The Dredge of a Lifetime

We were halfway between Coney Island and John F. Kennedy International Airport when we saw the horses. There were six of them trooping along the sandy shoreline, which was a surprise to most of us on board The American Princess, but not to Dave Avrin of the National Parks Service. “You’ll see some folks riding horses in the middle of Brooklyn,” he said, as if we had seen a pizza place or a fire truck.

It was our fourth hour on the harbor tour of the inaugural Dredge Fest, and we were deep in Jamaica Bay, the body of water that separates Brooklyn and Queens from the Rockaways. We had been told many times not to expect visual thrills. "One of the challenges of giving a boat tour about dredging," Tim Maly, one of the event’s organizers, had said as we swung under the Verrazano Narrows Bridge, “is that an enormous part of the landscape is invisible, because it’s underwater, and we can’t see underwater."