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| A view of Liberty Landing Marina from Pilgrim alongside the transient dock. The big skyscraper nearby is the Goldman Sachs Tower in Jersey City, completed in 2004 and currently the tallest building in New Jersey. The skyscrapers in the background are on the other side of the Hudson River in Manhattan. | Click on the picture to display a chart of our route to Liberty Landing Marina. (136 kb) Use your browser's "back" command to return here. |
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| The fuel dock at Liberty Landing Marina. You can see a couple of small sailboats from Offshore Sailing School, which has a branch at the marina. | This is Esmeralda, a Great Harbour N37, hailing from St. Augustine, Florida. Believe it or not, this is the same boat that anchored near us at Sandy Hook in the wee hours of this morning. Jerome stopped to talk with them here at Liberty Landing. |
This was a nice marina with floating docks, a fuel dock, and lots of parking ashore, plus you can't beat the million-dollar view of Lower Manhattan. Of course, you get what you pay for: the transient rate was four dollars a foot per night, so a Tayana 42 would cost $168 a night. The marina was quite large, with hundreds of slips, and it extended far back from where the transient dock was located.
All along, I knew I would be heading back to Maryland once I reached New York, so one of the first things on my mind was to find out how to get to Amtrak. As I walked over to the bathrooms, I stopped at the fuel dock building and asked the attendants about train connections. They were basically clueless, telling me to travel to Hoboken (somehow) and take the PATH train to Manhattan. When I got to the marina service facility (which was aboard an old converted lightship), I stopped at the marina office and asked the lady behind the counter. She had a much more practical suggestion: catch a water taxi right here at the marina that crosses the Hudson and drops you off in Manhattan, then walk two blocks to the subway. Sounds like a plan.
I always check out the bathrooms in any marina I visit as I consider them to be the acid test of the marina's customer service commitment. Unfortunately, the bathrooms were quite underwhelming, especially for an expensive marina. They were located in the converted lightship, and were small, old, dirty, and rather shabby. I understand the marina is building a new service facility ashore; we could see the construction in progress.
The converted lightship also had a number of offices for boating-related businesses, including a branch of Offshore Sailing School. I took a course at the school a number of years ago, but it was held down in Saint Lucia, in the Caribbean. New York City would seem like a tough place to learn how to sail, due to the nearly continuous big-ship traffic on the river and the numerous boat wakes. But like they say about New York: if you can make it here, you can make it anywhere.
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