They had a reel good time.
Dozens of fish fanatics went all in for the city’s first-ever Fish Migration Celebration — braving wet weather to display homemade designs of undersea creatures and cheer on boats passing by on the Hudson River.
Crowds gathered Saturday on the West Side Highway toted massive paper-mache sturgeons, flounder and eels — while they danced to the sound of marching bands. The pelagic party, which preceded a stunning flotilla of marine-themed boats that followed the journey breeding fish along the Hudson River every year.
“What better way than a celebration like this to make these invisible creatures and this Serengeti-scale natural event that’s happening in our community — the busiest city in the country — visible so people could really appreciate,” Tracy Brown, the president of Riverkeeper, told The Post.
“This is like a big natural migratory phenomenon and we should celebrate it. We should understand it, and we should support its continuation by cleaning the waters and removing dams and doing everything we can to let these fish continue their cycle.”
The day-long party kicked off with the fish parade in Chelsea, which saw dozens of participants carrying the shimmering school of fishy creations.
The party was a send-off for a flotilla of ships that traversed up the Hudson to Croton, following the very same path thousands of sea creatures make every year.
It was inspired chiefly by the Māori ritual of calling eels back from the sea to the freshwater in their community, Brown explained.
The eel was prominently celebrated at the party, with one of the ships decorated to look like the slippery sea critter. Four other ships were made to look like New York’s other iconic fish: the striped bass, the shad, the river herring and the Atlantic sturgeon — which was the “crown jewel” of the event.
“People love them because they were around from the time of the dinosaurs. They’re very prehistoric-looking — they have these plates on their skin and they’re they grow to be really large,” said Brown, adding that the largest one ever found in the Hudson was 14 feet long.
“And they live really long, they live to be like 60 years old — so they’re these huge old wise fish of the river. Sadly, they are endangered now.”
Riverkeeper is locked in a legal battle against New York, New Jersey and Delaware to take appropriate actions to protect surgeon, which suffer from overfishing and pollution.
Organizers said the Fish Migration Celebration was put on in part to raise awareness of the fish’s plight, while also celebrating the magnificent feat of nature that occurs beneath the Big Apple’s nose from spring to late summer every year.
The post NYC fish fanatics go all in on offbeat ‘Migration Celebration,’ including paper mache undersea creatures appeared first on New York Post.
