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Eventually waking from my Baltimore adventure, I rolled over to discover that my other new cat friend thought my bike bag was a cat bed. Speaking of my bike, I thought about fixing the flat tires in order to ride Phillyside or some amazing flat rails by Morgan's, but did neither. (In hindsight, I really should have put in the effort to get to Phillyside. The rails were at some really rough projects though, so those might've been a good skip regardless.) (2026 Update: Three days after posting this update, I saw an Instagram post from one of the Chocolate Truck guys saying that the flat rail spot was going away. Damn.) |
This afternoon we headed to The Woodlands Cemetery, where inside the cemetery, there's an annual festival of live music, food, artists and crafters. This was a fun and different experience, but I also had something abandoned on the mind - and if this market ran long, I planned on taking multiple busses out to Camden if necessary. My worry was all for naught though as we piled into the car, crossed the Walt Whitman Bridge into New Jersey, then curved north past rundown row houses and into a pleasant riverside park. There were people barbecuing and people playing baseball nearby, but the vegetation was already thick enough that we could make a stealthy beeline towards the chain-link fence that stood between us and an old boat graveyard. |
It goes without saying that I would use up precious Philadelphia time and also inconvenience Isy's friend just to go see a boat graveyard in Camden. This was actually a special boat graveyard though, as it's home to a lightship! The Lightship 59 Barnegat. |
It's been a few years since I've posted about a lightship, so if you've forgotten, their purpose is to sit at a known location and act like a lighthouse with one or more lights flashing at the tops of their masts. This was a useful solution for places with frequent storms, deep seas or cost-prohibitive terrain, where a standard lighthouse wouldn't work (or wouldn't work for long). The LV Barnegat was built in Camden in 1904, then sent for 18 years to Five Fathom Bank, a location 14 miles off of New Jersey's southernmost point, Cape May. From there, it was sent halfway up New Jersey to mark Barnegat Inlet and keep ships away from New Jersey's beachy shoreline for almost 40 years. The only interruption of this Barnegat Inlet service was a couple of years during WWII, when it was stationed outside Wilmingon Delaware and checked ships that were heading upriver. One interesting thing about this lightship's location at Barnegat Inlet was that it marked where an incoming ship would want to go, so some of the men aboard recalled the strangeness of being in a ship that other ships are bearing down upon, and also the alarm at hearing other ships pass by incredibly close in foggy times. Anywhere between seven and fifteen men were stationed on the Barnegat for weeks at a time. |
The Barnegat was decommissioned in 1967 and donated to the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum in Saint Michaels, Maryland. Unable to keep up with the ship's maintenance, it was then sold to the Philadelphia Ship Preservation Guild in 1970 and displayed at Philadelphia's Penn's Landing. Local Camden enthusiast and marina owner Rod Sadler bought the Barnegat in 1993. Towing it to his marina on the Camden waterfront with dreams of restoring and displaying the lightship in Camden, these plans never got off the ground and the lightship hasn't moved since. |
Sadler died in 2019 and his widow eventually reached an agreement to sell this property to the City of Camden. Camden was looking to extend its waterfront park and was open to the idea of possibly preserving the lightship, but that may have been all lip service as they've since left the site open to trespass and portions of the boat are now covered in graffiti. |
I really wanted to climb the ladder up to Barnegat's lantern but this was my first time meeting Isy's friend. Young me wouldn't have even thought anything of it and just left Morgan to be mad if she wanted to get mad, but with age, I've learned that it's good to tone it down when meeting your girlfriend's friends. As it turns out, we were just about back at the car when Isy mentioned her surprise that I didn't climb "that ladder". Telling her I didn't do it because I didn't know if Morgan would care, she laughed at the apparently silly notion that Morgan would care. Damnit! |
There was some consolation as I had at least poked around a bit of the ship's interior. |
I used to question if I even count lightships as lighthouses or care to visit them in general, but in reading about Barnegat, I learned that America used to have 51 lightships in service, but only 16 American lightships still exist today (and two of them are grounded in Suriname). This shrinking number makes them more interesting and worth visiting in my eyes. Barnegat was a great use of an afternoon down in Philadelphia and even better as it's one more visited out of sixteen. So yeah, lighthouse number four for New Jersey and my first new New Jersey light in 10 years! |
Afterwards, we needed to kill time due to a traffic accident and I was happy that the idea of walking Camden's waterfront park came up. I was happy to spend more time here, as I have this obsession with American cities I've heard about and seen on maps all my life, like Camden, Hartford, Wichita, etc.. It was a fine evening to stroll atop the park's brick walkways and size up if there was anything to ride. Part of the time was also spent noticing that the 76ers have a practice facility adjacent to the park, while also wondering about a couple of fine Beaux Arts buildings we could see over in Philadelphia. (The two buidings were the Pier 38 Warehouse and the Pier 40 Warehouse - old warehouses built for the Port of Philadelphia.) |
About the only thing left to do was to grab a few 40's to bring back to Newfoundland. I had tried to research good liquor stores near Morgan's, but the one that was the closest had 40's of St. Ides - which is pretty much the best thing you can ask for at a liquor mart. A guy inside was taken aback with my purchase and told me he used to drink 40's of St. Ides "a long time ago" and that "they do the job". This cracked me up, but I didn't get any pictures of the liquor store as that guy then proceeded to talk the clerk's ear off, but it was a cool liquor store/takeout spot. |
Anyway, flying Philadelphia-Toronto-Deer Lake, we were soon enough back to dealing with riding mountain bikes in 5°C/41°F temps and getting coated in grime just trying to get some kilometers in. As always, thanks for reading! |
