Down the shoah

We are underway northbound in the Atlantic Ocean, bound for Raritan Bay. Our two-week marina booking was up two days ago, but we did not have suitable weather out here on the ocean, particularly with only one stabilizer fin operational, until today. We dropped lines right at slack, which was not until 11am, so we will be arriving right at dinner time.

Vector in her berth at Hoffman's Marina. We were lucky to be next to the fuel dock, which let us offload the scooters.

I've been pretty much working non-stop since we arrived to Brielle, and so there is not much to say here in the way of our travelogue. Apart from going to dinner every evening, and three nights of fireworks that we could see right from our deck, we did not spend any time seeing the sights. They gave us wristbands for the pool, which would have been very pleasing when we arrived in 100° weather, but I never even got the chance to walk over and take a dip. And while this is quintessentially the Jersey shore, with all that implies, we never made it to a boardwalk, an amusement ride, or a saltwater taffy stand.

The heat dome our first couple of days trapped this haze. That's the sun center-frame.

We did enjoy the local eateries as much as we could. We had several nights of rain where we eschewed a scooter ride in favor of walking, and thus we ate at the marina's own restaurant, Waypoint 622, more than anyplace else. Fortunately, it was decent, and the marina gave us a couple of discount coupons. Wednesday is prime rib night and we did that twice. We also ate right next door at the more casual Pig & Parrot a couple of times, and just a little further away the Shipwreck Grill, a white tablecloth joint which could not squeeze us in on our first attempt; even the bar was packed.

Ah, that's better. Sunset over Brielle on a clearer day.

One night it was raining too hard even to walk, and we ordered from nearby Vinnie's Pan Pizza via Doordash. It was OK but not really the kind of crust we like, so even though it was walking distance we never went. The other place we were able to walk to was the Brielle House Bar & Grill, where we literally dined alone. It was OK but not worth a return visit, even though they had the best draft beer choice for me of all the places we tried. One morning we rode over to Brielle Bagels for breakfast, also not worth a return.

Squan Tavern has been here a long time. They added Italian food in 1964 and expanded next door sometime after that.

Our favorite of the lot was the Squan Tavern, a short scooter ride out to downtown Manasquan. When I hear "tavern" I think pub food, but this is NJ, and it turns out to be a very nice red-sauce Italian joint. They have a nice selection of drafts and decent house wines. A close second would be Lubrano's, which is conveniently in the same plaza as the ShopRite grocery store. It's a BYOB place but there is a discount bottle shop right next door and we split a $9 bottle of wine on both visits. Our second time the wait for a table was two hours and we instead ordered "to go" and ate on one of the few café tables they have out front.

We ate at the bar at Squan Tavern. I had the Sunday sauce, a taste from my childhood. Louise got seafood.

We made two dinner trips across the river to Point Pleasant. They have a very nice downtown, which I only saw passing through on the scooter, but noted for some future visit. We ate instead at The Ark Pub & Eatery (actual pub food this time) and Fratello's. You may sense a generally Italian theme here, and whatever else I might say about New Jersey, it has a lot of Italian restaurants and most are pretty good. I am, ultimately, a product of this cuisine.

This window made of old bottles adorns The Ark.

On the maintenance front, the big project, which is to make further progress on diagnosing and repairing the problem with the starboard stabilizer fin, had to be deferred. I just never had the block of time I needed to do the work (and this is despite a couple of "rain days"), and moreover I did not want to risk un-pinning the fin, not getting it working, and then being unable to re-pin it in the heavy current at the marina.

The river was crazy busy most days. This was one of the quieter times.

I did make time to tighten up the bolts on the anchor roller, which sometimes work loose over time. That task was non-negotiable, as our next stop will be an anchorage and the bolts had nearly worked all the way out. And while we had easy shipping access with the scooters, I cleaned up, photographed, listed, sold, and shipped the retired Juki sewing machine that Louise replaced with a newer version.

