Greg Freitas spent September 10th, 2001 taking groups of clients on his schooner, Adirondak. He went to bed in the boat quarters and didn’t think twice about sirens that he slept through. When he went to his local coffee shop, the server’s eyes were wide with fear and pointed to a television screen, where Freitas turned and saw the image of smoke billowing from the North Tower of the World Trade Center. Freitas went back to the pier and started his boat to help in any way he could, thinking a small plane hit the tower. This would become the 9/11 boat lift, the largest water evacuation in history with an armada of about 150 commercial vessels to transport an estimated 500,000 people out of lower Manhattan to New Jersey and Brooklyn.
