For the first night in a long time, I slept straight through the night. Well, the fun ended when I got up... As I said yesterday, the Admiral could not wait to get out of Atlantic City. I had barely finished the engine room check when she said "Can I start the engines yet?" We left the Golden Nugget Marina in light fog and 10 to 15 mph winds out of the southeast. Well, one of these days we are going to stay in a marina with a (heated) pool and/or hot tub that is actually open, but I am not holding my breath.
Our journey north took us 20.6 miles up the Intra Coastal Waterway to Beach Haven, NJ. The route took us through more beautiful coastal marsh and well away from the heavily populated barrier islands. We heard a call on the VHF radio requesting a tow from Tow Boat US from a boat that was grounded about 20 markers north of us. The channel markers are numbered sequentially with red being even numbers and green being odd. It was not a distress call, but rather he was firmly stuck in the soft muddy bottom. The picture on the right shows the scene as we passed. He was pretty clearly about 200 feet outside the channel, and the towboat is going to have to hurry since the tide is falling. It is now 8:00 pm, and these two boats just came into an adjacent marina so it took 8 or 9 hours to get him pulled into deeper water. We are already close to the area of New Jersey that was heavily impacted by Hurricane Sandy in 2012 so some of the channels are still silted in quite a bit. The ICW channel should be 12 feet deep at mean low tide, but in places we have had 6 feet or less for several miles at a stretch.
Speaking of (naturally) shallow water, we passed several uniformly flat, shallow areas full of fish stakes. Some of these are painted white while others were real natural branches from trees. I suppose that these are part of various signs indicating ownership. The stakes are pushed into the muddy bottom and have a short line with a baited hook.
We are staying at the Beach Haven Yacht Club Marina, and we are their first transient visitor of the season. Evidently the fuel dock is open all year, but the marina closes for 6 months or so. In the late afternoon we walked the 6 blocks to the Atlantic Ocean. The beach area was chilly since the water temperature in the Atlantic Ocean is 56F. Aside from one surf caster, we had the entire beach to ourselves. The town is also relatively deserted, and most of the businesses are closed with signs saying that they will open for the season on Memorial Day.
We did find a large, but quaint local restaurant open for dinner as we were headed back to Lucky Us. The "The chicken or the egg" has a long and varied menu. I had a grilled crab cake that must have been 100% crab meat. Wow! Luckily, the Admiral is already dropping hints about going back there for breakfast since we are staying here another night due to predicted rain and high winds tomorrow. Let's see... For breakfast I might just have to start with a short stack of pancakes smothered in peach cobbler. Oh, poor me...
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