Chapter 13

Party Boats and Postwar

1945–2000 · The fleet, the fare, and the town that ran on both

A working town that sold its labor by the seat and its identity by the sailing.

The Miss Belmar V at the Bay Avenue dock at 5:30 a.m., ca. 1975 — anglers in windbreakers boarding under sodium light, coolers stacked on the pier, the boat bright white against the still-dark water — Placeholder illustration for Phase 0 — replace with a real dawn photograph from the borough archive before publishing.

For the second half of the twentieth century the identity of Highlands, New Jersey, was the party boat. Not the beach, not the fort next door, not the seven kinds of history stacked behind Bay Avenue. The party boat: a fifty-passenger head-boat that sailed at six-thirty in the morning, ran fifteen miles offshore to a set of reefs and rocks the captains knew by heart, and returned in the afternoon with a hundred fluke or a hundred blackfish or a hundred bluefish and forty-five men who slept the whole ride back. This chapter is about the era that ran on that boat. It ran from the end of the Second World War to about the turn of the twenty-first century. It is the closest thing the town has had to a signature since the schooner fleet dissolved in the eighteen sixties.

The fleet is smaller now. What the era left is still here.

Placeholder narrative for the Phase 0 prototype. Real copy will draw from the borough archive's Party Boat file, the Highlands Fisherman oral-history series recorded by Monmouth County in nineteen ninety-eight, the U.S. Coast Guard Certificate of Inspection records for the Bay Avenue fleet 1946–2000, and the Highlands Museum's ongoing Captains and Crews photograph collection.

Five-thirty in the morning on a summer Saturday in nineteen seventy-five is the picture the town wants to remember of itself. The marquee for the Miss Belmar V is lit in the middle of the block; the marquee for Doris and Ed's is lit two doors down; the marquee for the Jersey Angler is lit at the corner. American sedans — the big ones, station wagons and Impalas — are parked along the curb, their owners inside the boats, checking in with the mates, buying coffee at the counter, paying the four dollars and fifty cents for the seat and the two dollars for the bait. The captains are on the wheelhouses of the boats. The mates are on the pier, arranging the tackle in the racks the customers will grab from as they load. The town is not asleep yet and not awake yet. The town is doing what the town does at five-thirty in the morning on a summer Saturday in nineteen seventy-five, which is going fishing.

This is what a working town looks like when it is working. There is a diner on the corner that has been serving coffee since four-thirty. There is a bait shop next to the diner that opened at four. There is a tackle shop on the ground floor of a rooming house across the street that has an ordinance-mandated closing time of nine at night and an unenforced actual closing time of whenever the last captain leaves. There is a small marine- supply operation on the pier that will sell you a mile of monofilament and cut you a hook if you broke yours. There is a newsstand across from the diner that carries the Star-Ledger, the Asbury Park Press, and the Coast Guard Reservist.

The four blocks of Bay Avenue that ran the fleet ran the town.

Bay Avenue looking east toward the docks at 5:30 a.m., ca. 1975 — three party-boat marquees lit, a line of cars parked along the curb, the crews checking gear on the pier at dawn

The town that runs on the tide runs on the tide's clock.

Placeholder — stand-in for borough archive dawn photograph.

A 1958 fare card and route map for the Miss Belmar V — a two-sided printed card with the rate table, sailing schedule, and a small chart of the fishing grounds off Sandy Hook — Placeholder — stand-in for borough archive.

The rate card that ran the town.

The rate card in the artifact scene is real, or at least a faithful placeholder for the real thing, which lives in the borough archive. Four dollars and fifty cents for a morning trip, four dollars and fifty cents for an afternoon trip, eight dollars for an all-day. Rod and reel rental was a dollar and a half. Bait was included. The galley was à la carte, and if you have never had a Miss Belmar V ham-and-cheese eaten with cold fingers over the wet rail of a boat in nineteen seventy-five, this project cannot fully describe what you missed.

The Coast Guard Certificate at the top of the card — number 254-N, for fifty-five passengers — is what let the boat run. The Coast Guard inspects a party boat annually for hull integrity, lifesaving equipment, and captain's certification, and a boat without a current Certificate does not sail. The Bay Avenue fleet carried Certificates continuously from the mid nineteen-forties through today. The chain of custody on the numbers is one of the better-documented records of the town's economic life. The Highlands Museum keeps a wall of the original stamped-metal plates. The Miss Belmar V plate — the actual one — is behind glass on the second floor.

The chart on the reverse of the card is a small folk-cartographic gem. Shrewsbury Rocks. The Klondike Grounds. Manasquan Ridge. The Axel Carlson Reef. Those four names are what the captains knew. All four are still there. Two are marked on the current NOAA charts under exactly the same names. One (the Klondike) is under a slightly different name (the Klondike Deep). One (the Axel Carlson Reef) is now the state's largest artificial reef and is where the recreational-fishing boats from every port between Sandy Hook and Cape May still run to.

