Party Boats and Postwar

A party boat sells a seat. That is the whole idea, and the reason the boats were also called head boats: you paid by the head, you took whatever rail was open, and you fished next to a stranger from Newark who had been doing it every Saturday for eleven years.

Nobody chartered the boat. Nobody had to know anybody. You showed up at the dock in the dark with a thermos and the price of a seat, and the boat left whether you were on it or not.

That arrangement built the second half of the twentieth century in Highlands. It is a democratic thing, an open boat, and it fit a town that had always made its living by letting the water come to it — the clam flats, the rowboat liveries, the shore dinners sold off a beached houseboat at the foot of the bridge. The fleet that came out of the war years was not the town's first maritime economy and it was not its last. It was the one the town's living memory sits inside.

There was no fleet to speak of before the war. If you came down to Highlands to fish, you rented a boat and you rowed it.

Roxy Rocigliano ran a livery — Roxy's — and hers were the boats most visitors ended up in. Some worked the Shrewsbury River, close enough to walk to and forgiving enough to fish badly in. The rest were handled the way a working town handles a problem: the skiffs were tied bow to stern in a long string, towed out to the point of Sandy Hook behind a single boat with an engine, and cut loose on the grounds. When an angler had had enough, he stood an oar upright in the boat. Somewhere out on the water the tow boat saw it and started collecting.^[1]

It is worth sitting with that image, because it is the entire pre-war economy in one frame. No schedule. No radio. No refunds. A man holds up an oar and eventually someone comes.

Two doors away, Jack and Florence Bahrs had bought a beached two-story houseboat at 2 Bay Avenue in 1917 and moved their rental boats over to it. They sold bait, rented rowboats, and cooked dinners for fishing parties who came down on the Friday night train and paid $2.50 for room and board. When a nor'easter wrecked the rental fleet, they sold breakfast, lunch and dinner to raise money for new boats, and that is how Highlands got a restaurant that outlived every boat it was built to serve.^[2]

John "Johnny" Sciortino came from Sicily by way of a ship that landed in Boston and a life in Newark. In 1945 he opened Johnny's Landing on the Highlands waterfront.^[1]

What he did there was not invent fishing. People had been taking a living out of this bay for as long as there had been anybody here to take it. What Sciortino did was industrialize the trip. He put boats on a schedule, put a price on a seat, and made it possible for a man with no boat, no gear and no connections to be on the ocean by six in the morning and home by dinner. Henry Schaefer, who wrote the outdoors column in the Newark Star-Ledger, later gave him the credit without hedging it: it was Sciortino, at Johnny's Landing, who developed the Highlands charter-boat business.^[1]

It worked the way things work in a small town, which is to say it worked through everyone else. Johnny's Landing became the Highlands Marina. Sons came into it. By the late 1950s the marina held about a dozen six-pack charter captains and about five open boats, and it held a cocktail lounge where all of them ended up in the afternoon with the day's story already improving.^[3]

In 1960 a group of them founded a club at that bar and named it for the dock — Sciortino, Ruett, Beatty, Coles, Moro, Cirello, Quackenback and the Renzo brothers. Hi-Mar, short for Highlands Marina. It met monthly in the marina. It grew to about 35 members. Its contests were sponsored, as most things in New Jersey were sponsored in 1962, by Schaefer Beer, and in 1967 its members took a patch home as state champions of the 21st Annual R. J. Schaefer Salt Water Fishing Contest.^[3]

The club is still going. It meets in a VFW hall in Port Monmouth now, a few miles west of the dock that gave it its name — which is a small and accurate description of what happened to everything else in this chapter.

One house rule survives. On Otto Ruett's First Timer, if you caught your first striped bass aboard, you owed the captain a bottle.^[3]

And one boy. Phil Sciortino, Johnny's son, mated on that boat and learned enough there to become one of the best striper fishermen on Raritan Bay — then opened a tackle shop on Route 36 in Hazlet on Halloween of 1976, back when, as his own son puts it, there was nothing on that highway at all.^[1]

The rhythm of the year set the rhythm of the dock, and the dock set the rhythm of the town.

Summer was the open-boat season: bluefish, porgies, fluke, sailing daily, the boats loading in the dark and the bait shop opening before the diner did. Striped bass ran the rips off the Hook and the shoals at Flynn's Knoll, and the men who fished them worked out methods the whole coast would eventually copy — worming for bass, livelining bunker, chunking the Knoll, trolling plugs through the Sandy Hook rips at night.^[3] Fall and winter meant bottom fish and long runs: ling, whiting, mackerel, flounder.^[4] The Shrewsbury Rocks, a few miles off the Monmouth beaches, were close enough to be a routine run and serious enough that men hooked giant bluefin tuna there from boats not built for it.^[1]

The distinction that ran the business was between a head boat and a charter. A head boat sold every seat it had and did not care who bought them. A charter sold the whole boat to six men who had planned it in February.

What the era does not leave us, and what this project would most like to recover, is the small arithmetic of it: the price of a morning trip in 1958 and in 1975, what a mate took home out of the pool, and who cleaned the fish on the rail. Those numbers are in a shoebox in somebody's attic on Miller Street.

