean-up was a long slog. I have a soft spot in my heart for Red Hook. I suppose a lot of New Yorkers do as it is such a charming neighborhood. It was one of the first neighborhoods I knew when I moved to Brooklyn almost 16 years ago. I also had my studio in Red Hook for years right near the squid processing plant. Top Ketch! There was a logo on their trucks that basically looked like the Planter’s Peanuts guy but he was a squid instead of a peanut. The monocle and top hat did very little to mask his smell, but at least he was classy.

I tossed a Roseate Tern from the Pier. This pier is a great place to see terns fishing during the summer without trekking all the way out to the beach. And with solitude, the smell, and the sound of the bells on the buoys, it can be just as transporting.