ON THE MERRIMACK RIVER — Willem Van de Stadt was in the middle of saying how the mouth of the Merrimack was almost never this calm when he got a call that a boat was sinking. The Salisbury harbormaster flipped on his siren, throttled hard, and slalomed through a thick crowd of boaters and across the sandbar that causes all the chaos.
The mouth of the Merrimack is perhaps the most notorious maritime crossing on the New England coast, where a raging river pools up behind the barrier beaches of Salisbury, to the north, and Plum Island, to the south, before the outgoing tide squeezes that huge mass of water between two man-made jetties and over a sandbar that is being hit from the other side by crashing ocean waves. When the conditions are bad, they churn up a rollercoaster of whitecaps that regularly top 10 feet; even worse, it can go from “it’s almost never this calm” to “flip a boat” in a matter of minutes.
Summer is the busy season on the Merrimack, with hordes of boaters cramming the mouth, and crowds of onlookers jamming the jetties to watch the show. On this recent morning, however, the notorious waves were little more than a mogul field of rapids, and the good weather “out on the bar,” as the locals say, meant Van de Stadt had to make his way through hundreds of yachts and fishing boats and sailboats and Jet Skis that were all using the window to slip out of Newburyport and Salisbury and Amesbury on a beautiful Saturday when the giant was sleeping.
Van de Stadt and his two-man crew aboard The Corbin blew past the clog of fishing boats drifting just outside the channel, chasing the striped bass that were getting sucked out with the tide. And as he motored into deep water, he pulled back on the throttle and paused to use binoculars to try to figure out which of the many boats in front of him was in trouble.
Soon, Van de Stadt had his boat alongside a couple on a 28-foot Sea Ray that was taking on water for some unknown reason. He told the woman driving to keep steady as his crew tied the two boats together. A Coast Guard boat was already there, as was the Newburyport harbormaster, trying to calm a frazzled-looking man using a hand-operated pump in a futile attempt to empty the flooded bilge. A gas-powered pump from the Corbin saved the day and soon a tow boat was pulling the couple to port.
“Let’s see what happens next,” Van de Stadt said as he pulled away. “Last weekend, it was this calm and all of a sudden there were 4- to 5-foot waves. Anything can happen in a second out here.”
The mouth of the Merrimack is well-deserving of its legend, for it is almost perfectly designed to produce a field of waves. This is why there’s a special Coast Guard “surf” station right there, and why the people who work at the station are regularly asked if it’s true that the mouth of the river is the most dangerous waterway entrance on the East Coast.
“The official answer is that no one is out here rating these entrances on a scale of 1-10,” said Petty Officer 1st Class Joe Habel. “What I can tell you is that the Coast Guard has four unique ‘surf’ stations on the East Coast where you have navigable water where there’s 8-plus feet of breaking waves for 36 days or more.”
The mouth of the Merrimack hits that requirement with ease, and some years can double it. In a Nor’easter, it turns into a “roller coaster in a snowstorm,” said Habel, who as a surf station captain is trained to take a boat through 20-foot breaking waves.
“I know people who have left boating because of the mouth of the Merrimack,” said Marty Leahy of Salisbury, a fisherman who has spent years going in and out of the mouth. “It’s a different animal from anything else.
“The waves come at you from all sorts of different directions, bouncing off the jetty and coming from everywhere. I’ve had times when I turn around, and I’ve had times when everyone puts on a life jacket and you hope for the best,” he added.
At the same time, the setting is cinematic, and hard to resist for boaters in the river and gawkers on the land. Many believe it’s becoming more crowded, thanks to a well-documented boom in boating triggered by COVID closures as well as the arrival, in Newburyport, of a Freedom Boat Club, which offers members access to a fleet of boats and is often criticized for putting novices behind the wheel.
“Sometimes, the problem with the mouth is simply the sheer number of boats coming in and out,” said Nick Ironfield, who takes drone footage for his popular “Merrimack River Boats” Instagram page. “It gets so crowded that it’s hard to see exactly what’s going on until you’re in it, and by then you need to be locked in, scanning constantly, ‘Where’s that boat going? Where’s the sandbar? Where’s the waves?’”
On its worst days, the Merrimack is deadly, notorious for drownings in the fast-moving current. But there’s a reason Ironfield started filming boats on the Merrimack, and it’s not because of the danger.
“I was struck by how happy everyone was,” he said. “We just started boating last year, and when I saw the joy everyone was getting out of it I just decided to try to capture it.”
On this Saturday, as the Salisbury harbormaster docked his boat and took a break, it looked like it was going to be one of those magical days of boating on the Merrimack. But part of the magic will always be what lurks underneath, the huge forces at work with all that water moving around, and all that unpredictability.
“When you see it firsthand and experience the enormity of all that fresh and salt water combining in this one location, I don’t care how big your boat is, the mouth has the ability to humble you,” said Jeff Trotsky, a veteran fishing guide on the North Shore. “I went in there recently with my partner for dinner and it was calm as can be, and then the tide started draining and we hit 12-foot waves on the way out. I’m just glad she had a couple glasses of wine at dinner or else she might have killed me.”
Billy Baker can be reached at billy.baker@globe.com. Follow him on Instagram @billy_baker.
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The crowded chaos that is the mouth of the Merrimack - The Boston Globe
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