31/May/23 - 1/Jun/23
Atlantic City NJ - Mantoloking NJ Barnegat Bay Marina

• Start 7:00 AM
• End 4:06 PM
• Underway 7:00
• Distance 51 Miles
• Total Miles on Trip 204
• Avg Speed 7.3 Knots
• Weather - Partly Cloudy, 55 Degrees, Wind 4KN NE

Because the wind continues to churn the Atlantic Ocean, making it too rough to travel in the ocean and we want to catch the small window of good travel weather on Friday, we choose to take the inside route from Atlantic City to Manasquan Inlet. While taking the NJ Intercostal Waterway (NJ ICW) has it's challenges at least we can travel north. Because the NJ ICW is shallow in spots, typically you only travel on a rising tide. Mother Nature has been fighting us this entire trip, in order to make it to Manasquan before dark we would have to travel on an falling tide. As Matt & Ilene found out, you have to be extremely careful in the NJICW. There are place in the NJ ICW if you stray even 50' outside of the channel you run aground. If you do this on a rising tide, you wait for the water to rise and back out. If you run aground on an falling tide, you end up sitting for six hours waiting for the tide to come back in.

Other than Matt & Ilene's incident the trip went well. At times it was very stressful, no one likes running their boat with less than a foot of water under it. When water is that shallow it is a lot of in and out of gear trying to find water deep enough to go through. The good news is, after Barnegat Bay we will not have to worry about shallow water until we get back to NJ.

Barnegat Bay Marina has been totally rebuilt after being destroyed by Hurricane Sandy. The marina does not seem to see a lot of transient boaters, but it was reasonably priced and they had slips available. Most of the marinas that loopers stop at have no available slips. Because of the weather there are many boaters waiting to head north.

Our slip sat facing the bay, with both a picnic table and Adirondack chairs right behind our boat. It was a great place to grill steaks and watch the bay. Thursday we rode our bikes to Shoprite & Lidi to restock the boat. It turned out to be about a six mile ride, but the roads were flat and most of them had very wide shoulders.

Friday Morning conditions look perfect for our run past the Statute Of Liberty and onto Croton-On-Hudson.