Last weekend, I went on a group kayaking tour in Deal Lake. It’s hard to say what town the lake is in because it runs along seven: Allenhurst, Asbury Park, Deal, Interlaken, Loch Arbour, Neptune and Ocean.
The tour was done as a collaboration between the Deal Lake Watershed Alliance (or the DLWA) and Paddle Time Kayaks, a mobile rental company that normally operates in Shark River. This tour only happens twice a year and the next one isn’t scheduled till September.
There were three different types of kayaks offered: the red ones were tandem kayaks that were thirteen feet long and built for two people. The green ones were twelve-foot single kayaks, and the yellow ones were nine-foot singles. The greens are recommended for people who are very tall.
Speaking of people, there were a whole bunch who signed up for the tour—I’d say about ten to fifteen at least. I spoke to and got to know a few of them and learned that they’re from all over New Jersey. And I couldn’t help but wonder what attracted them all here.
I didn’t have to wonder for long. Deal Lake is absolutely gorgeous. It has several fingers that stretch in different directions, allowing the lake to border numerous towns. We didn’t have time to explore them all so I traced our route below in red, with the big green spot being the launch site.
The first thing I learned on this tour is that Deal Lake once connected with the ocean back in the 1800’s. At this point, the water was over twenty feet deep. But a hurricane in 1890 forced the closure of the inlet they had there, and since then, the lake has been its own body of water.
A few minutes after paddling out from the launch site, our tour guide told us to stick our paddles vertically into the water. This was to give us an idea of how shallow it has become in the century since the closure. Your paddles can touch the bottom without much effort.
Another thing our tour guide pointed out were the ospreys and herons who commonly build their nests on top of telephone poles near the lake. He said it got so bad that the electric company had to install “bird blockers” on the poles to keep them away.
After that, we continued single file underneath a small bridge towards the top two fingers of the lake (see map above). As I went under, I could feel the rumble of a nearby train headed our way.
Due to time restraints, we could only explore the bigger of the two northern fingers. Our tour guide mentioned countless species of birds and fish who inhabit Deal Lake: herons and ospreys (as mentioned earlier), geese, ducks, egrets, robins and hawks for the birds, and sunfish, catfish, pickerel, carp, herring and bass for the marine life. It also had a group of turtles on a rotted log, but they jumped back into the water before I could get a picture.
We took the top finger to its end, which led us to Deal Country Club (again, see map above). Past that was nothing but marshland, too shallow to paddle in. Our tour guide said that when he first moved to the area thirty years ago, the marsh area was an extension of the lake that you could kayak in. Erosion has dried it up over the decades.
On our way back to the launch site, he told us quite an interesting story about an old nightclub that was once located on Deal Lake in the early 1900’s. It was called Ross-Fenton Farm, named after its two owners and the former farmland it was built on. This place was supposedly so famous that celebrities would fly into the lake on seaplanes from New York City and Philadelphia, and there would be people paddling in canoes with lanterns to guide them in at night.
Unfortunately, a fire ravaged most of the property in the late 1940’s. Its owners were already approaching the age of retirement and decided not to restore it. Instead, they sold it to a construction company that built a multimillion-dollar home in its place.
By the time we returned to the launch site, the tour had taken about two hours. We went in the morning and the timing was perfect, before the sun and the heat got too brutal. They said these tours are sometimes offered three times a year instead of twice, depending on how many people sign up.
And I certainly know who one of them will be. https://www.paddletimekayaks.com/