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Spot: Jersey Shore, NJ
Summary
Remember that one episode of Popeye when Popeye is hitting on Olyve Oyl: “Hey Olivesgk! Howsg aboutsk a shore dinner?” to which Olyve responds: “Why shooooore!” Well in the northeast United States, “shore” translates to “beach” and in New Jersey, the Jersey Shore translates to the coast from Sandy Hook in the north to Cape May in the south.
Think of that California stretch from the Huntington Pier to Wedge. What do you got? Nice beaches, a couple of piers, some jetty breaks, a boardwalk, a lot of bars, pizza places, tourists and locals coming together in swift collision. Quieter in the winter, packed and loco in the summer. When there is a hurricane from the south, the surf can get epic. And the Huntington to Newport stretch also gets big surf from winters storms.
Well the Jersey Shore is like that, but it’s about 127 miles of that: beaches and boardwalks and beachbreaks and jetty breaks, which includes Asbury Park (home to Bruce Springsteen), Belmar, Point Pleasant Beach, Seaside Heights, Atlantic City (home to Donald Trump), Ocean City (not Maryland), Wildwood and Cape May.
In the summer time when the weather is hot, the huddled masses sweltering in the big cities face a choice: Head for the hills or flee to the sea. More than a few of them flock to the Jersey Shore, and all 127 miles of it is chockablock with tourists, campers, cars and locals cashing in as fast as they can to get through the rest of the year.
Surfers try to weave in and out of the summer madness, but they have the place to themselves for the rest of the year, which is not such a bad thing.
The Good
You want some good? I got your good right here, there, Sizzle Chest. This YouTube shows classic late summer hurricane surf from Ernesto, which ravaged the eastern seaboard from late August into September of 2006. Check out Peter Mendia and friends getting barreled off their nut at around the 2:00 mark. Shoobie doo!
The Bad
Shoobies and Bennys. Tourists from Philadelphia and New York. City folks from elsewhere. They talk funny. They dress funny. They sometimes dress like blingalings. In the summer those city folk who don’t flock to the Poconos come to the beach, and they bring their ways with them. Funny accents, funny music.
Also: sharks. The movie Jaws was inspired by an incident in New Jersey, where four people were killed in shark attacks in the 1916.
The Strange
A $270,000 study conducted by the Kindred Keziah marketing firm asked 6,700 summer visitors about the positives and negatives of their Jersey Shore experience and what they found was that the “Jersey” before the “Shore” was a big negative. The word “Jersey” seems to be synonymous with “pollution” and “gangsters” and “ghetto” and other unpleasant things, which is a shame, because the Garden State has done a lot of clean up their water since the 1980s, when the beaches were infamous receptacles for toxic waste and hypodermic needles and other medical waste washing up on shore.
People also claimed about crowding, traffic and rudeness, to which the State of Jersey responded: “$$%#(*% you! Forgetabout it!”
Bad joke, but the truth is, the Jersey Shore is a cool little surf trip just waiting to happen.
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