Visit to Tuckerton Seaport and Baymen's Museum (Barnegat: 2014, homes)

[Badfish740]

Just got back from the annual week on LBI with the family. My daughter is still little (2.5) and we've got one on the way so we didn't get out on the bay in a boat for clamming/crabbing as I had hoped (hopefully next year), but we had some great days on the beach, caught some crabs from the dock, and had a great time overall. We took one rainy day to visit the Tuckerton Seaport and Baymen's Museum which I highly recommend to anyone visiting the area. My family has been traveling to the island for over 60 years starting with my grandfather who started taking my mother and my aunts and uncles down because he didn't like the boardwalk and "honkytonk" as he called it at Seaside. The island is a much different place now with lots of out of staters, million dollar homes, and weekend partiers, but fewer and fewer people who really know and appreciate the heritage and history of the island itself as well as Barnegat Bay. Barnegat Bay is where the Sneakbox and Garvey were invented, among other things-all of this and more is showcased at the Tuckerton Seaport and Baymen's Museum. We kind of breezed through it since a 2.5 year old's attention span only goes so far and since it was a weekday a lot of the volunteers weren't there, but I had a good conversation with a decoy carver and his grandson who were doing a demo for some summer camp kids. I was there mostly to check out the Garveys since I'm planning on building one eventually:

Plywood Garvey being built at the boatworks-I believe this is one of the 10' boats you can sign up to build as an "introduction to boat building" class:



"Wasp"-a 1960s era racing Garvey awaiting restoration:



Unnamed/status unknown traditional cedar planked Garvey:



Big (maybe 24'?) Garvey with a Chrysler V8:



Local's boat moored across the Creek from the Seaport-the craft is alive and well in the back creeks and coves of Barnegat Bay:



Boat used for tours of Tuckerton Creek-definitely going to take advantage of this the next time we visit:



The museum has so much more that Garveys including the history of the U.S. Life Saving Service (forerunner of the Coast Guard), the Tuckerton Railroad which first connected the island with the mainland in the 1870s, and a great exhibit on the importance of salt marshes and bays. I highly recommend a visit if you're in the area, or making a trip of it. I'm hoping to finally get down to the decoy and gunning show this September.