A smiling Gov. Chris Christie leaned across a broad blue banner imprinted with the words, “New Jersey, Stronger Than the Storm” and cut the ribbon on a brand new boardwalk in Belmar.

“The biggest reason that I want to come and open these boardwalks,” he told the crowd in May, “is because I want New Jersey, the region and the country to know that New Jersey has come back.”

SANDY IMPACT MAP

Check our interactive map to view the areas of New Jersey's Bayshore region that were hit hardest by the storm. The map is viewable on desktop computers and mobile devices.

A hundred miles to the southwest, on the other side of the state, Mike Coombs crouched in the palomino-gold meadow grass. It was not going to be a good day for farming. His back ached from the shift in temperature. A brisk breeze from the west had turned east and would be bringing moisture in off the Delaware Bay, and a wet “medda,” as Mike called it in the faintly Southern twang of this part of New Jersey, meant he wouldn’t be cutting hay anytime soon.

Three thousand acres of salt hay, and all but 500 were thrashed and drowned by last October’s storm. The surge from the Delaware Bay pushed mountains of water up the estuary’s tributaries, slashed levees, smashed through sand berms and flooded meadow and marsh; it tore through homes and businesses and shifted so much sand it clogged rivers, creeks and streams.

“All we’re asking for is, could you please just come out to the Bayshore communities?” said Joe Derella, Freeholder Director for Cumberland County. “I don’t think that’s unreasonable. I think that’s fair because they’ve been devastated.”

Part of Cumberland County’s dilemma is that it has suffered one blow of hard luck after another. Nine New Jersey counties met the federal threshold of 1 percent tax assessment losses, which the governor had no part in determining. Cumberland came up just short, though Derella said four of the county’s Bayshore townships lost between 8 and 10 percent.

Where state aid is concerned, Gov. Christie says he’s had to make difficult choices, but that doesn’t mean he isn’t aware of the struggles of Cumberland County’s residents.

“I understand they suffered some damage there, and that they have needs going forward, but they suffered significantly less damage than those other nine counties,” Christie said last week in an interview with The Star-Ledger. “And so I understand that everybody wants to be attended to with that same level of attention — that’s not possible. And so I make these decisions based upon the level of devastation and the degree of need, and that’s where we spend most of our time. That being said, we’ve done things for Cumberland County. We’ve done significant things.”

But while $1.6 billion has been allocated so far to the nine hardest-hit counties, Cumberland has received less than $2 million from the state, according to Derella and a number of the Bayshore mayors. That number does not include FEMA money or National Flood Insurance payouts that have gone directly to individual residents and businesses.

The people of Down Jersey bowed under the weight of Sandy’s destruction, and when a vicious nor’easter hit two months later, their knees buckled. It wasn’t about being ignored — they were used to that, they were fine with that — it was about being ignored when so much was wrong. The storm shattered lives and livelihoods, sweeping away precious fishing grounds that sustain thousands and contribute millions to the state economy.

Commercial fisherman Bob Bateman standing outside his work shop behind his house in Bivalve. Bateman's property continues to flood during full moon high tides because of a breach in the bank of the Maurice River about a half mile away. Bateman had four feet of water in his home during Hurricane Sandy.

Spend time on the wide grass prairies as they cut salt hay or on the bay as they rake oysters. Drink a can or two of Bud with them, walk the drenched land with them and see for yourself how nothing much has changed since Sandy throttled the Bayshore. Be sure to stop along the beachfront, too. Homes that once huddled here against the storm now form ghost towns from which only occasionally a man or woman emerges, specterlike, to claim not all is lost. Do this and you will see and hear for yourself what it means to die not from a natural disaster, but from neglect, with no one to help, no one who has the governor’s ear and no experience asking for public money after a disaster.

Meghan Wren, the executive director of the nonprofit Bayshore Discovery Project, even resorted to swimming 13.1 miles across the Delaware Bay on Aug. 3 to raise $25,000 for her program as well as the Cumberland County Long Term Recovery Group and the Rising Tides Forum, which aims to prepare the area for future storms and sea-level rise.

With more than $30 million in property damage alone, the 300,000 residents of the Bayshore region are living in a limbo from which no one sees a way out. They are shy, self-sufficient and resilient and have been for 350 years; they are used to living on little and asking for less. But in all the generations of all of Down Jersey, they have never been tested like this.

