The Lure of Seeing a Hushed City at Water Level

For years, a small, secretive group of people, most of them men, spent their off hours paddling just above the surface of the city’s dirty rivers in kayaks. They rowed to their own music, often alone, and few paid much attention.

Skip to next paragraph Enlarge This Image Robert Stolarik for The New York Times

In the East River waters, near the Long Island City Community Boathouse in Queens are, clockwise from right, Robert DiMaio, Monica Schroeder and Erik Baard.

Enlarge This Image Robert Stolarik for The New York Times

The Sebago Canoe Club in Brooklyn, on Paerdegat Basin off Jamaica Bay, held an open house on May 19.

Kayakers speak about their sport in spiritual terms: a feeling of freedom, the communing with nature, an enveloping quiet while paddling only a few meters off the Manhattan shoreline in temperatures that are often 15 degrees lower than on shore.

“When that sun is going down on the East River, there is nothing that compares,” said Robert DiMaio, 46, a documentary film producer who proposed to his wife as they were kayaking. “Everything is quiet. The lights of the city are coming on. It is beyond addictive. You want to be able to articulate it, but it is hard. The city becomes a theater of light and distant sound.”

Kayaking has been largely unregulated, but now the city is giving it closer scrutiny. The change has been met with both optimism and alarm by New York’s close-knit community of kayakers, which has grown to perhaps a few hundred serious paddlers since the mid-1980s.

This month, the Parks and Recreation Department began enlisting paddlers to help plan a water trail along the Hudson, Harlem and East Rivers, which will be turned into a guide that offers information about kayak and canoe launch and landing sites, suggested routes for day trips, safety tips, and data regarding currents and tides.

The city has also committed to building as many as a dozen new launch sites, in addition to the 18 that exist now, to counter complaints that kayakers lack sufficient access to the water.

Some kayakers fear that the Bloomberg administration’s new interest in the sport may spell the end of the carefree spirit that has often superseded rules in an activity characterized by volunteer instructors, free lessons and a go-at-your-own-risk attitude.

“Nobody, between the parks department, the harbor police, the Coast Guard — nobody knows what’s a real law or even what’s enforced any more,” said Phil Giller, 54, former commodore of the Sebago Canoe Club in Brooklyn.

Veteran paddlers fear that new rules are not far in the future. The parks department has said that it plans no major policy changes, but several paddlers who have spoken to parks officials privately say they have been told that the agency had become concerned about liability issues, especially as the city starts building more launch sites.

New rules, according to kayakers and department officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity, could include requiring safety courses, boat inspections and licenses. The changes could include the imposition of standardized hours, which might limit or ban off-season and night kayaking; nighttime forays have become particularly popular in the past few years.

The city could also become stricter about requiring paddlers to buy a permit for the season, which runs roughly from May to October. Such launch permits are currently required, but are rarely checked by the city.

The impetus for the change has been Dorothy Lewandowski, the parks department’s commissioner for Queens and an avid kayaker. She says the city has no sinister intentions.

“As I started meeting paddlers, I noticed there wasn’t a resource,” Ms. Lewandowski said. “We have miles and miles of waterfront, and people should have a place to recreate around that.”

Ms. Lewandowski said the department had not formally moved to change any rules. She said, however, that the city would probably start enforcing several regulations that had long been ignored, among them a rule requiring kayakers to have a parks department permit to be out after sunset.

“This allows us to coordinate with the harbor police and the Coast Guard so we know what is going on out there, because safety is paramount,” she said.

While no records of the number of kayakers and canoeists in the city are kept, the number of free trips taken by people at the Downtown Boathouse — a private group with three sites on the Hudson, at 72nd, 56th and Houston Streets — increased to almost 23,000 in 2005 from 2,800 in 1997. A national survey by the Outdoor Industry Foundation, sponsored by outdoor equipment manufacturers, found that the number of kayakers had increased by 23 percent in 2005 alone.

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