Kayakers Rescued Near Waterfall in Harbor

Erik Baard was 200 yards away from a smooth, placid day on the water. The weather was warm, the water picturesque, and Mr. Baard and 26 other kayakers were just about to finish their trip Friday on the Brooklyn waterfront, from Red Hook to Governors Island and finally on to Dumbo.

But then Mr. Baard heard a commotion and looked back, and suddenly, his uneventful trip had become a cautionary tale about what goes wrong when kayakers mix a little horseplay with a huge art exhibit along the East River.

Two of the kayakers, in one boat, capsized after straying too close to a waterfall erected by the Danish-Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson under the Brooklyn Bridge, the police said. The two, Bert Rosenblatt, 36, and Vladimir Spector, 37, were rescued by a police boat and taken to a hospital, and released shortly after with no injuries, the police said.

Mr. Baard said the men had been “goofing around,” and got too close to the fall as they tried to take pictures.

The accident happened as Mr. Baard and two other experienced kayakers were leading a fund-raising paddle for the Long Island City Community Boathouse, a nonprofit organization of which Mr. Baard is a founder. Their charges were 24 members of the Young Men’s/Women’s Real Estate Association of New York, many of them intent on taking photographs of the four cascades of water that were installed last month along the vast sweep of New York Harbor.

Everything had gone off without a hitch. With the falls under police protection, the kayakers were warned to steer clear.

But when the group reached the waterfall that flows from a scaffold under the Brooklyn Bridge opposite Pier 17 in Manhattan, two minutes from the kayakers’ dock, Mr. Baard looked back, as he does frequently on such trips, and saw two of the novice kayakers flailing in the water, their boat upside down.

At that point, what should have been a routine rescue turned into a spectacle that involved dozens of police officers, a swarm of reporters and baffled passers-by.

Before the group had taken off, everyone had been given instructions repeatedly about what to do should their kayak flip over or drift into trouble, said Mr. Baard, who as a freelance writer occasionally contributes articles to The New York Times.

Rule 1, clutch your paddles, they were told. The men let them go. Rule 2, hold onto your kayak. Instead they let it drift away, and clung to the buoys and containment barriers that were meant to cordon off the waterfall, Mr. Baard said. If the men had followed their instructions, Mr. Baard said, they would have drifted to a calmer part of the river, where they easily could have gotten back into their kayak.

“I don’t know if they were afraid or what,” he said. “One issue was that they didn’t know us very well, so they didn’t have an immediate trust of our judgment, which would have helped. But they didn’t listen to what we asked them to do, and so at that point I tried to let the police take over.”

Paul J. Browne, the chief spokesman for the Police Department, said that after one of the police boats guarding the waterfall noticed the commotion, the waterfall was shut off and a 20-minute police rescue operation began.

When the officers arrived at the scene, they found Mr. Baard pleading with one of the men, who were both wearing life vests, to let go of the barrier, but to no avail. Eventually, the police ordered him to let go, and the man complied.

“One of the kayakers was able to swim towards the launch,” Mr. Browne said, “while the other was thrown a line and put it around himself, and he was pulled out of the water.”

Mr. Spector and Mr. Rosenblatt were taken to New York Downtown Hospital “after having swallowed quite a bit of water,” Mr. Browne said, but were quickly released. Under other circumstances, the rescue may have been routine. But the sight of two men flailing under a waterfall under the Brooklyn Bridge left many onlookers baffled. Josh Brown, 29, a waiter at the River Cafe who witnessed the rescue, said he had seen people jump off the bridge before. This, he insisted, was more bizarre.

But Mr. Baard was unfazed.

“In a harbor like New York, where everything is under watch, it gets inflated,” he said. “But it was routine. The only damage is to our reputation and our pride.”

By ANAHAD O’CONNOR

 

Kareem Fahim, Christine Hauser and Colin Moynihan contributed reporting.

New York Times