“We don’t have a boardwalk, we don’t have a casino, but we’re still important. We’re people with lives and homes and it’s really sad,” said Kathryn Weisenburg of Fortescue. “That song ‘Stronger than the Storm’? That song breaks our heart.”

'SERENGETI OF THE WEST'

It’s easy to see why wildlife biologists and conservationists refer to the Delaware Bayshore as the “Serengeti of the West.” The land stretches to the horizon, Kansas-flat, revealing a painter’s palette of green. Asparagus, iris and morning glory grow wild by the side of the road. And over islands of water in the middle of meadows, snowy egrets flutter awkwardly to earth like tetherless kites. So flat is the western coast of the state that many who live here have a view of both sunrise and sunset and the constellation Cassiopeia can be seen year-round.

Sixty-five miles of New Jersey’s Delaware Bay coastline is an estuary where freshwater streams and rivers mingle with the saltwater tides, and more than 1.6 million people live in its watershed. Annually, the Delaware Bay estuary provides $5.3 billion in ecosystem services, according to a 2011 report by the University of Delaware’s School of Public Policy & Administration, and those services directly account for 53,000 jobs.

But while the Bayshore gets attention for its rich natural resources, its residents feel overlooked.

“We’re an environmental Disneyland,” said Campbell, Downe Township’s mayor. “We’re here to take care of it, but with no money to do so.”

More than a third of Cumberland County residents and more than half the county’s children — twice the state average — live below the poverty line, according to last month’s report from the New Jersey Poverty Research Institute. But of the $780 million set aside by the state for three Stronger NJ programs, Cumberland County is eligible for none of it.

Steve Fleetwood, the president and CEO of Bivalve Packing Co., understands the value of the Atlantic coast to the state’s economy, but he’s tired, he said, of being a second-class citizen.

“I’ve lived here all my life. Nobody knows we’re here and nobody cares and that’s okay. It is what it is. But our channel needs dredging. The Bayshore is eroded. Nothing ever changes. It sure would be nice if someone recognized we were here.”

'CAN'T CATCH A BREAK'

Standing on the deck behind his mother’s house, Mike Coombs shakes his head and puts a pinch of chew under his lower lip.

Mike Coombs of Cedarville, one of the last salt hay farmers in New Jersey, baling hay on a Delaware Bay meadow. Salt water intrusion from failed dikes and strict environmental regulations may put Coombs out of business.

Mikey — that’s what his mother calls him — has no idea what “New Jersey” the governor was talking about when he cut that ribbon in Belmar back in May because nothing has “come back” for him, or the fishermen or the rest of the Bayshore.

“No weakfish, no flounder, there’s nothin’ in the bay and the salt hay is flooded,” he said. “It’s hard enough to make a dollar. I work out here in the heat with the greenhead flies. … I have hundreds of acres of meadow I pay taxes on. I don’t get a break at all.”

“Can’t catch a break” — you hear that all the time down here. If these people didn’t have hard luck, as the saying goes, they’d have no luck at all.

STORM'S LINGERING SPECTER

Just north of Mike’s meadows, in Greenwich (pronounced “Green-witch”), Martin “Reds” Morse wonders if his home will ever be completely dry again. The hurricane barreled through dozens of centuries-old levees along the Delaware Bay, including one just 200 yards from Reds’ place where a thick hose now snakes across his front lawn, pumping water from a basement that floods twice a day at high tide.

In Bivalve, Bob Bateman, a commercial crabber, and his girlfriend, Billie Jo Hill, sit at an old wooden workbench in the garage behind their home and spoon macaroni and cheese onto paper plates.

The walls of the old building are bare of Sheetrock, lined only with bloated rolls of insulation swollen from the frequent floodwaters. Sandy blew out a sand berm on a nearby river, the Maurice (pronounced “MOR-ris”), and the hurricane’s surge sent thousands of gallons of river water crashing through their house. Everything on the first floor was ruined.

Martin "Reds" Morse stands beside the mural he painted on the exterior of his garage depicting a local lighthouse, an oyster schooner and the 100-year-old shad boat "Viking" he keeps in his front yard in Greenwich, Cumberland County.

“We’re still struggling,” he said.

Just down the road from Bob’s place, next to the marina, is Surfside Products, which processes virtually all the surf and ocean quahog clams landed by New Jersey fishermen. In terms of total economic impact, Dave Bushek, director of Rutgers’ Haskin Shellfish Research Laboratory in Port Norris, estimates an annual contribution of $180 million. But the plant also sits just yards away from that sand berm breached during Sandy, and its parking lot floods now with every high tide.

