I Paddled to a Sinking Ferry in Newtown Creek

I Paddled to a Sinking Ferry in Newtown Creek I left New Jersey on March 22nd to paddle Newtown Creek, the 3.8-mile waterway dividing Brooklyn and Queens and an EPA Superfund site since 2010. Billy, the Graffiti Wanderer, invited me out and guided the trip. Six miles in, coming around a bend past the Grand Street Bridge, we found the M/V Schamonchi: a 270-ton steel ferry, four stories tall, sitting half-sunk in the mud with a containment boom strung around her waterline. She was built in East Boothbay, Maine in 1978 and spent twenty-five years running passengers between New Bedford, Massachusetts and Martha's Vineyard. Her last season as a ferry was 2003. She came to Brooklyn in the mid-2000s, became an underground arts and music venue, then a squat, then a slow sinking. You can still see the EXIT sign and the red stairwell through the opening in her side. A man living on a houseboat alongside her made it clear we weren't boarding. We didn't. We looked and we left. Along the way: a scrap-yard grapple crane working the water's edge, a fisherman who's watched this creek change since long before the cleanup, hand-built docks at the end of dead-end streets, a mockingbird running through half a dozen borrowed songs on a Superfund site, and a fingerboard skate park under the Kosciuszko Bridge that I got more excited about than the paddle. Newtown Creek has been taking industrial damage since the 1850s. It's still a working waterway. It's still full of life. A note on the fumes: partway through I started feeling woozy and said on camera that I thought it was the creek. I don't know that. It could have been psychological. I've left it in because it's what happened, not because it's a diagnosis. — OPEN THREADS, help me out in the comments — The low rail bridge near the launch. I guessed "a branch off the L" on camera and I'm not confident. Sunnyside Yard is right there. If you know the actual line, tell me and I'll pin it. The Schamonchi's status right now. A nonprofit has been working to raise her and tow her to the Brooklyn Navy Yard for restoration. If you know where that stands, post below. The waterfront building around 18:37 — I called it one thing on camera and I'm not sure I had the name right. — CHAPTERS — 0:00 Launching on a Superfund Site 1:19 Under the Low Rail Bridge 3:19 The Scrapyard Claw 4:17 Hand-Built Docks and Dead-End Streets 7:59 The Fumes Start Getting to Me 9:13 Fishing for Stripers in a Superfund Creek 10:34 Under the Kosciuszko Bridge 12:26 Pit Stop at Maspeth Avenue Plank Road 18:37 The Tree Growing Out of the Bulkhead 20:07 The Grand Street Bridge 20:56 The Sunken Ferry: M/V Schamonchi 26:56 Getting Off the Water 29:35 Under the Bridge: The Fingerboard Park 32:26 Meeting Matteo and the Fingerboard Crew 36:09 Heading Back to Jersey Shot on a DJI Osmo Action and Gopro Hero Black 10. I paddled a rotomolded sit-on-top; Billy was in an inflatable and had the better boat for the day.