Ah, for a day out on the sea. Or, well, out on the East River.  Ricardo Rivera of Yonkers and his fellow house-painters thought they had missed their stop. “Is this 34th street?” Mr. Rivera, 50, asked at Wall Street. They had spent the day painting condos on North Fifth Street in Williamsburg, the very condos that critics of the ferry would say the ferry was designed to serve. “It’s really nice,” Mr. Rivera said of the ride. “Really beautiful.” If it cost $4, he said, he would still take it. “The circle line only goes around,” he said. “This? This one is better. It zigs.”  Earl Pinto was back on a boat. He had gone to Long Island City, to test the route as he had intended. “I went home and got lunch, then came back,” he said. He took a photo of the view and sent it to his wife. Stuck in an office all day, she was jealous. Mr. Pinto only made her more so. The note that accompanied the view read, “‘Just chilling on the water.”  Our captain overshot the landing at North 6th street and the ferry swung, hard to the left, turning 360 degrees to head back. Someone on the deck yelled, “Whoa-oh!”  We have switched boats, from the un-airconditioned, scratched-windowed Peter R. Weiss to the swank Christopher Columbus, which even has cloth seats, upholstered with the sort of anti-dirt speckled plush used by United Airlines and ritzy bus lines. And armrests. Hallelujah!  Also on board is Matt Taylor, who lives on the same street as the ferry landing in Greenpoint, and has brought his seven-month old son Oliver on his first boat ride. “You try and show him the skyline, and he just looks at this thing,” Mr. Taylor, 33, said, pointing to the windowsill.  No one likes going to the Midtown DMV. No one. “I figured this would be the reward for that experience,” Michael Moreno said of his circuit on the ferry (he was going around for a second time).  “Other than motley tourists stepping on my feet,” said Mr. Moreno, 38, “this has been great.”  Mr. Moreno, who wears a scruffy beard and carried a tote emblazoned with a quote by Melville, looked seaworthy. Indeed, he grew up on an Island, Grosse Ile, off Detroit, and wound up near the water again, in Greenpoint. But he doesn’t make it out on the water all that often.  “The Ikea ferry doesn’t count,” he said. “It’s always packed full of shelves.”  The first time a ferry operator yells at a passenger, one of the 50 or so today who have leaned over the railing to watch the boat’s thick wake. “Do you want to fall off?” the ferry operator warns. “Because you will fall off into the water.”  Passenger retreats. Operator returns to cabin.  It was Antonique Pizarro’s first time on a boat. “It feels like flying, like you’re just flying, but you’re in the water,” she said. Antonique, 11, is from South Williamsburg but had never seen her neighborhood, or the Manhattan skyline, from this vantage point. She compared it to the opening credit sequences of a movie, when the camera swoops down to show the city from above. “Usually,” she noted, “people like to ride on cars or in airplanes. I’d like to ride on boats every day.”  “If someone asked me what the best state is,” she said, leaning eagerly over the railing, “I say New York.” She and her family got ready to get off at 34th Street. Antonique looked as if she didn’t want to.  Earl Pinto, 61, has been on 19 cruises, the best of which weaved down the Panama Canal. Standing at the stern of the boat, watching the dock at 34th street recede, he treated his ride on the ferry as cruise No. 20. He had brought sunglasses and wore a fishing hat.  “The water’s always beautiful,” said Mr. Pinto, who has even fished in the East River, though he prefers Sheepshead Bay.  He was here as well for more practical reasons. Though he works in Manhattan, teaching at Baruch College, his wife works in Long Island City. “I want to see how long it takes to get there,” he said.  Emily Shephard, of Greenpoint, was the first person on the inaugural day of the ferry Peter R. Weiss to get stuck on the boat. A saleswoman for the Brooklyn Roasting Company, whose coffee will be sold aboard the boats, sell its wares on the boats, she was delivering a re-up of iced coffee when the boat departed from Dumbo, where the roasting takes place a few blocks from the slip.  “It’s O.K.,” she said, “I’ll be back in five minutes.” At 11:16 a.m., she hopped off again. Good thing; she had left her car by the dock, unlocked and open.  Each of the three boats that cross the river runs continuously, leaving ports as soon as waiting passengers board, without sticking to an exact schedule. The idea is that they won’t waste time (and gas) idling in ports, and every pier will see a boat at least every half-hour.  Northbound, the boats run from Wall Street to Dumbo to Schaefer Landing in South Williamsburg to North Sixth Street in Williamsburg to India Street in Greenpoint to Hunter Point South in Long Island City, Queens. Then they dock at 34th Street and reverse the direction of the stops. The effect is such that if you’re Manhattan-bound, you’re better off getting on at either the north or south end of the route, where the boat quickly doubles back.  Nilda and Barry Birnbaum, who are retired from jobs working for the city, board the ferry at Dumbo and plan to take it for a full loop — to “test it out,” Mr. Birnbaum says. They sit on the boat’s top level, looking ahead as it cuts across the water. Having raised their children on Staten Island, they’re used to ferries. “This one’s fancier,” said Mrs. Birnbaum, looking around. “Not as dirty.”  “It’s very fast for people who work on Wall Street,” Mr. Birnbaum noted. “Where it docks, these are yuppie neighborhoods.” They spoke, as New Yorkers are prone to when confronted with a short lull in conversation, about gentrification, real estate, their favorite neighborhoods. “Our son told us he was moving to Williamsburg in the ’90s,” Mr. Birnbaum noted. “We said, ‘Are you crazy?’ His neighbor was Norah Jones.”  Danielle Maveal and her pup, Myrtle, wearing a collar sewn with rosettes, board the ferry from India Street, a potholed commercial row in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, to head down the river to Ms. Maveal’s job at Etsy, in Dumbo.  It is Myrtle’s first day on the water, too.  “She’s adapting to all these different modes of transportation,” Ms. Maveal says. “I’m taking her to Germany in September, so she’ll ride a plane.”  Jose Luis Coirolo is sitting in a booth downstairs at 7:45 when he sees a familiar face board at Schaefer Landing in South Williamsburg. It’s James Heygate-Browne.  “We’re boat colleagues,” Mr. Coirolo says. “We’ve taken it through blizzards.” Hardcore river commuters, they’ve been taking the four-times-a-day ferry the New York Waterway operated from select stops before it rolled this out. Mr. Heygate-Browne is “surprised” to see that the ferry is a single-hull model. He finds them relatively tippy.  A morning rush is building. At 8:30 a.m., 71 passengers get off at 34th Street.  The Brooklyn borough president, Marty Markowitz, is holding on to the railing that leads up to the second floor of the 149-seat ferry, which has navy blue vinyl floors and big scuffed windows. “Brooklyn is three-quarters covered by water,” he says, though he doesn’t look too comfortable on it. His knuckles around the pole are going white.  At 7:35, the boat arrives at East 34th Street. Safe passage, Mr. Markowitz! Mayor Bloomberg, City Council Speaker Christine C. Quinn, and their respective entourages debark into the fog rising over the water, where cars await them.  The heavy clouds strung over the East River make the bunting swagged over the North Sixth Street dock in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, seem limp and sad. The first boat is supposed to depart at 7 a.m. It is late. Around 7:15, it pulls in.  Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, in a seaweed-colored tie, stands among a crowd of officials and reporters at the dock and explains the ribbon-cutting process.  He’ll count to four, they cut on three. “No mistakes,” the mayor says.  At 7:20, the boat pulls out. We are bobbing on the water. Mr. Bloomberg is drinking sustainable coffee and riffing about his first commute at age 10. It involved playing a game called red dog. “I would stop the commute halfway to play red dog and then make it home.”  As the ferry nears the Long Island City terminal, the mayor waves out the window. Two kayakers use their paddles to wave back.
City Room spent the inaugural day of the East River Ferry service cruising back and forth between Brooklyn, Queens and Manhattan.