FROZEN FOAM: A Walk on Cape Charles Beach

A wave is a fleeting thing — rushing onto the sandy beach only to disappear, sometimes leaving behind a foam mustache which also quickly vanishes. But not always! Sub-freezing temperatures this past week preserved the foam in place, and Kathleen Sabo captured it with her cell phone camera during her regular beach patrol to pick up trash. (Published February 9, 2015)

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4 Responses to “FROZEN FOAM: A Walk on Cape Charles Beach”

  1. Joe Vaccaro on February 10th, 2015 5:58 am

    Great photograph!

  2. Andy Zahn on February 11th, 2015 9:38 pm

    Reminds me of the Long Branch, NJ, fishing pier. I went with my dad one winter evening on the pier fishing for whiting. It was unbelievably cold. So cold I couldn’t crank my reel. There was a shed on the pier with heat and a counter with coffee and perhaps some hot food. I got out of the cold and hung out in the shed. I never saw it, but they said when it was extremely cold and the surf was frozen on the beach whiting came up on the beach and you could walk with a bucket picking
    up fish.

    I went with my dad and some firefighters to a pier in Keansburg, NJ, one night when I was about 4, and they were out
    to catch eels. While the men were snigling Panama Pete, I curled up and went to sleep. I don’t know if they caught any eels but I later in life trapped and sold eels and they are about impossible to hold onto. There was a place near-by where for every 2 eels you dropped off they gave you one smoked eel. That man caught eels in a wooden barrel with some holes for the eels to enter and a piece of horse meat for bait.

    We were potting crabs and knew and were friends with all the men raking clams. We would stop and talk with all the guys and sometimes share a few beers, and when they caught a horseshoe crab they gave it to us for eel bait. The eggs from the crabs really attracted eels, and the pots were full of eels. We sold them for 65 cents a pound, as we did all our by catch of fish. At Christmas if you had a way to hold the eels, the Italians love eels and the price goes to $3 per pound.

    On the 6th of March, 1962, we had a horrible unpredicted nor’easter which lasted 3 days and did huge damage with a lot of houses lost. On the 5th I walked on the beach in Ship Bottom, and the ocean was flat calm. Not even a breaker. I should have known. Commercial fishing boats were going out Barnegat Inlet and out to sea and they said it felt like they were going up hill. Several high tides with the wind keeping the water from going out and our Island was flooded. A fellow teacher had relatives in Denmark, and while our tide was 10′ above normal their bays and rivers were empty. All their
    water was on the other side of the ocean!

    Like I say, if there was anything to this global warming and sea levels rising it would have started long ago and all the
    barrier islands would long be gone.

  3. Joe Vaccaro on February 13th, 2015 8:42 am

    Mr. Zahn,
    Another nice story. I hope you consider writing a book on all of your memories. The story about the eels at Christmas time was spot on! Thanks for bringing back some of my great memories.

  4. Andy Zahn on February 14th, 2015 8:34 am

    Mr. Vaccaro, I am glad you enjoy the memories! I was blessed with great parents, a wonderful town of Irvington, a good memory, very varied activity throughout my 83 years and a very stubborn bunch of principles that can’t become PC nothings.

    All of Essex and Union Counties were my stomping grounds as a little kid and on up ’till I left home, and all of us children were entirely safe. Older kids and adults looked out for us, and if we did something wrong our parents heard about it. I met very interesting people and I paid attention to what they said. From my parents and others I found out that street smarts, common sense, leadership abilities, and hands on, being able to do a job, except in highly skilled professions such as medicine and engineering, are far more important than all these college degrees where the grad in a high position doesn’t have the foggiest.

    At one time I wrote a series of articles about my old Irvington for the IRVINGTON HERALD but I came to realize the demographics had so changed that no one cared about what the “town” once was with Olympic Park and its fantastic swimming pool and the wonderful, friendly, middle-class working people.

    As kids we went to the county parks and hiked out to Sandy Hill and on up to South Mountain Reservation and did crazy things like rock climbing and bike riding out Hwy. 22 to Snuffy’s in Scotch Plains plus playing in the brook, which was an absolute no-no, but it is the nature of the male species to take risks.

    All through high school I worked half-time at the Pru in Newark for the minimum wage of $.60/hr and then got a 5 cent raise when the minimum went to $.65. That’s $10.40 a week take home! I worked in the Treasury Dept. and that was an education in itself. A quarter bought you 5 ice cream cones or 5 big Hershey bars, a huge chocolate malted, or a long bus ride, and what we were putting into Social Security was real money. What we get back now — and they never tell us this — is pennies. In other words due to inflation $,1000 is really worth what $100 once was. This is how we cope with the huge national debt. Another fact they never tell us is that many people pass on before they ever collect a cent.