Visit to Ellis Island

Liberty Island Park NJ, N40 42 W74 04
October 24. This morning I tied a line 150’ from Tarwathie to the wall onshore. That gives us the extra security for tonight and tomorrow’s rough weather. The man from the next boat hailed and asked to talk on the radio. We did.

The man, named Barney, he had his son Ben onboard. Barney kindly let me post my blogs using his SSB radio. He has the ham license and the extra equipment needed to make it work. I was impressed by how easily he sent it away. I’ll have to work on getting the ham license and the black boxes. My blog fans will appreciate it if we post more often.

Ben is a pilot for US Airways. He needed to go back to work so we rowed him ashore and showed him how to get the ferry to New York City. Ben sailed with is dad in the Caribbean, the Mediterranean, the Azores and in Southeast Asia. Barney is a real world cruiser. I’m going to try to pick his brain tomorrow.



Then Libby and I continued to the bus and ferry for Ellis Island.


I visited Ellis Island a few years ago with my sons David and John and my grandson Nick. Libby had never been there before. It’s a great place to visit. The photographs and the narratives make one really imagine how is must have seemed to the immigrants who were processed here. Doing that in the immense hall where they stood makes it poignant. The accounts say that there were numerous complaints about our treatment of the immigrants, but overall I got the impression that a lot of humanity was expressed in such a massive undertaking. About twelve million immigrants entered America via Ellis Island out of sixty million who immigrated to America (North and South) since discovery.

My favorite display on Ellis is a picture and a narrative about the man who brought warm milk for the children each day. He had a big pot and a ladle and it was sail that the children loved it. Wouldn’t you know though that I didn’t get a good picture of it.