A workhorse. I changed the motor twice, the speed sensor once, and aligned it a couple of times. The Juki people told Louise she puts too many hours on it for a consumer machine and she should upgrade to the professional model. The new owner should be very happy.

The other non-negotiable project cropped up while we were here. Louise came running upstairs from her quilt studio to report she smelled something burning, and no sooner had we made it to the engine room to have a look than the smoke alarms went off all over the boat. The engine room was filling with acrid white smoke, and it smelled like Ricky Racer doing a burnout. Short of a hole in the hull, the most dangerous thing aboard a boat is fire, and suffice it to say we both had plenty of adrenaline in our systems at this point.

Well, there's your problem.

A different view.

The trouble was easy to find and not really a mystery, as Louise had quilts in the washing machine. The heavy load proved too much for the old drive belt, and the motor pulley had burned right through it. I spent an hour getting the remnants out, cleaning up the machine and all the belt pulleys, and putting on an old belt we keep as a spare so that the machine could finish its cycle. We had a new belt a couple of days later and all is normal now. We did have to air the boat out for the rest of the day, and scramble around getting the wirelessly-linked smoke detectors to shut up.

Video of the event, starting from when the smoke becomes visible and ending with me headed to the back of the ER to open the hatch and clear out the smoke.

I would be remiss if I did not report here on the marina, where we have stopped exactly once before, a full dozen years ago. It's pretty much the only transient marina that can accommodate us, and thus we have no choice but to pay the vigorish, and this is the reason we always bypass the Manasquan Inlet. The rate here is $5 per foot, plus another $30 per night for electricity (we use about $2-$3 of electricity per day). For our non-boating readers that is more than double the average price of a marina stay; at $290 per night you can get a nice hotel with housekeeping and a pool.

Breille has a nice recycling center a short distance from the marina. I made several trips. I did not have need, but it's nice to know they take old electronics.

We have paid this much or even a little more in the past, but usually that's in a resort area (for example Atlantis in the Bahamas) with resort amenities, or to be right downtown in an expensive city like Chicago or Miami or New York. Brielle and this marina are none of those things — a small pool does not a resort make — and it does not even have the facilities of a mid-range marina elsewhere like floating docks (the tide swing here is over 4') or breakwalls for the current. The staff is very pleasant, accommodating, and helpful, but I can say that about a lot of places we've been at half the price.

Among my dad's things I found this photo, I think from a Crystal cruise in the early 2000's. That would have been semi-formal night; I also brought the tux.

If you are wondering what would motivate us to pay that kind of money to be on the Jersey shore for a couple of weeks, well, that brings me to the reason for our visit and why I have been so busy here. My aging parents live just ten minutes from the dock here, which was really the reason for our only other visit over a decade ago, when they came out to the marina to see the boat. I've seen them on other NJ passes as well, but usually in a more cost effective way. We can anchor in Atlantic City, Barnegat Light, Shark River, or Atlantic Highlands and rent a nice car for less than a quarter of what it cost us to stay in this marina, and I've even driven or taken the train down from the boatyard in Mamaroneck when we have work done.

I combed the house looking for something comforting, familiar, and soft that I could leave with my dad. I found this bulldog from my high school.

Visiting for a day or two is one thing, but this time around I needed to be here a couple of weeks. My dad, who is 98, moved into a memory care facility a couple of months ago, and my mom, 94, is now trying to manage a life alone in a place not well-suited to it. This has been the reason for my last few trips here by rail or air, but I have been deferring the heavy lifting to a time when we could spend a couple of weeks right here in the boat, where it's a short scooter ride away.

In my dad's medicine cabinet. This might date to my childhood. I left it for another time; it's HazMat.

To be clear, I called a lot of other places to see if we could get a better deal. I looked at marinas in Forked River and along the Navesink from Atlantic Highlands to Red Bank. I even got on the waiting list at the state marina in Atlantic City, which would have necessitated a rental car but would still have been far less. But every place that could physically accommodate us (not many — we are longer or deeper draft than the vast majority of marinas can take) was sold out. Not surprising in an area where marinas have to make their nut for the whole year in the span of a four-month boating season.

