Theres plenty of water around New Jersey, and for that we are thankful. The tricky part is a lot of that water gets pretty shallow on a regular basis. Which is exactly what caused a man to go looking through the bars in Margate for Christopher Cook Gilmore, a local character who well, lets just keep it short and describe him as a sailor/boater, world-traveling writer, all-around local conversation piece and gentleman bon vivant.
This guy, he found Gilmore in a place called The Greenhouse. Geez, he tells him, I looked in two other places already. We got to get moving.
Turns out one of their buddies is hung up on the mud way out in the back bay in some boat that wants more water than the bay has to give at that particular time. No way hes getting out of there until the tide turns around. Somebody has to fetch him, and its Gilmore. Not that hes necessarily the cavalry, but the thing is, hes got a garvey. You got 8 inches of water, that old garvey will get you through. Gilmore was on his way out of the bar when the guy remembered one vital piece of information.
Oh, Chris, look, he said to ask would you please bring a case of beer with you?
We gather now to celebrate the New Jersey garvey, a boat that is as much a part of the coast as gulls and fish and people like Gilmore. Theyre not exactly pretty the garveys, that is but they sure dont take much water and that is a very good thing. Their flat bottoms make them fast, though that also makes them want to pound in chop. Theyre wide and stable for work, a good platform for hunting, easy to maneuver, fairly light if made of native white cedar and seaworthy enough to carry big loads, like a huge pile of tonged-up clams or three or four men and a case of beer.
If theres a better bay boat for poking around South Jersey, its hard to imagine. But they dont always poke. Hang a 30 horsepower outboard on one and itll fly. Stuff a big-block Chevy engine into one, like they do in the Barnegat Bay, and itll do 85 mph or so if youve got the courage to keep that throttle open while you skip across the water like a flat stone flung hard.
A 17-foot garvey will get you home against wind, tide and chop with a 4 horsepower motor. But bigger motors make them plane off, which increases your range dramatically. Gilmore uses a 30, which he picked because its the biggest that a person can lift off the transom himself if the boat is sinking. It also fits into the front seat of his ancient Triumph Spitfire.
The New Jersey garvey probably originated with a man named Jarvis (Gervas) Pharo, who settled in West Creek in the early 1700s, according to the folks at the Tuckerton Seaport museum. Having brought with him a design for a Punt Boat a similar shallow-draft vessel he is said to have begun making garveys that could be poled, rowed or sailed across the bay. Its probably not much of an exaggeration to say garveys gave bayside fishing and clamming industries their cotton gin.
Theyre still good boats. A sweet shape is a sweet shape that can never change. But theyre wood. Well, they used to be before people started making them with, or covering them with, fiberglass. Being a wood boat is like being an adolescent: You better have somebody around who really cares. And so there arent many people building wood garveys these days. For better or worse, fiberglass rules and I have to admit my boats are fiberglass. I love wood, but Im the type who wants to run em, not work on them.
Gilmore, he loves it all, the painting, the cussing, the bailing and, yes, the very different sound wood makes when it hits water. He and garveys go back to when he was a kid, and so its no surprise that hes doing what he can to keep them on South Jerseys bays. He even formed a club, along with friend and Press photographer Scott Stetzer the Longport Garvey Club. There are five members. Each has a garvey. Their garveys arent boats so much as they are reasons to get out on the bay. The bays may not be far from the beaches as the gulls fly, but in terms of environment and feel theyre separate solar systems. Touring the narrow cuts that lace the back bays together in a garvey is like riding a bike instead of driving. Youve can go deeper. Linger. Speed kills the view and blurs the memory.
Andy Neustadter, another member of the garvey club, grew up a block from the beach, and still keeps a Hobie on it. But theres something about his old, peeling wood garvey that brings him back to the bay. During hunting season it fits him and his black Labrador Boo and the occasional felled duck just fine. Sunset cruises, well, theyre the best. He keeps it in the water all year advisable for some wood boats because if they dry up the wood shrinks and pulls it occasionally for new bottom paint. It looks ... weathered. Which is to say it looks exactly like it should.
Garveys work hard, come home dirty and go to sleep without a shower. They can only look pretty to a person who loves simple things that work well. Can a handsaw that your great-grandfather used be pretty? Can it still work well? Will it feel good in your hand?
Gilmore and Stetzer once took their garveys all the way down the Intracoastal Waterway, across the Delaware Bay, and south, south, south until they were deep in the Great Dismal Swamp in North Carolina. They had made the mistake of reading a guide to the intracoastal that had an introduction by Walter Cronkite, something about the great beauty of the swamp, and just for fun they started trying to figure their range on a tank of gas and pretty soon there they were in their sleeping bags, with a hurricane bearing down on them. Hugo, it was. But they made it back, and in between they visited saloons and slept on the ground with no one around and talked with kindly church ladies and saw skies with stars bright as Santas eyes, and they wound up proving you can use a garvey for yet one more thing: going someplace far and making it back. Stetzer has since taken his to Canada, Gilmore to New York City.
But mostly they stick close to home, watching the sunsets and exploring the back bays, content to travel to faraway places right in their back yard.
(On The Water, a watersports/water lifestyle column written by G. Patrick Pawling and photographed by Chris Polk, runs on Sundays during the summer. To read past columns, including Pawlings account of a ride in a Barnegat Bay racing garvey during which he managed to lose his helmet at 80 mph, go to www.pawling.net. For column suggestions e-mail onthewater@pawling.net or call 609-398-6593. For photographic suggestions, e-mail chris@polkimaging.com
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