A colossal living island has emerged three nautical miles off Atlantic City, and at least four agencies are currently arguing about the paperwork.

At approximately 4:47 a.m. Thursday, sixty-one people on or near the Atlantic City waterfront watched a landmass that was not there at 4:46 a.m. quietly finish surfacing. By 5:15 a.m., the U.S. Coast Guard had dispatched two response vessels. By 5:40 a.m., those vessels were holding position at a distance that Petty Officer Diane Lourdes described to me by phone as ‘professionally cautious.’ By 6:00 a.m., a man named Gary Spetrino had already zip-tied a banner reading SPETRINO’S FRESH LEMONADE — CASH ONLY to a piece of driftwood near the thing’s northern shelf.

The entity is the Zaratan — a cryptid of maritime legend so old that the earliest documented descriptions of it predate any modern regulatory body by several centuries, a fact the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey is currently experiencing as a procedural problem. As of Thursday evening, the Port Authority had neither issued a fine nor a docking permit, primarily because, as one internal spokesperson told me, ‘the relevant forms do not have a field for whether the landmass is alive.’ She asked not to be named. I am naming her department, which is Docking Operations, and I think that’s fair.

Community Notice

Three Agencies, Zero Consensus, One Living Island

The jurisdictional situation offshore Atlantic City is, by Thursday afternoon, a four-way dispute with the structural integrity of a folding table at a tailgate. The Coast Guard maintains primary maritime authority. The EPA has asserted that the Zaratan’s back — which by all witness accounts supports a functioning ecosystem including what appears to be a mature stand of scrub pine and at least one freshwater pond — constitutes a wetland of federal concern. The New Jersey DEP has filed a preliminary inquiry. And Gary Spetrino, the carnival operator, has staked out approximately 2,400 square feet of prime back-facing concession territory on the basis of, in his words, ‘first come, first served, same as the boardwalk.’ When I reached him by phone Thursday afternoon he said he had already called three food truck operators and was ‘very optimistic about the weekend.’

I’ve been in maritime law for twenty-two years. I have never been asked whether a landmass has feelings. That was not a category of question I had prepared for.

— Renata Corso, Maritime Attorney, contacted Thursday by WTC field correspondent

Witness accounts from the sixty-one people who observed the initial surfacing are, on the whole, consistent: slow emergence beginning around 4:30 a.m., initially mistaken for a sandbar, then a shipping container, then a ‘really big whale situation,’ in the words of one witness, before the scrub pine became visible and the framing shifted. Several described a smell — ‘low tide and old wood and something I can’t place,’ said one, which I wrote down because I have smelled that before and I know what it means. Nobody on the scene reported aggression. Nobody reported movement. The Zaratan has, as of my filing deadline at 9 p.m. Eastern, remained stationary. Whether this is patience, indifference, or rest is not something I can currently determine.

We are monitoring the situation. We are not, at this time, prepared to say what the situation is.

— USCG Sector Delaware Bay spokesperson, Thursday press briefing

I drove down from the Pendleton office Thursday morning — fourteen hours, most of it on I-84 East and then south. The cracked rear window does something specific in crosswinds near the Pennsylvania border that I have stopped thinking about. I got into Atlantic City at dusk and could see the shape offshore from the end of the pier: dark, irregular, still. The scrub pine was backlit just enough to read as tree line, which it is. The freshwater pond was catching the last of the orange. Two Coast Guard cutters were running lights. A news helicopter was making slow circles. Gary Spetrino’s banner was still up. I stood there for a while and wrote down what I could see and what I couldn’t, and the second list was longer, which is almost always how it goes.

WTC will continue coverage as the regulatory dispute develops, as the entity’s status is clarified, and as Gary Spetrino’s concession plans either materialize or, more likely, encounter an injunction. If you were among the sixty-one witnesses present during the surfacing and have not yet been contacted by this network, I am at the number on file. I am also at the pier. I brought a thermos. I will be here for a while.