Digging the Ditch
Cruising the Intracoastal
Waterway from Cape May to Brielle, our writer discovered
a hidden New Jersey.
By Christopher Cook
Gilmore
Photograph by Walter Choroszewski
 Pictured
at right:
A bird's eye view of the Ditch:
The Ocean County portion of the Intracoastal Waterway.
The
sun was up and the Cape May skies were
battleship gray. A storm named Josephine was approaching
hard up the coast, but it was down in South Carolina and
still a day away. The air was cool, the tide was dead
low, and there was no wind on the bay. It was time to go.
 I was in the Lobster House Restaurant and Bar,
near the entrance to the Cape May Canal. My destination,
the Brielle Yacht Club, was 130 miles up the Intracoastal
Waterway, and all I had to push me and my garvey up there
was a six-horsepower outboard motor. At a quarter past
eight in the morning, the first Monday in October, I paid
for breakfast, kissed the waitress, and got in my boat.
On my way across Cape May Inlet, riding a
gentle incoming swell, I looked back and got a peek at
the ocean. It was wild and white from the approaching
storm, and a good half-mile behind me. I turned away and
twisted the throttle. Ten minutes later I was in flat
water, cruising at five miles per hour up the peaceful
blue bay behind Wildwood Crest.
The meadow grasses, autumn-gold at the top but
still spring-green at the bottom, surrounded me for
miles. The tide was all the way out, the marsh banks
exposed, and hungry shore birds were picking over the
shallows. I saw flocks of egrets, herons, and cormorants.
I saw gulls, terns, and oyster catchers. I watched a long
"V" of ducks flapping and honking south down
the wine-dark bay. The voyage had begun.
The Intracoastal Waterway, known to all East
Coast watermen as the ICW, or more commonly "the
Ditch," is a protected 1,500-mile inland water
highway stretching from Maine to Florida. Created in the
last century by an act of Congress as an aid to coastal
shipping, it was built by slaves, prisoners, and
immigrants. Today, though its use is mainly recreational,
the ICW is still maintained to high standards by the
federal government. The Army Corps of Engineers does the
dredging, and the Coast Guard looks after the buoys and
channel markers that show the way.
Navigating the ICW is as easy as traveling by
car. Channel markers are never far apart and each is
clearly numbered. To find out exactly where you are, all
you have to do is look up the number on your chart. About
the only things that can get you lost are fog or heavy
rain.
I am an explorer, and the purpose of my
journey was to explore the part of the ICW that runs
behind Jersey's barrier islands on the Shore, where I've
lived all my life. My equipment was a sixteen-foot cedar
garvey with a small cabin up in the bow. For fighting any
kind of strong wind or current--or a storm, God forbid--I
was seriously under-powered.
By noon I was passing under a high bridge
behind Avalon. With one hand on the wheel I heated up a
pot of rice and beans on a propane stove, and had lunch
underway. Two hours later, when I got to the dock at the
Deauville Inn in Strathmere, all I needed was coffee.
As I crossed Corson's Inlet the sun came
bursting out of the clouds. I opened the hatch and sat on
top of the cabin, steering with my toes. I turned on the
radio and tuned it to a classical music station playing
Brahms. Suddenly I was sound asleep and had run aground
on a sandbar. I had to get out an oar and push myself
back into the ICW.
Ticking along with the tide, I studied the
beautiful houses--many of them modern mansions with sleek
speedboats, sailboats, or huge sportfishermen at their
docks--that line the bay behind Ocean City. Then I was
back in the marshes again, following the ICW the long way
around Great Egg Harbor Inlet, which was no place to be
with a storm on its way. By 5:30, I was behind Margate,
my hometown, where I spent the night.
Josephine was off Delaware when I left Margate
at dawn the next day. The weather was clear and calm
until I sailed past Atlantic City. In the winding narrow
channel behind Brigantine it began to rain. It was dry
and warm in the cabin. I screwed down the hatch cover and
made tea.
I was doing all right until I hit Great Bay.
Suddenly the wind and rain came up, way up, and the
visibility got so bad I had a hard time spotting the ICW
markers. The tide was rushing out Beach Haven Inlet and
the north-east wind was screaming in. In my little
flat-bottomed, square-bowed bay boat, I was caught in the
middle.
I took two waves over the bow, but for some
reason pushed on. I spun the wheel. Everything got
better. It was still raining hard and I was running
against the tide, but the wind and waves were at my back
now, and I was heading inland, west, away from the ocean,
away from the fog and the storm. I found my way back to
the entrance to Great Bay, then ran two miles down the
bank until I got to the mouth of Motts Creek.
A little way up Motts Creek is a bar, the
Motts Creek Inn. When I saw it from the water there was a
guy up on the roof in all the wind and rain, trying to
nail down a blue plastic tarpaulin. There was another guy
on the dock, holding the ladder. They were staring at me
and shaking their heads.
