Last week I took the boat out into NY Harbor with a group of friends to see the Red Bull Air Races. It was great because it combined three of my favorite hobbies: flying, sailing, and cooking for friends. I’ve mentioned before that I own a boat with my producer, Avram Ludwig, but Avram’s been in England with his girlfriend while she finishes her PhD, so now when I go out on the boat with friends it’s a lot of work because I’m sailing and cooking at the same time. As a result, I had to enlist some of my friends to help out. Below are some of the photos from the trip:

Sailing in the harbor was tricky not only because it was so crowded but also because we were trying to get as close as possible to the planes without getting arrested by the Coast Guard. The Coast Guard tried to keep the boats at a safe distance from the planes because only a week before one of the planes crashed into the water, so they kept rushing over to anyone drifting under the airspace. As you can see from this photo, we did manage to get right to the edge of the action, and it was really exciting to be right under the planes, hearing the roar of the engines as they took off.

The two friends I assigned to sailing the boat while I was cooking were Saar Klein (who edited Bourne Identity) and Russ Stratton (the producer of a reality show that I’m doing for A&E). It was a very entertaining study in contrasting characters: the rule breaker and the law-abiding citizen. Saar kept trying to sail the boat as close as possible and was unfazed by the Coast Guard’s reprimands, while Russ strained to keep the boat just outside the restricted area, denoted by yellow buoys. There was a lively debate on what was the “safe” margin before catching the Law’s attention, similar to the theory that going 5 mph above the speed limit probably won’t get you a ticket but 30 mph will.

Gerry Byrne, the post-production supervisor for Fair Game, was assigned cooking detail. It’s very ambitious to cook for a crowd on a sailboat like ours and many other boats that day were sailing over to us, trying to cajole us into giving them food. This was one of our more successful meals, much better than last Fourth of July, when I invited a crowd out to watch the fireworks and dinner but forgot all of the meat for the meal in my refrigerator! That night, we sailed from boat to boat asking if anyone had any meat we could buy. We were entirely unsuccessful and my guests went home hungry.

Related posts on 30ninjas.com:

• Doug Liman Blog: Sailing In Cannes Photos, Part 4
• Doug Liman Blog: Holding With Tradition, I’m Sailing the Hudson After the Covert Affairs Premiere Party
• Doug Liman Blog Birthday Pie With a Side of Boat Crash
• Doug Liman Blog: Flying to Canada To Protect The Action in Covert Affairs
• Doug Liman Blog: Valerie Plame and Joe Wilson to Watch Naomi Watts and Sean Penn Play Them in Fair Game
• Doug Liman Blog: Walking the Streets The Night Before Flying to L.A.