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April 2017
18
Find Us On Facebook at Boating On The Hudson
by
Ralph J. Ferrusi
and
Ralph J. Ferrusi III
S
aturday night,
January 28, 2017, at the New York B.A.S.S.
Chapter Annual Awards Banquet at the Hilton Garden Inn in
beautiful downtown Auburn, New York, Ralph Joseph Ferrusi III
proudly accepted the Non-Boater Lunker*** of the Year award.
Some years (decades...) earlier, Ralph went fishin’ on Oscawanna
Lake with his grandfather, Ralph Joseph Ferrusi I (Pops), and
caught his first-ever fish, aWhite Perch. Here’s how Ralph III tells it:
“...man was Pops proud !!...we put it in a bucket to take
home and I was so happy and I just couldn’t leave it alone....well...the
bucket spilled in the backseat and the fish slipped down behind the
seat and I started howlin and Pops wasn’t quite as happy/proud as he
was just seconds earlier....we got home and got the Perch out
from behind the seat...unfortunately...Mr. Perch had expired, but we
showed him
off to Grams, then he got buried in Pop’s tomato
garden... “
Ralph III’s been a fisherman his entire life.
Around the same time, Pops took his son, Ralph Joseph Ferrusi
II (“Junior”) fishin’ out on the Hudson in a small, leaky, borrowed
wooden rowboat. Ralph II wasn’t lucky at fishin’, but boating
caught on, and he has been a “boater” his entire life, once upon
a time zooming all up and down the Hudson in his 14’ fiberglass
runabout, currently canoeing all up and down the Hudson (and
Beyond) in Kevlar or Royalex racing canoes.
Back to Ralph III:
“I joined Ulster County Bassmasters in 1997, won my first
Angler of the Year award in 2000, then went on to win the Angler of
the Year award 12 more times in a row from 2005 up to 2016 for my
“lucky 13th” time..... I’ve been fishing in the New York Bass Federation
“Local Boy Makes Good”
on and off since 1998 when I found out about it through my
Club.... Bass fishing has totally changed my entire life.....”
Saturday morning, January 28, we picked up Ralph III and
Ruby the Wonder Dog in Saugerties and headed for the
Thruway to Albany. We unanimously agreed not to take the
Thruway west from Albany: we’d take “the path less traveled”,
and experience a slower-paced, quieter Americana on Route
20. (A word to the wise here: we jumped off Exit 23 into
Albany to pick up 20. It seemed pretty innocent on the map,
but Albany’s western suburbs went on and on and on, with
endless traffic lights about every block or so). It seemed to
take forever for Route 20 to become a country road, but
finally, we were cruising through 1950’s Americana: farms
and small villages; hardly any traffic at all. Amazin’...
Then, between Duanesburg and Esperance, traffic was
stopped, dead, for a long distance ahead: flashing red and
blue lights all over the place, on both sides of the road. We
crept along, stop and go, at about two miles per hour, and
finally could see something enormous up ahead, creeping
along, pretty much taking up both sides of the road. What
the heck??? Long story short, a small STATE BRIEFS article
in the Friday, February 3rd Poughkeepsie Journal revealed
it was a 350,000-pound (175 tons...) General Electric-built
steam turbine on a 20-foot-wide 350-foot-long truck, on it’s
way to Pennsylvania.
It stopped dead in Esperance, and while we were stopped
Ralph figured out a back-roads route that might allow us
to get ahead of it, and we finally popped out on now-four-
lanes Route 20, cruising up and down long rolling hills, often,