Epoxy

Ortley Beach

Toms River, New Jersey, USA

Also known as Barnegat Bay, Toms River, Ocean County, Island Beach

Those comb shapes along the mainland shore were salt marsh until somebody dredged them.

Barnegat Bay filled up fast. Ocean County held about 108,000 people in 1940 and roughly 346,000 by 1960, and developers met that demand by cutting navigable lagoons into the marsh so every house could have a boat at the door. Brick Township alone ended up with more than 128 miles of artificial waterway. Between 1953 and 1973 the county lost about 30 percent of its tidal marsh.

Marsh is what filtered the bay. Without it, and with the surrounding sand compacted almost to the density of concrete under roads and houses, runoff now arrives largely untreated.

The bay is shallow and slow. Water entering it takes around 74 days to turn over in summer, which is long enough for whatever comes in to stay a while.

Details

Feature: Coastline
Build: Epoxy
Material: Solid Cherry
Colour: Ocean Blue
Size: 10-1/2" x 16"
Completed: July 2025

Shop this Style $350.00 CAD

Detail of the Ortley Beach map by Keyway

How this one was made

Cherry, and wall to wall. The flood covers the whole face and runs off every edge.

The lagoons are the job on this board. Along the mainland shore there are dozens of comb structures, each one a set of parallel canals a fraction of a millimetre wide with a spine running behind them. Every tooth is its own dammed channel, straight, and straight at that width is harder than curved because any wobble reads against the tooth beside it. There are more of these here than on any board in the batch.

Two colours, the water and the white. The white does the compass rose, the heart and the outlines around the lettering. The lettering itself is the negative, left standing at the original surface inside the poured area so the sanding brings the tops back as bare cherry, with an engraved outline filled white around each character. Reverse relief and syringe fill on the same letters, which is the most involved lettering treatment that we do.