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by YOAV GONEN
Two 17-year-olds who set off from Staten Island last evening on an ill-conceived adventure aboard an inflatable raft were rescued after strong currents pushed them into a heavily trafficked shipping lane that leads under the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge.
Amid a heavy emergency response, a small FDNY vessel piloted by Firefighter Joe Andryuk plucked the unfazed teens from the waters of Upper New York Bay shortly after 6 p.m. near the former home port in Stapleton.
The boys -- 17-year-olds Nikita Suponya of Rosebank and Edgar Reyn of Bay Ridge, Brooklyn -- said they had embarked from the shore near Alice Austen Park in the hopes of paddling under the Verrazano en route to an island off of South Beach.
"We wanted to go to the island, but the current went the other way," said Suponya, who like Reyn, was wearing shorts and flip-flops with no shirt. "We just wanted to swim to the beach."
Asked if they had ever tried such a voyage before, Suponya answered, "I've done it in lakes."
Even after the rescue the boys seemed all smiles, unaware of the danger they had faced.
"They were all the way in the middle" of the channel, said a member of the Police Department. "They got caught in the current."
Several emergency responders shook their heads over the "rubber dingy," the plastic oars and the tragedy that could have been had the teens not been evacuated from the shipping lane.
"They would have been on their way to Bermuda -- under the propellers of the Carnival Cruise ship that just went by," said a member of the Fire Department.
Emergency vessels from the Police Department's Harbor Patrol, the U.S. Coast Guard, and an FDNY Marine Co. 9 boat piloted by Joe Gagliardi responded to an anonymous 911 call, stating that a raft was struggling against currents about 1,000 feet off-shore from Stapleton.
While the boys had intended to travel under the bridge toward South Beach and presumably to Hoffman Island, which is part of the Gateway National Recreation Area, the current pushed them in the opposite direction from the time their small raft first entered the water.
They were rescued by Andryuk's boat -- which had been launched from the larger Marine 9 vessel -- just 12 minutes after the 911 call, according to an FDNY spokesman.
The two were taken to Marine 9's base on the site of the home port.
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