Closed Sea weaves together a colorful history of whalers and pirates, Revolutionary patriots and loyalists, fishermen and loggers, iron masters and life-saving crews, sportsmen and holiday makers. Filled with historical anecdote and keen observations of sea and shore, Closed Sea is a compelling portrait of the historical culture and ecology of New Jersey's Barnegat Bay region. With a naturalist’s eye and a sailor’s experience, the author opens our eyes to the Jersey Shore’s past, its shifting inlets, disappearing islands, dangerous tides and shoals. Moving inland, he explores the Pine Barrens environment and industries it has supported over the centuries. Closed Sea explores the remarkable history of a fascinating place, a place of great beauty, danger and opportunity, a place that has cast its spell on generations of people. The author “has had a fascination with Barnegat Bay since his college days; an affair of the heart, which blossomed into a book belonging in the library of anyone who has ever dipped a foot into this salt water. Closed Sea is a kind of historical, social, ecological Baedeker of the vast bay and the shores it touches,” The Beachcomber on Long Beach Island wrote in a review. “It is a masterful guide, before its time in many ways,” said the Asbury Park Press . "It is a masterful guide, before its time in many ways." --Asbury Park Press "Ecologist and environmental historian Kent Mountford, chronicles the history of this important body of water from the days of the Leni-Lenape and the earliest European explorers." --New Jersey Monthly "Kent Mountford, estuarine ecologist and environmental historian, has had a fascination with Barnegat Bay since his college days; an affair of the heart, which blossomed into a book belonging in the library of anyone who has ever dipped a foot into this salt water. Closed Sea… is a kind of historical, social, ecological and certainly in-depth Baedeker of the vast bay… and the shores it touches." --The Beachcomber Extending roughly from the Manasquan to the Mullica rivers is a region of bay, creeks, barrier island, and coastal forest. Girdled on the east by treacherous inlets and shifting shoals, hemmed in on the west by the vast and mysterious Pine Barrens, steeped in myth and history, this place has been claimed by many: pirates and whalers, iron masters and fishermen, patriots and vacationers. This is Barnegat Bay. Closed Sea is the saga of New Jersey s Barnegat Bay region. It is a legendary coast that has drawn many admirers lured by its beauty and promise, undaunted by the inherent dangers of living at the edge of an unforgiving sea, yet unable to shake the attraction that its glorious shores hold. Kent Mountford, PhD, is an estuarine ecologist with 36 years experience focused on North America's mid-Atlantic temperate estuaries. A writer, lecturer, and sailor, Dr. Mountford has been employed as a scientist for the District of Columbia and the US Environmental Protection Agency. Dr. Mountford was raised a native New Jerseyan, spending each youthful summer at the Shore and the early core of his professional life on Barnegat Bay. He received his Masters and his PhD from Rutgers, New Brunswick, where he also received his undergraduate degree in 1960. He has been a sailor for fifty years and is a licensed U.S. Coast Guard captain. His half century of logbooks, filled with experiences and sketches, cover some 35,000 miles sailing across waters domestic and foreign. With his wife Nancy, he lives on one of the Chesapeake's tributaries and, from an office overlooking his boat moored in her cove continues to write, lecture about, and study coastal history and ecology.