4th of July from the Statue of Liberty

4th of July from the Statue of Liberty.
the people at our marina told us we were crazy to take the boat down there, but boy were they wrong. we got there really early, like 2 pm because we did not know when they closed down the east river and the Hudson.

in our boat anchored 200 yards off of the Statue of Liberty....waiting for it to get dark, only xx hours to go... while waiting we saw what i thought was the blue angels coming from afar. it turned out to be 6 NYC police helicopters that buzzed around the statue for an hour or so. not sure what they were doing.

turned out only about 15 boats were anchored like use between the statue and Ellis island, right off the shore of liberty park NJ where the biggest fireworks show i have ever seen exploded over our heads. see more pics at:

http://picasaweb.google.com/sandeb2/4thOfJulyFromTheStatueOfLiberty
at about 1030 when the 3 fireworks shows we coudl see wre over we headed to the east river to go back to our marina. the coast guard sopped us for '10-15 min' that turned out to be longer and they sort of hassled us tho i did everything they asked us to do. then we started up the east river which is about 300 yards wide. soon we were in the middle of about 25 80 foot cruise boats all coming towards us about 3 at a time from all sides at about 20 knots throwing huge wakes. i tried to point into the wakes without getting in front of other boats which was hard and we took water over the bow of the boat twice which we never id in the atlantic ocean. it was very exciting and certain crew members were yelling "we're all going to die..."