The James River “Ghost Fleet” is losing two relics.

This column contains no mea culpa, no “I was wrong.“ Today, the operative phrase is, “I told you so.“ If I was mistaken in thinking Shockoe Bottom was a viable and inevitable location for a new baseball stadium, let me now point out that I began advocating a riverfront site for a new ballpark in October 2000. Now comes Reynolds Packaging Group, which owns almost 18 acres of property on the south bank of the James River between the Manchester and Mayo bridges. It’s pitching this site for a minor-league baseball stadium.

The nation’s last known hand-poled ferry has gotten a reprieve to keep it afloat for three more months. The 140year-old Hatton Ferry on the James River faced extinction after the Virginia Department of Transportation cut its funding last month. The Albemarle County Board of Supervisors came to the rescue yesterday, unanimously approving $9,340 to cover the ferry’s costs through September.

Help is on the way for James River Park, one of Richmond’s most popular and heavily used recreational attractions. The City Council has given the park system $100,000 to hire six seasonal workers to help with park maintenance through the end of the summer season and early fall, with the option of returning next spring when the need for help is greatest.

A strainer in the James River is sort of like the one in your kitchen. Except it can kill you. To veteran paddlers and rescue experts, strainers are logs in swift water at or near the surface. They can upset a small boat, or catch—and drown—a swimmer. “It’s like a strainer you use for your spaghetti,“ said Anne Catherine Jensen, a senior guide with Riverside Outfitters, a Richmond company that offers trips on the James. “The water will go through, but you won’t.“

LYNCHBURG—Whatever other factors combine to make this year’s batteau trip down the James River unique, organizers and participants agree on one thing—this year’s should be a fast ride. Given heavy recent rains, the water levels of the James have risen enough to excite and, in some cases, concern those involved. The James River Batteau Festival started yesterday with 19 batteaux, according to Chairman Buddy High.

A Staunton man has drowned while rafting on the James River in Botetourt County.

Any race run in Richmond in June will require its participants to endure heat and humidity. As if that’s not hard enough, try running a 10K wearing a gas mask. Jeremy Soles didn’t just try to do that—he did it. Soles, 31 and a resident of Henrico County, came across the finish line in the XTERRA Fugitive 10K yesterday on Brown’s Island soaked in sweat and sporting a black gas mask.

By foot and by boat, nearly a thousand volunteers took to the James River yesterday to tidy up a 70-mile stretch of shoreline. Among the items collected: 479 bags of trash; 321 bags of recyclables; 150 large or unusual items, including an 8-week-old kitten (later taken to a rescue shelter); and one “LL Cool J at Brown’s Island” sticker in pristine condition recovered in Charles City County.

Is the James River Park system getting too popular? There appears to be some evidence to support that theory, at least at Pony Pasture, where visitors have their easiest access to a swimming hole from a parking lot, compared with other areas of the sprawling park. Traffic congestion has been growing in recent years at Pony Pasture, and it has swelled to the point where volunteers are being stationed as marshals at the entrance to the parking lot on weekends.

Playing hooky is bad. Playing hooky on rocks in the rapids of a rain-swollen river is worse. Four teenage boys were pulled from the James River yesterday just after noon at Pony Pasture in a rescue effort that brought dozens of responders, including 16 from the Richmond Fire Department, several police officers, and school truancy officers.

Anyone who has wandered the shores of the James probably has been dismayed by the amount of trash that lines its banks. Soda bottles, food wrappers, dirty socks and diapers, old tires, chunks of styrofoam, and less recognizable rubbish foul the water. This Saturday volunteers will spread out to pick up the mess others have left behind. The 10th annual James River Regional Cleanup takes place from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. If this year’s event is anything like those in years past, then it will fill hundreds of trash bags with small garbage and produce a mound of other human detritus too big to fit in bags, from sofa cushions to old computers.

Four teenage boys were rescued from rocks at Pony Pasture on the rain-swollen James River today.

With temperatures and water levels high, a rash of recent rescues, and the year’s first river-related death during the weekend, the Richmond fire department’s swift-water rescue team is off to a hectic start this season.

Last year, Tony Borst’s summer on the river ended poorly. Bludgeoned with a baseball bat in the middle of the night and left in the coals of a fire pit, he suffered 17 cracked ribs, a shattered elbow, third-degree burns and other injuries. But several months in medical facilities and one artificial elbow later, Borst is back home—on an island downtown.