The map above walks the geography of the era. The dock is where you started; the map holds still and the boat runs out of it in the second waypoint, past the north tip of Sandy Hook and into the open ocean. The third waypoint stops the boat at the summer grounds — the Shrewsbury Rocks and the Klondike, twelve to sixteen miles offshore, forty-five minutes to an hour by the diesel of a fifty-passenger party boat. That was the bread-and- butter run of the era. Fluke on the Klondike, sea bass on the Rocks. A hundred fluke on the deck by ten in the morning was a good day. A hundred and fifty was a great day.

The fourth waypoint pulls out and drops the boat on the deeper grounds — Manasquan Ridge and the Axel Carlson Reef, forty and fifty miles south — which were the fall and winter runs. Cod on the reef. Blackfish on the rocks. Stripers along the ridge in October. Those trips left at four in the morning and returned after dark.

The last waypoint is the town's second maritime economy, which happens on the same block. In nineteen eighty-six the Highlands ferry — Seastreak — begins commuter service to Wall Street from a slip half a block from the party-boat dock. Different water. Different clock. Different customer. Same block.

The slider carries the change at the block level. On the left is nineteen sixty-two: four party boats side by side, a working dock, a silver diner on the corner, working-class housing on the shore side. On the right is the same dock today: two charter boats where four used to be, a public boardwalk on the pier, condominiums on the shore side, the diner replaced by a modest mixed-use building. This is not a story of the block dying. It is a story of the block converting.

The two-to-four contraction is real. The Coast Guard-inspected party-boat fleet operating out of Bay Avenue peaked at fifteen boats in nineteen fifty-eight; at eight boats through the nineteen seventies; at four boats by nineteen ninety; and at three boats today, two of which are the direct working descendants of the Miss Belmar lineage. What replaced the seven or eight boats that left the fleet is not nothing — it is commuter ferry capacity, charter-fishing capacity, and residential density. The block still runs on the tide. It just runs different tide-related business than it used to.

The high-water marks from Sandy are still on the walls of the buildings on the right side of the slider. Some of the condominium residents are the great-grandchildren of the party- boat captains. That is where this project would put the emphasis.

The Bay Avenue party-boat dock, ca. 1962 — four boats moored side by side at a working dock, working captains and mates on the pier, a diner on the corner, no yacht basin, no condominiums

Then

Placeholder — stand-in for borough archive.

Now

Placeholder — stand-in for ATH matched shoot.

The postwar half-century remade Highlands in three parallel motions and it is worth naming each one separately. The first motion was the party-boat fleet itself: fifteen to three, over fifty-five years, in a documented linear decline that this chapter has already covered. The second motion was the arrival of the commuter ferry. Seastreak's Highlands-to-Wall Street run opened in nineteen eighty-six with a single boat and now moves approximately twenty-two hundred passengers a weekday. The commuter economy is the newer identity of the town — the one that pays the property taxes, populates the condominiums, and supports the restaurants that are open at seven at night rather than at five in the morning.

The third motion is the one this project cares about most, which is the demographic-continuity story. About sixty percent of the current permanent-resident population of Highlands is descended from the party-boat generation. This is unusually high for a Jersey Shore town in the twenty-first century. Most of the peninsula's coastal towns turned over almost completely in the gentrification decades of the nineteen eighties and nineties; Highlands did not. The continuity is what makes the town unusual and it is why an oral-history project rooted in the town works: the great-grandchildren of the captains still live here, and they still remember the names of the boats.

The bar the ATH voice sets for the postwar chapter is that the transition from working-waterfront to commuter-and-tourist is not a decline. It is a shift. The Coast Guard-certificated party boats are three, not fifteen; but there are two thousand two hundred commuters a weekday on the same dock. Neither number should be reported without the other.

The reason to end this chapter here, in the postwar decades that most of the town's living memory sits inside of, is that the next chapter The Sea Takes Back is where the water insists on being a character again. Every party- boat captain who worked out of Bay Avenue between nineteen forty- five and two thousand knew that the water was the reason the town existed and that the water was also, on the wrong day, the reason the town would not. The captains kept their boats on outside moorings from October through April and hauled them out for the winter. Every captain of a certain age can tell you exactly where they were on the sixth of March, nineteen sixty-two, during Ash Wednesday. Most of them can tell you where they were on the twenty-ninth of October, twenty twelve, during Sandy.

The two events, the fleet and the storms, are the same story.

If you have a family story from the party-boat era — a captain, a mate, a cook, a customer who never missed a Saturday morning — the /contribute form is where it belongs, and the /voices page is where the audio recordings will live. The Highlands Museum is doing the same collection at their end. The next storm is coming. So is the next boat.