Both Mom and Dad chipped in at this restaurant, long gone, owned by our cousin.

When all is said, though, I was glad to be this close. It let me come home for lunch most days and minimized the time we were apart. It made it easy to stop by and see my dad on average every other day, and I was able to spend at least four hours at the house every single day (apart from the lone day it rained too much). We were able to do everything on scooters except for the one day I had to drive my mother around to a bunch of banks, for which I rented a car.

It's been great to see you, Dad.

The trip to memory care is one-way. My dad is not going home. Yet he was the one with the computer, and the email address, and the text messaging. My mother is still firmly planted in the 20th century, and does everything by telephone and US Mail. I spent days getting into his computer and email, closing on-line accounts, securing everything, and setting things up so that I can handle any of their on-line needs remotely. I also excavated a lifetime of CD-ROMs, USB sticks, computer cables, old software, and the like. Midway through the visit I disconnected the fax line and the DSL Internet.

For some reason he had numerous 3D copies of the "Save" icon in multiple colors.

With US Mail and a land line being the only way to reach her, and with her being extremely hard of hearing, I also spent a lot of time on the phone (or online) trying to stem the avalanche of paper mail coming into the house. And I went through a decade (or more) of accumulated files and paper bills and statements and the like. Louise carted over ten pounds to offsite shredding, and I took a dozen or more bags to the donation center, recycling, and the dumpster. There is more to do, but I made a big dent.

As long as I had a rental car, I took advantage to get some of the larger items over to the donation center.

One evening at dinner I got a call from the memory care facility; Dad had an unwitnessed fall and they sent him to the emergency room. This is a required standard procedure for an unwitnessed fall where the head could be involved. We finished our dinner and then both rode down to the hospital to check on him, and he seemed very relieved to see a familiar face. The CT scan was negative and he was only there a few hours. I was very glad to be in town to give him some comfort.

I've written here in my DC posts that the L'Enfant Plaza hotel was the first place I stayed in DC, as a child when the place was new. I found this shoe mitt from that stay, which my dad was using to store small items.

Early in the visit I noticed some rotten wood at the base of the door frame, and we got a contractor out to replace all the rot and get the frame painted. That was ongoing when I wrapped up my final day yesterday. The contractors, and the medical staff at the care facility, were grateful to have someone to talk to that was not mostly deaf.

Wood rot on the door frame, quarter for scale. It was much larger than this once they got into it.

You may recall that I said I though we had a lot of growth on the hull, based on our speed through the water, and I asked the marina to get us a diver a couple of days ago to clean the hull. Like the marina itself, dive service here is about double what it usually costs us elsewhere, and the marina/yard tacks on another 10%, so it was expensive but sorely needed. It took two divers over 45 minutes (they have to move fast to get it done at slack water) and they both came out covered in minuscule live shrimp that were hanging out in our "reef."

It looks like seaweed but these are hundreds of tiny shrimp. They were moving.

We're now on our way to New York City, where Louise has scheduled yet another California visit with flights out of LaGuardia. It seems this is our year for dealing with elderly parents. I'll be driving back down here in a rental car, either while she is gone or shortly after she returns, to continue the work and take my mom to a few more appointments. With all that is going on it is unclear how far, if at all, into New England we will get this season.

Trains crossing the rail bridge (and the bridge's old mechanical siren) were a constant backdrop to our stay. I rode these "Comet" cars to college 45 years ago, and they are still in use.

This is our last open-water passage until we are done in the NYC area and head east into Long Island Sound, and that is probably the next time you will hear from me, maybe two or three weeks hence. Tomight and over the weekend we should be in Great Kills Harbor on Staten Island, and we will tackle New York Harbor and the East River after the chaos of the summer weekend has passed.