Sometimes, being benched is a good thing. It’s springtime and the livin’ is downright summery these days. So, being benched with a Navesink River view at the Fair Haven Dock is just what the winter-weary doctor ordered for perennial river-time seekers.
It’s not every day that heaven freezes over, but it happened over the weekend when the Navesink River’s tide stayed put with the first full river freeze in decades.
Summer skies have cleared, humidity is low and it’s the weather is perfect for some Rumson river time and a few end-of-summer wins down the road at the Fair Haven Firemen’s Fair.
It’s all fun and island-hopping games until they have to start a fire.
Yes, there comes a time when summer Rumson island-hopping coolness sets in, parents rang the unheard dinner bell and a bunch of hungry, wayward, marooned kids try to cook that fish they caught and toast their own little buns.
There’s nothing quite like river time in the summertime, especially if you’re a Rumson kid with a boat and a best life to bait.
It’s summertime. And there’s nothing like taking a long walk off a short … dock — especially if you’re a Rumson kid in the ’70s trying to stay cool.
Call it a ratty reprise ode to summertime …
Summers in the Rumson-Fair Haven area are rife with river-oriented activities that have become tradition.
River Rats’ sailing “camp” is no exception. OK, nobody was camping per se. It was more like a little club. Still is. In fact, it’s that time of the year when kids start signing up for summer River Rats fun. In fact, it’s that time — to sign up for the Rats season.
It’s been a sort of rite of living on the Navesink passage for decades — since 1955. Kids learn how to boat and do a lot of summer fun bonding in the process.
It’s that time. Time to get seriously crabby on the river.
Nothing fishy about it. It’s a rite a passage in Fair Haven. It has been since the dawn of time in the borough and surrounding area. Kids, even entire families, buckets and nets in hand, get down to the Navesink River and start netting the crabbiest of crabs.
It’s a case of summer island plopping. Yes, that’s right. Island plopping.
That would be the more accurate term when telling the pretty common story of some Fair Haven and Rumson kids taking their own eight-hour tour of the Navesink and Shrewsbury rivers and ending up settling down for some adventure on Starvation Island in Rumson on pretty much any summer day.
Longtime Rumsonite, public defender, professor, dad and “crabber of the Navesink River,” John F. “Jack” McMahon, passed away on June 18 in the arms of his wife Pat and surrounded by family. He was 90.
Call it a boatload of waterborne sunshine.
On the cusp of the unofficial start of summer, thoughts turn to sunny cruising on the Navesink River.
Fair Haven residents and beyond are still fishing for an answer to what they see as a rogue wave of a Fair Haven governing body decision to knock a volunteer out of a regional committee, of his own resurrection, designed to protect the Navesink River.
What was dubbed an unprecedented “slap in the face” turned into some verbal fisticuffs when a tsunami of riled residents at Monday’s Fair Haven Borough Council meeting turned out to turn the tide of borough business by defending that volunteer — fourth-generation Fair Havenite and boat captain, Brian Rice. It became a full wipe-out when the ousting became official with a contentious undertow of a 3-2 vote with one abstention.
Continue reading Public Fishes for Reason Native Fair Havenite Tossed from Volunteer Spot
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