Inside the bar I heard a strange whistling
sound. "There's a crack in one of those
windows," said Pete, the owner/ bartender. "It
always whistles when the wind goes over 35." Dick
and Gary came in out of the rain and we all had a beer.
There was a hole in the roof and the tarp wasn't helping.
The talk was all about boats, bad storms, and what a wise
decision I'd made out there on Great Bay. Gary helped me
tie down my boat, and Frank Basile, my support team, came
and got me half an hour before the storm tide crashed
through, flooding Motts Creek and the long dirt road
connecting it with the mainland. For the second night of
my trip, while Josephine ravaged the Jersey coast, I
slept in my warm bed at home in Margate.
When I left Motts Creek at ten o'clock the
next morning the tide was going out and the wind was at
my back. What had been a nautical nightmare the day
before was now a sunny pleasure cruise across Great Bay,
through the inlet, and into the peaceful thoroughfare
behind Long Beach Island. I made tea, turned on the
radio, and watched another beautiful Jersey barrier
island slowly flow by. At two in the afternoon, winding
through the eel grass, I arrived at The Dutchman's
Brauhaus, on the causeway that crosses Manahawkin Bay to
Ship Bottom. The Dutchman's was closed until the next
day. Instead of waiting 24 hours for it to open, I
slogged on.
By 5:30, I was sitting at Kubel's in Barnegat
Light, nursing a black-and-tan and going over my charts.
So far, in three days of steaming, I'd explored about a
hundred miles of the Intracoastal, at an average speed of
five miles per hour. What better way could there be to
study the rich details of New Jersey's most pristine and
scenic route?
I passed the night at Ella's Motel, and by
7:30 the next morning I was back in the boat following
the red and green ICW channel markers up Barnegat Bay.
(When you're headed north on the Ditch, keep the green
ones to your right and the red ones to your left and you
won't run aground.)
Right after a breakfast of Pirate Slumgullion
(rice and beans and peppers and tomatoes heated up on my
stove), I noticed a small sailboat with a tall mast
coming in my direction. It was a little wooden sloop,
painted yellow and looking very salty and seaworthy.
There was a lone sailor at the tiller and his laundry was
drying in the rigging. As we passed he smiled at me,
pointed down the ICW, and shouted, "Florida!"
At noon I shot into the Point Pleasant Canal
on the tide, a good thing, because I wouldn't have had
the power to run against it. With six knots of current
boiling under me and hard steel bulkheads on either side
of the narrow canal, the boat was at times difficult to
steer. I relaxed, a stick in the river, and watched the
trees of a dense and beautiful forest fly by.
In a few minutes I was churning down the
sleepy Manasquan River within sight of Brielle, the last
stop before the ICW goes out to sea and where my journey
would come to an end. I waved to people on the porches of
their palatial waterfront estates, and they waved back.
The dock-guy at the Brielle Yacht Club was expecting me,
and so was Gina, the pretty bartender at the Sand Bar.
She kept the Coors Lights coming all evening while I told
her about my ride up the Intracoastal. I mentioned the
run-in with Josephine on Great Bay. I talked about places
she'd never heard of, with names like Reeds Bay, Grassy
Sound, Nummy Island, Crook Horn, and Little Mud
Thorofare. I told her about the inlets and sand dunes,
the houses and docks and boats, the mudflats and marshes
and meadowlands that had been my environment for the last
four days.
I ate a big seafood dinner and swapped stories
with a salty old sailor named Roger, who was bringing his
cutter, Banjo, from Connecticut down to Florida. A
retired Navy man, Roger lived aboard his boat and was a
real coaster. After I'd told him all about the glories of
back-bay cruising through New Jersey, he shook his head
sadly. He was in port only for the night, he explained,
and the next day he'd be putting back out to sea. "I
don't want any part of the Intracoastal," he said.
"Banjo draws five feet."
I got out my charts and log. In all, I had
covered 130 miles of bay, as far as you can go on New
Jersey's section of the ICW. To get from Brielle to Sandy
Hook, you have to go out Manasquan Inlet into the ocean
and run twenty miles up the beach with only Shark River
for refuge if a storm comes up.
I'd made the journey in four days, with a
total of 27 hours at the wheel. I'd spent most of the
trip ticking through remote wilderness areas, accessible
only by boat. I'd run aground half a dozen times, but
never for a moment had I been lost. Okay, I never should
have been out there in Great Bay with Josephine, but
then, what is a boat ride without an adventure?
I slept that night on my boat, and the next
day Frank showed up with the trailer. We pulled the
garvey into a little marina off the ICW, got on the
Garden State Parkway, and an hour later I was home. The
journey was over.
Christopher Cook Gilmore
has written numerous articles about New Jersey's
waterways.
Copyright
© 1997, Micromedia Affiliates
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