It’s still a bit early in the season for serious ice, but one of the Coast Guard’s two big Bayonne-based icebreakers, the Sturgeon Bay, was heading north on the North River on Thursday. Sturgeon Bay continued upriver to Kingston where she arrived by sundown. As usual, the 37-year old vessel was putting out a lot of smoke running against the ebb tide. The Coast Guard has an RFI out for proposals to replace these 140-foot boats as well as the smaller 65-foot icebreakers we see on the river but Sturgeon Bay and her local counterpart Penobscot Bay are going to be working hard keeping the upper Hudson navigable for the next four or five years at least until those new boats can be designed and built.