Diving at The RailRoad Bridge, Point Pleasant New Jersey

Dive Summary - June 8, 2025 - Railroad Bridge, Manasquan River, NJ On June 8, 2025, I dove the historic railroad bridge in the Manasquan River under perfect slack tide conditions. With calm water and visibility around 10 feet, the dive revealed a surprisingly complex and vibrant ecosystem hidden just beneath the surface. What I expected to be a quick exploration turned into a full immersion into one of New Jersey's most dynamic aquatic habitats. The bottom was carpeted with bright yellow colonial tunicates, their gelatinous mats clinging to rocks, rubble, and discarded debris like underwater insulation. Intermixed with them were large patches of sea lettuce, their green fronds fluttering in the mild current and offering shelter to juvenile fish and invertebrates. The riverbed itself pulsed with life, each movement revealing tiny creatures, many too small to identify without a magnifying glass. I encountered a horseshoe crab crawling slowly along the silty bottom, its shell encrusted with hitchhikers and its long tail trailing like an ancient rudder. Not far from it, a Knobbed Whelk trudged across a flat rock, and nearby, a thick-limbed Northern Sea Star clung to a barnacle-covered boulder, adding vibrant color to the floor. To top it off, a fluke (summer flounder) lay expertly camouflaged in the sand, only revealing itself with a sudden burst of motion as I drifted overhead. The bridge pilings themselves were vertical reefs. Barnacles and mussels formed dense armor along their surfaces, with sponges growing in patches between them-yellow, brown, and rust-colored colonies filtering the nutrient-rich water. Tucked in along the lower edges, I found bright orange Northern Cup Coral, their tiny polyps extended and glowing like underwater embers. The diversity packed into these few square feet was astounding. A shimmering school of baitfish moved in unison through the midwater, darting from piling to piling in perfect synchronicity. Their silvery flash brought sudden movement to the otherwise still scene, reminding me how dynamic these sheltered spots can be for juvenile fish. Behind the school, I caught sight of a pair of Blackfish (tautog) emerging from a crevice-dark, slow-moving, and clearly at home among the structure's protective angles. It was also a dive of subtle moments-micro-interactions between predator and prey, colonies expanding over steel and stone, and the soft sway of hydroids and seaweed tracing the rhythm of the river. Every inch of the site seemed occupied, as if the entire environment was alive and aware. This dive proved again that the Manasquan River railroad bridge is more than just a local dive site-it's a living, breathing reef system in miniature. From prehistoric crabs to camouflaged fluke, and from tunicate carpets to coral clusters, this dive offered a raw, unscripted experience of marine life thriving in the heart of New Jersey.