One foggy morning this spring, a ferryboat traversed the choppy waters between lower Manhattan and Governors Island. It was just after 7 a.m.—the first run of the day. But, for the boat, it was almost sunset. “She’s our tether,” a lightly bearded passenger named Sebastian Coss said. Coss, a former Governors Island staffer, was referring to the ferry, whose official name is the Lt. Samuel S. Coursen.
Commissioned by the U.S. Army in 1956, the Coursen has reliably transported equipment, vehicles, and passengers to and from Governors Island ever since. During the island’s decades as an Army and Coast Guard base, the ship carried military families (as well as lumber and munitions). In its period of bureaucratic limbo, occasional government caretakers hitched a ride. Lately, food trucks, porta-potties, and luxury-spa-goers are a more common sight.
Two years ago, New York City announced that the Coursen, which runs on diesel, would be replaced by a thirty-three-million-dollar hybrid-electric passenger ferry. Asked if he’ll miss it, Coss chuckled. “If you owned a nineteen-fifties Chevy Bel Air and you drove it to work every day, there’d be elements of it you’d really love,” he said. “And you’d also be, like, ‘It’d be nice to have air-conditioning.’ ”
The new ferry has enough air-conditioned interior seating for twelve hundred passengers—plus room for thirty vehicles. It runs on two Schottel azimuth thruster propellers powered by twenty-two lithium-ion battery packs, making it the first vessel to offer regularly scheduled low-emissions travel across the harbor. Its name, the Harbor Charger, was suggested by David Kurnov, of Brooklyn, in a public naming contest. Other submissions included Climate Queen, Hybrid McBoatface, and the S.S. Electric Boogie. Coss oversaw the design and construction of the new ferry. It is expected to begin service later this month. A round trip is five dollars for adults and free for kids.
At nine o’clock, Coss and some colleagues boarded yet another ferry, the Staten Island ferry, to pick up the Harbor Charger from a dry dock, where it had gotten a paint job. The boat was at the end of a long pier. It looked like a floating white trapezoid.
Inside one of the ship’s battery rooms, an inspector wearing a hi-vis orange U.S. Coast Guard raincoat was examining its hybrid-electric system. Two men wearing blue hard hats, who worked for the ferry operator, were on hand. The inspector asked about setting up the vessel’s seven gas-detection systems. “You know how to do it? How to calibrate it?”
“We don’t know yet,” a hard-hatted man said.
“Make sure you have the manual,” the inspector advised.
Talk turned to cameras and alarms, and then to the vessel’s fire-suppression system. The other hard-hatted man said, “It’s intrinsically safe, but not necessarily explosion-proof!” At that point, a reporter was escorted out of the battery room.
Up on the boat’s bridge, he found Captain Aaron Gracely, who had led the five-person crew that brought the ferry from a shipyard in Morgan City, Louisiana. The voyage took fourteen days. The Harbor Charger travelled thousands of nautical miles through the Mississippi River Delta, around the Florida Keys, and up the East Coast. Gracely, who usually captains larger vessels—oil tankers, container ships—described a stretch when the boat ran on battery power down the Atchafalaya River. “On a typical boat, when the engine goes quiet, everyone wakes up, ’cause it’s, like, ‘What just broke?’ ” But on the Harbor Charger, as in a hybrid car, battery mode is virtually silent. Gracely grinned as he said, “The sun was coming up, and it was quiet. It was a gorgeous river—just cypress trees and birds. It was like you were in a canoe.”
Another memory: the crew’s engineer, Austin Wyant, wired a fishing rod to the ship’s bell. One day, he caught a twenty-pound wahoo, which he cooked on a Blackstone grill that he’d strapped to a railing on the passenger deck. Someone set up a makeshift kitchen, with hot sauce, sea salt, pickles, Clorox spray, and a handmade sign: “Billy’s Bar and Grill.” The crew slept on cots under tarpaulins each night. In all, Wyant caught a hundred and forty-five pounds of fish—Spanish mackerel, tuna, bonito, and mahi-mahi. Otherwise, Gracely said, “nothing exciting happened, which is nice. No weird rattles or vibrations. Nothing serious broke.”
Around eleven o’clock, back on Staten Island, a snafu: a cooling valve had been left open, so the batteries had to stay off for a while, just to be safe. Alas, the city’s first-ever hybrid-electric ferry would arrive at Governors Island fuelled by diesel from a thirty-four-hundred-gallon tank. Captain Gracely was unfazed. He powered up the diesel generators and motored away from the dock. (Governors Island later said, in a statement, “The Harbor Charger has successfully operated on battery power over the last several weeks.”)
In the Gulf of Mexico—or the Gulf of America, as it’s now known—a homing pigeon flew into the ship’s bridge. The crew named the bird Pidge. “We let him rest, gave him food and water, and then he left when we got close to the coast,” the captain recalled. “I guess you can consider Pidge the first passenger.” ♦
