High tides squeezing Shore crowds

SEA ISLE CITY, N.J. - Not for nothing do people call high tide at the Jersey Shore the "meet your neighbor" tide.

And so don't mind if Cathy Lusby, 55, of West Berlin, N.J., gets a whiff of the sunblock used by the guy sitting next to her on the tide-shrunken 40th Street beach and has something to say about it.

"It smells like a tropical fruit," she informed the heretofore stranger. "It makes you want to eat."

The guy, Stephen Mitzel, 18, of Bristol, took it well, displayed his sunblock for the ladies, and kept his arm still while Lusby's friend Randee Italiano, 54, strained to read the writing under his tattoo. (Brandon Mitzel 1982-2006.)

"My brother," he explained.

"God bless," Lusby responded before settling back in her chair (back by the beach's 11 garbage cans), feet resting on one of two purple snack tables she brought to the beach - which, if you brought the chain guys from the Linc to measure from ocean to dunes, probably wouldn't be much wider than a first down.

Ah yes, a Jersey beach during a daytime high tide, where, if you're lucky, you can stretch out your legs without your toes winding up in someone's face.

With beaches eroding and gear exploding, the beach at high tide can be a bit, shall we say, cramped. It may be, simply, the most irritating time to be on the beach in Jersey, which is saying a lot.

"It's a nightmare when you have four kids," said Brenda Bentz, 39, of Haddon Township, who consulted her own tide chart before settling on a spot on the beach, about an inch from someone's blanket.

"People keep pushing into one another. It does get very crowded. Those women behind you? They come with their blanket. I find that so obnoxious, the whole blanket thing. They bring so much stuff, their tables, two chairs. They take up more space than me with my four kids."

Women with their tables? Hmm, anyone we know?

"We usually have portable fans on one," noted Italiano, one of the table ladies.

She and Lusby cop to the blanket charge - actually, it's a king-size sheet - without apology. They really do not care whose space they may be taking up.

"We lay on it once," Italiano says. "We legitimize it."

Fortieth Street is a popular beach on any day, lining up as it does with the public bathrooms, the hot-dog guy, and the quick turn off the main drag of JFK Boulevard.

On Wednesday, the always lively, no-beach-tag day in Sea Isle, high tide was at 11 a.m., creating early where-do-we-sit anxiety that eased as the day went on, but also left early birds vulnerable to having ocean views obstructed.

Elaborate strategies evolve to keep other people at a distance. Especially if you need to stake out an area big enough for all your tents and blow-up pools and plastic Radio Flyer wagons with canopies and stuff for the kids.

"We usually try to spread out as much as we can," said Bill Peletsky, 35, of Collegeville. "We run our gear down first and get the kids later."

Peletsky arranged the chairs in a semicircle, with a 10-foot front yard of sand before the tide line, bordered by a one-foot wet sand wall, the umbrellas at the edge. "We keep reinforcing the wall," he said. "I just build the wall bigger and bigger."

Sometimes, he'll dig a really big hole in the sand as a buffer. Or build a nine-foot sand alligator.

"The alligator needs a spot, too," said his friend, Dawn DiPierro, 40, of Exton.

Next week, tides will be a maximum nuisance value, falling at various times in the midafternoon up and down the Shore. Beach crowds will compress backward like an accordion throughout the day, with all manner of irritants closing in: smoke, radio, and that cousin of the Seinfeld close talkers, the close beach-chair ploppers. Not to mention the universally loathed cell-phone talkers.

It's just the price, along with your beach tag, of setting down your chairs - and table and blanket and wagon and canopy and double jogging stroller and tent and cooler and umbrella and cart and the portable fan - amid the close quarters of a typical beach in Jersey.

"We just stake our claim," Lusby said. "There could be no one else on the beach, and they'll sit next to me."

Most take it in stride. Hey, it was bumper-to-bumper traffic on the way down, bicycle-to-bicycle on the promenade, why not a seamless transition to blanket-to-blanket congestion on the sand?

The one-paragraph daily Shorecast in the Atlantic City Press has been unexpectedly riveting this summer as it chronicled the tidal, ocean temperature and wave variables, crunching them into your chances for fun.

Lowell Desher, 75, the patriarch of four generations vacationing in Sea Isle, noted that the view staked out by his grandson at 9:45 one morning last week had already been rudely obstructed. "I like a free vision of the ocean," he said. "Right now all I get is carts."

Ah, yes, those ubiquitous wonder-wheel upright carts that it seems everyone brings to the beach now. Are we all on our way to market?

Desher said he did not mind the proximity of beachgoers when they were spread out on a blanket and in a bikini - as was a lady nearby. "I'm here for one thing," he said. "She's already been noted."

Though it may also be noted that not everyone's body or suit choice will prompt the same level of enthusiasm.

Yet the younger generation of Desher's family appeared unfazed by the masses. "We're used to crowds," said Matt Ulbine, 26. "We're from New Jersey."

His wife, Jayme Parish, 23, concurred: "It doesn't bother me at all," she said. "I like listening to other people's conversations."