There’s a guy the cops call Mr. Smith who lives on a boat tied to a log in the Sacramento River,just a short skip downriver from the Tower Bridge. He’s rarely seen, but he’s out there, hunkered down in a Bayliner named Takee One that’s barely afloat.

Traci Trapani and Jason Warren have been coming across people like this guy a lot. They’re officers with the Sacramento Police Department’s marine unit, and a big part of their daily routine is monitoring a subculture of boat people living on our rivers.

The cops have pulled about 10 wrecked boats out of the rivers this year alone, many of them from the American River over by Camp Pollock. In just over an hour on a sunny Thursday afternoon last week, Trapani and Warren came across four more old vessels moored in the Sacramento River, plus a makeshift raft of tied-together Styrofoam that someone is living on.

“Some of these boats are about to sink,” Trapani said, skippering a police boat past Old Sac.