A cold Friday afternoon and icy conditions were not enough to stop a paddleboarder who decided to cruise the Hudson River with nothing but his backpack.
Eddie Freiberg, a real-state agent, recorded the “weird” adventure while showing an apartment to one of his clients. They were in a high rise building on the Upper West Side when Freiberg’s client spotted the paddleboarder.
“Oh my god, there’s a guy paddle boarding in the middle of the ice,” Freiberg recalls his client said.
He immediately pulled out his cellphone and recorded the seemingly unbothered paddler making their way south through the icy river. Freiberg shared the clip in his Instagram and quickly became a viral New York moment that left the born-and-raised New Yorker in disbelief.
“I thought I’d seen almost everything. I never expected to see that in the middle of winter,” said Freiberg.
New York City is still thawing out from a historical blizzard and extreme low temperatures that led to the formation of ice chunks on the Hudson River, the remnants of which are seen on Freiberg’s video.
Storm Team 4 reported icy temperatures for Friday, with a high of 38 degrees in the afternoon — and just 35 degrees for the Hudson River. NBC New York reached out to FDNY to confirm any reports on the mysterious paddleboarder, but the department did not immediately respond.
Freiberg has not gotten any leads as for the identity of “paddleboard guy.”
“Maybe we start tagging him, it will be cool to find out what he was thinking,” he said.