Like Mike Coombs, Bob remains haunted by the hurricane. Just a few months ago, his nephew Josh was dredging for crabs and conch in the Delaware Bay with two other crewmen, all of them in their 20s, when their line suddenly snagged something on the bottom. The boat, the Linda Claire, capsized. Two of the men — boys, really — were saved, but not 23-year-old Josh. If you ask the older fishermen about it, they will shake their heads and tell you that like the hand of Neptune himself, a piece of Sandy debris surely took that boat down.

The people of Down Jersey once hunted whales off these shores, scooped up oysters and fished for sturgeon and blue crabs in the rivers and the bay. They diked the meadows for salt hay, grew vegetables and planted fruit orchards; they hammered bog iron that bubbled up from the estuary into wrought iron and blew the finest Delaware Bay sand into delicate glass.

They married here and had children here — fishermen and farmers, glassblowers and gaffers, sail-makers and shipbuilders and hot-metal chargers — and when one industry went bust, they made do and found another. What they didn’t do was give up or move away, instead accepting a life in that ever-shifting liminal space between the tides and terra firma, understanding they belonged to neither. And if they went largely ignored by the rest of the state, well, that was fine with them.

In this secluded part of New Jersey, it’s common to see a family’s wash drying on clotheslines in the backyard, shirts and pants dancing jigs in the breeze. In the summer, hungry field workers follow the scent of charcoal fires and pork drippings to roadside barbecue pits.

And along Route 47, which winds, serpentine, through the meadows, vegetable, flower and fruit stands advertise specials on cockscomb, aster and marigold; chives, pepper and sweet pea; and all manner of tomatoes — Yellow Brandywine, Jetsetter, Bush Early Girl, Roma and Marconi Red. The stands display their homegrown wares in neat rows and overflowing baskets, but they are unattended. Instead, patrons pay by dropping money into honor boxes.

Ed "Shep" Sheppard and Martin "Reds" Morse walk along Mill Creek Dike in Greenwich, Cumberland County. Many locals fear the dike will be taken out by the next big storm.

But drive the less-traveled roads of the Bayshore and you’ll see abandoned homes and businesses, raw and vulnerable, stripped bare of their skin. They sag in the cold, swoon in the heat and list right or left as if too tired to stand up straight. On Oct. 29, 2012, when Sandy spun chaos up and down the state, Cumberland County could ill afford a disaster of such magnitude. In June, barely four months earlier, it took the brunt of a derecho, a brief but violent thunderstorm, and a year before Sandy, it was pummeled by Hurricane Irene. Each assault by nature ripped apart bulkheads, earthen dikes and sandy berms — the man-made structures that hold back the bay, rivers and creeks all along the western shore of the state. With little money available, few repairs were made and levees were left to erode even more.

“Since Sandy, just talks and no funding for fixing it,” Maurice River Township Mayor Andy Sarclette said. “The government requires a hundred meetings just to take out the trash.”

“I make policy based upon facts, and the facts are there’s significantly more damage in lots of other places in the state than there was in Cumberland,” Christie said.

The governor’s office said $3.9 million in grant-related hazard mitigation money went to Cumberland County, but those funds came from FEMA and though distributed by the state, Derella said, the amount also was predetermined by FEMA.

Direct aid from Trenton to Cumberland County amounted to a $200,000 community disaster loan to Downe Township from the Department of Community Affairs to dredge a sandbar from the middle of Fortescue Creek; $756,000 for homeowner and rental assistance, which Cumberland County learned about last week; and a $1 million piece of the $50 million pie the state determined would be Cumberland’s share of federal mitigation money.

Four years ago, in October 2009, Downe Township received a promise of $543,500 from the state to build a new bulkhead and resurface three major roads. Two hurricanes, a derecho and several nor’easters later, the township is still waiting.

Long before the storm, acres of heartache blanketed Down Jersey.

“Those beaches could have been protected with a jetty, but nobody cared,” said Bivalve’s Fleetwood. “We’re not only paying for everyone in New Jersey to enjoy open spaces, but no one’s worried about our own bay.”

Others believe the neglect is far from benign.