It would be a distortion to tell the postwar decades as a sportfishing story alone. The borough's own 1975 history names three industries, in this order: fishing, clamming, and boating.^[4]

Clamming is the older trade and the harder one. Parkertown, where the Navesink met the bay, was a hamlet organized entirely around the bivalve — a visitor in 1889 wrote that clams were to Parkertown what the whale had been to Nantucket. Early in the century the borough had 10 processing plants. Two were left by 1975. The men went out in the dark and raked clams off the bottom; their wives opened them, stripped them, and strung them 25 to a string for shipping.^[4]

What kept the industry alive was chemistry, not nostalgia. A clam out of these waters cannot go straight to market. It has to depurate — 48 hours in clean circulated seawater while it purges itself — and that cycle is the only reason a Sandy Hook Bay clam can legally reach a plate. The Baymen's Protective Association pushed for a public purification plant for more than a decade and got one in 1974, built on $50,000 of public money. It closed in the mid-1980s when it could no longer meet health standards, the clammers had to truck their catch to South Jersey to be purged, and the cost of that drove a lot of men off the water for good.^[5]

It came back because of one person. James T. White — clammer, schoolteacher, former mayor of Highlands — secured a $1.3 million grant from the Port Authority in 1991, tied by agreement to a nonprofit public facility. He died before it opened. The plant that carries his name opened in 1994, and the association became a nonprofit in 1998.^[6] The J. T. White plant now sends more than 40 million clams a year to market from a borough-owned building at the edge of a town most people drive through on their way to the beach.^[5]

The lobstermen worked a third clock. Out at 5 in the morning, as far as 17 miles offshore east or southeast of the Hook, 600 pots set in strings of 30, hauled every fourth day, back around 4 in the afternoon to sell to the seafood stores and the restaurants. In 1975 the borough's historian noted what those men did with their evenings: they wrote to Congress, trying to get a 200-mile limit enacted to save an American commercial fishery they could feel slipping.^[4] They got it the following year.

Here is the fact that explains more about the modern Highlands waterfront than any story about decline. Atlantic Highlands has a harbor. Highlands does not.

Over the following decades the open-boat fleet did what fleets do: it went where the slips, the depth and the shelter were. The party boats now sailing off Sandy Hook Bay leave from the Atlantic Highlands municipal basin, and the Fishermen and the Mi-Jo among them carry names that were tied up at Johnny's Landing when Eisenhower was president.

On the sixth of March, 1962, a nor'easter stalled off the coast for three days and five high tides. It killed 40 people, destroyed or badly damaged tens of thousands of homes in New Jersey alone, and rewrote the barrier beaches.^[9] Across the river, the Sandlass family's Highland Beach resort did not open again. That story is told in Chapter 9, Highland Beach; what belongs here is the aftertaste. Every captain of a certain age in this town can tell you where he was that week.

In 1974, Bud and Peg Bahrs retired after thirty-odd years of turning a seasonal fishing-party kitchen into a year-round restaurant, and Ray Cosgrove took it over.^[2]

On the first of January, 1975, the last military installations on Sandy Hook stood down, the peninsula passed to the National Park Service as part of Gateway National Recreation Area, and 13 miles of beach opened to the public for the first time in the recorded history of the place.^[4] The town at the gate of it wrote, that same year, that it intended to become the Seafood Capital of the East.

The shape of the local economy turned in those years from something you did on the water to something you saw from it. Not all at once, and not completely. But the customer changed.

An era of American work usually ends the same way. It gets counted, and then it gets regulated.

That is the honest ending of the party-boat era. Not that the boats disappeared. That the men who had spent their lives taking fish out of this water spent the last of it putting some back.

In July of 1986, two boats began running commuters from Highlands to Pier 11 at the foot of Wall Street. The pitch was geometry: 19 miles by water against 52 by road.^[13] The operation was called Direct Line Commuter Service, and it became TNT Hydrolines, and it became Seastreak, which today runs catamarans out of Highlands and Atlantic Highlands to two Manhattan piers and, in summer, to Martha's Vineyard and Nantucket.^[14]

The boats still leave in the dark. The parking lot still fills before six. The coffee still gets sold. What changed is what is in the hand of the person walking down the ramp — a rod tube in 1975, a laptop bag in 1996 — and where the money comes from afterward.

A town that once sold New York a day of fishing now sells New York a commute, from the same water, on the same tide, an hour earlier than it used to.

The identity holds, which is the strange part.

The names on the board are still names in town. The club founded at the bar in the Highlands Marina still meets. The clam plant at the edge of the borough still runs its 48-hour cure. The restaurant built out of a beached houseboat at the foot of the bridge is in its fourth generation of the same family. Johnny's Landing is a restaurant now, and the Highlands Marina is a different marina, and the boats that were tied up there sail from behind a breakwater a mile west, and the great-grandchildren of the men who ran them are the people who correct this website when it gets something wrong.

What the next chapter is about is the thing every one of these men knew and none of them said out loud on a good morning: the water that made the town is also the water that takes it back. They hauled out for the winter. They watched the sky.