The Rise and Fall of Egg Harbor: The Sportfishing Empire That New Jersey Forgot

The plant still stands on Philadelphia Avenue in Egg Harbor City. A three hundred foot mural of a sportfish yacht runs the length of its flank, painted there so people would remember. Most of them have forgotten anyway. Once, inside a twenty mile circle of South Jersey pine and salt marsh, four major boat companies stand at the same time. Egg Harbor. Pacemaker. Post. Viking. Thirty miles off, Silverton makes a fifth. Many people who know the water say the Jersey style sportfisherman is born right here, in this town, on a rented floor. Today the name lives mostly on used boats. The brokerage listings run out around two thousand seven. The state that built the empire does not remember it had one. It begins in nineteen forty six with a man who sells his car. Russell Post needs cedar for the first boat and has no money for it, so the car goes, and the cedar comes, and Post runs the finished hull out through the inlet himself to see if it is any good. That is the whole method. Build it light. Build it fast. Run it through the worst water on the coast before you put your name on it. The first boat is a twenty eight foot skiff. Round bilged. It does better than twenty miles an hour on modest power. The mayor of Egg Harbor City buys it for three thousand dollars. Everything starts on a rented floor on Boston Avenue.