“There is no effort to breathe life back into the Bayshore,” said Mayor Campbell who blames, in part, the DEP and New Jersey’s tidewaters lease act, which allows the state to claim whatever property is below the mean high-water line, even when it shifts farther inland.

“It’s all about power and money,” he said. “They want to own the land. It’s like the Gestapo. They fly over our communities and make sure we haven’t built a pond for ducks in our backyard. They’ve regulated our land away from us without paying us for it. They have this mentality that humans are bad and everything should be natural.”

A mile of private bulkheads in Downe Township was washed away by the hurricane, according to Campbell, who has been unable to get the DEP to help pay for new ones.

The DEP said it has not received any request from the mayor for permits to build a new bulkhead.

“We’re aware of the issues and have been in touch,” said DEP spokesperson Larry Ragonese.

Ragonese said if the residential bulkhead is reconstructed in the same footprint, no permits are needed. Campbell said that wouldn’t make sense, since the only place to build a new bulkhead is farther back.

“Time is our enemy,” he said. “On the Atlantic side, they’re getting easements to put up bulkheads. I could get easements, but we don’t have the money. I will lose half the houses inland in Fortescue if we have a storm because we have no bulkhead. I asked someone from the DEP, ‘There’s nothing I can do to help my community?’ He said, ‘Nope.’âÂÂ”

“These are not simple matters,” Ragonese said. “Come to us with a plan. We’re willing to work with them and be as accommodating as we can.”

Nothing, however, comes easy here. In the months after Sandy, while the Atlantic coast slowly resumed its life and returned to normal — boardwalks and bulkheads rebuilt, amusement parks restored and businesses revitalized — the western coast of New Jersey languished:

• Today Cumberland County’s $200 million recreational and commercial fishing, crabbing and clamming industries remain devastated, and Delaware Bay fishermen say they’ve had the worst summer in decades.

• Of South Jersey's 70 centuries-old dikes, 28 are located in Cumberland County, and many that were critically eroded and degraded before Sandy were breached during the hurricane. Only a handful have been repaired.

• Ninety percent of the water just off the central part of the Atlantic coast has been surveyed for debris and 100 percent of the debris removed, according to the DEP, but on the western coast less than half the Delaware Bay has been surveyed and only a third of the debris removed, making one of New Jersey’s prime fishing grounds, in one of the shallowest bays in the United States, suddenly one of the most dangerous to navigate.

“They don’t believe anything is sustainable here anymore,” said James Watson, director of the Cumberland County Department of Economic Development about what he believes is the state’s reluctance to help. “We have 40 miles of shoreline in Cumberland County, and only 3 miles have economic development. Leave us those 3 miles so we can try and build it back.”

THE FORCE OF NATURE

Sandy peeled back so much sand and sod from the beaches and marshes you can read the biography of the Bayshore in the bits and pieces that ooze from its bluish mud: Depression glass, an old fishing reel, fragments of ceramic dinner plates and tea cups. Embedded in the sod banks that finger the fringe of the Bay are also chunks of glass called cullet, chipped from the bottoms of factory furnaces years ago and now glinting in the sunshine like pieces of frozen starlight.

The seasons here are measured by the shades and hues of the meadows and the days by the wind and the tides. Land and sea shift slowly, incrementally. Everything runs in cycles. If the eastern shore of New Jersey tells time by two seasons (winter and summer), the western shore tells time by the phases of the moon, the direction of the wind and the ebb and flow of water. Nothing stays still. Fast currents and slack tides — dead high or dead low — are bad for crabbing; November brings flocks of snow geese to feast on the roots of salt hay and gnaw the meadows to nothing. Even the smallest of creatures, the coffee-bean snail, trudges laboriously up the stem of a blade of cordgrass twice a day to avoid being swept away by a high tide.

RISING TIDE OF MISERY

Before dawn yawns its way across the bay, Mike Coombs is up and ready for work. In boots and baseball cap, he jumps in his truck and rides out to one of the meadows where four generations of his family have cut and baled salt hay, prized as insulation and sold by nurseries and garden centers. On this day, just after a full-moon high tide, acres of salt hay, weakened by the wind and tides, have fallen into soft swirls like the damp curls of sleeping babies. At the edges of the meadow, water soaks the ground and pools in the tire tracks. The earth is still too wet and soft to support the weight of a tractor.

“The tide table is my worst enemy,” Mike said.

