It is feeling like spring in New York harbor.   Earlier this month a harbor seal  was seem enjoying the sun on an old pier on the Jersey City side of the Hudson. Harbor seal were once common in New York harbor but were hunted and finally driven out.  In 2006, after an absence of over 100 years, the first seals began returning to the outer harbor.   This year a young seal appears quite comfortable in the inner harbor directly across from lower Manhattan.

The New York City Police and Fire Departments will both have new boats in the water this month.   The new fireboat, named in-artfully, the Three Forty Three, will replace the Fire Department’s John D. McKean, which was christened in 1954.   The Three Forty Three is said to be the longest and heaviest fireboat in the world and is capable of pumping about 50,000 gallons of water a minute, more than twice that of its predecessor.   The yet unnamed new Police boat will be capable of speed of up to  45 knots powered by Rolls-Royce Kamewa water jets. The officer’s flotation vests are bullet-proof  or their bullet proof vests float, depending on how one looks at it.

New Vessels for New Perils

One of the duties of the officers in the Police boats is to keep an eye out for “floaters”.  “Floaters” are dead bodies that have fallen into the harbor. There are not many of them but in a metropolitan area of twenty million people, there are at least a few corpses that make it into the water, usually as murder victims or suicides.   Bodies dumped in the harbor in the winter usually sink during the cold months and  then return to the surface in April. (So far this year I haven’t heard of any floaters making an appearance, though in April 2004 there were four.)

Those who spend a lot of time on or around the harbor all have floater stories.  I do not, fortunately. I was, however, once single-handing my sailboat near Casco Bay in Maine and saw what I believed to be a body in the water.   It looked like a man wearing brown pants.   Fortunately, it was  dead harbor seal.  (Not fortunate for the seal, of course, but I had no idea what I would have done if I had found a dead human corpse.)

Spring in New York brings flowers—and floaters