High tides are obviously worse than low, and full-moon and new-moon high tides worst of all, he explains. For the three days before and the three days following a new moon or a full moon, the high tides will flood his salt hay and saturate the meadows. Mike lost thousands of dollars because of Sandy, and a wet spring and summer have continued to strain business. When the hurricane hit, it also scattered thousands of pieces of trash across 2,500 of his 3,000 acres. Heck, Mike and his brother and their father had to spend two months just dragging debris off the fields: propane tanks, dumpsters, boats and all sizes of wood, concrete and plastic.

Mike plans everything around the moon, even his wedding. A few years ago, when he and his fiancée were deciding when to tie the knot, he knew the only break he could count on from his 12-14 hour days would be during a full moon or new moon when the high tides would turn his meadows into mud.

“That’s when I knew I could take a vacation,” he said. “You die in the sun and freeze in winter. You gotta love it. You put up with strawberry flies and greenhead flies for three, four months. Nothing else you can do.”

What’s much harder to tolerate, he said, is the DEP, which tells him he needs permits — permits to store a pile of oyster shells on his meadow that he uses to replenish the paths out to his salt hay, and permits to repair the tractor bridges between those meadows.

Of the bridges, the DEP’s Ragonese said, “if it’s just a couple of boards, we’re not bothering him,” but if it’s anything more than that, it would require either a coastal wetlands permit or a waterfront development permit.”

As for the shell pile, if it has “expanded into freshwater wetlands,” he said, “that would be unauthorized filling-in of freshwater wetlands. … We’re talking with him about it.”

All the paperwork — the permits, the regulations — Mike said, overwhelmed his father and undermined his health. Not three months after the hurricane and only five weeks after turning 60, Mike Sr. was dead. Sure, the doctors said it was a heart attack, but everyone who knew Mike Sr. knew what it really was — Ronnie Bowers, one of Mike Sr.’s best friends, even said it: “The DEP killed him.”

On the day Mike Sr. died he was out trapping muskrats, tramping through wind-whipped cowlicks of salt hay and slogging through the mud. Around 6 p.m., Mike Jr.’s mother, Donna, called. It was dark and cold, and his father hadn’t come home yet. Mike Jr. knew where to look. He didn’t need a flashlight, not really. He knew every furrow, every ditch and every dike as surely as he knew the faces of his family, but there were hundreds of acres and he was in his hip boots. Around 9 p.m. the halo from his flashlight finally found his father’s body, face up, in a swale of salt hay.

“Every single day he was worried,” Ronnie said about his friend.

Ronnie is 77 and owns 200 acres in nearby Newport, 80 of them salt hay. Mike Sr. took care of the meadow for him, cutting and baling the hay. He also built an earthen berm to keep the river water off the meadow and Ronnie’s cornfield. It worked, but later the state said he needed permits, and after Sandy it all got so much worse.

“He wasn’t himself,” said Ronnie, who believes the worry simply wore Mike Sr. down.

What relief he did get, he got the way he always did.

“The land, the hay, his dogs,” Ronnie explained. “That was his psychiatrist.”

RICH IN HISTORY

Go north along the Delaware Bay, 25 miles above Bivalve, past the N.J. Fish and Wildlife preserves of Turkey Point, Egg Island, Fortescue, Nantuxent and Sea Breeze, and you finally arrive at Greenwich, founded in 1684 and one of the first ports of entry established in this country when it was still under British rule.

Greenwich sits on the Cohansey River and just a couple of miles from the center of town is Bayside, once known as Caviar Point. For the first 200 years of the republic, thousands of schooners sailed into port here, brimming with whale meat, then sturgeon, weakfish and oysters. In the late 1800s, Russia imported caviar from this tiny New Jersey hamlet, but in less than a decade the sturgeon population plummeted to near extinction. Today the dock is just a skeleton of wooden pylons. The hand-hewn, red oak poles stand in 6 feet of water but support nothing but an occasional sea gull.

A few hundred yards from the pier is Delaware Avenue with its rambling three-story Victorian homes built by men made millionaires from the Bayshore’s rich fishing grounds. During Hurricane Sandy, the wind scooped the shingles off the roof of the 160-year-old home of “Reds” Morse and the surging water pushed past the house, through the backyard and a quarter mile into the reeds to the edge of a cornfield. Reds’ first floor stayed dry, but not his basement, which he now must pump twice a day at high tide.

The problem for Reds and the other homes along historic Delaware Avenue really began in 1989, when the nearby Pine Mount Dike, built in 1802, breached in a storm. A year later, the Army Corps of Engineers and the DEP repaired it.

“They used gravel and it washed away,” Reds said. “Lasted maybe a year.”

His basement now gets 6 inches of water at high tide. Reds has always worked two jobs, one on land — in the boatyards, or at the marina, and now for the Bridgeton Water and Sewer Department — and the other on the water, catching shad, sturgeon, weakfish, even snapping turtles he sells to Philadelphia restaurants to make snapper soup. You can see him smiling broadly in one of the photos on his wall. It’s Easter Sunday 2004, and Reds, a licensed captain, stands in a skiff filled to the brim with shad. Though he works in the city all week, Reds fishes when he can and he has the ruddy complexion of a waterman — which is what the fishermen down here call themselves — to prove it.

Reds peered out over the old Pine Mount Dike, barely visible above the surface of the water.

“This used to be a stream,” he said of the 300-400-foot-wide tributary rushing by. “And all around here used to be all woods, freshwater meadow, 50-foot-tall trees, with the dike protecting it. Now it’s just a big mud pit.”

Although 13,000 acres of Cumberland County have been set aside under the New Jersey Farmland Preservation Program, ghost forests now rise where woods and freshwater meadows used to be. Sea-level rise push salty high tides farther inland, say coastal science experts, until the brine choked the cedar and pine trees and bleached their bare bones white.

“Water is coming up over tillable soil,” Reds said. “We’re paying taxes for it and it’s useless. Why are they letting it wash away?”

EMPTY TRAPS, HEAVY HEARTS

In late summer, the fog tumbles fast and low along the Maurice River as Bob Bateman steers his 24-foot boat away from Longreach Marina.

“Looks like we got smoke on the water,” he announces, a Marlboro hanging precariously from his lower lip.

The early morning mist sneaks over the bow of his boat and exhaust pours noisily from the outboard motor, absorbing the plume of smoke from Bob’s cigarette.

The old two-stroke, 200-horsepower engine burns both oil and gas, and the thick smell seems to leave a permanent slick in the briney air. Bob’s at home here. So are Rich and Lou, his two cigarette-smoking crewmen, all of whom appear oblivious to the cigarette ashes falling in snowy flakes onto the 5-gallon containers of fuel near their feet.

The men putter from one buoy to the next, rhythmically hauling lines and hooking traps in a close-quarters dance that yields few crabs and little enthusiasm. Instead, buoy after buoy brings up disappointment — five crabs, four, six, where dozens should be. Two-hundred-and-nine pots fill just five bushel baskets instead of the usual 20-25, according to Bob, who said it’s been that way all summer.

“The spawn that was in the water last October; those baby crabs either got washed onto the shore or washed out to sea,” he said. “It makes it very tough. We really don’t have anything else to turn to, nothing else to catch.”

Bob’s boat approaches another orange buoy.

“Last one,” he says, as he hooks trap number 210.

Rich upends it. Nothing. Not a single crab. Even the bait is missing. The crew has been on the water just three hours, but already the day is over.

He takes a long drag on his Marlboro Light 100.

“Well, that’s it,” he says, and turns the boat toward home.

Not far from Bivalve, at Beaver Dam Boat Rentals, you can ask Lynn Waterman to show you the sign she hung on the door of the business she runs with her husband. She’s not shy about showing it. In fact, she’s almost proud of it in a tired kind of way. Sandy left a sandbar in the creek that makes it impossible to even kayak in or out of the dock at low tide. Lynn made the sign herself, on white oak tag. It reads, simply, “I wasn’t stronger than the storm.” It hung outside for weeks, which is why aortal rivers of purple ink run from each letter in jagged streaks.

LITTLE LEFT TO LOSE

Twelve months after Sandy swept away much of the first floor of his home, Bob and Billie Jo are still looking for their washing machine.

“We lost everything — my office, refrigerator, stove, washer and dryer,” Bob said. “The washing machine is somewhere in the meadow.”

Swept, too, from Bob’s yard and barn were outboard motors, air compressors, pressure washers and tools he uses as a waterman.

Flood insurance covered the $40,000-$50,000 of damage Sandy did to the house, but not to his business, including the 80 crab traps he lost.

Since the hurricane, his property and barn have flooded repeatedly, including earlier this month when a nor’easter sat for four days over the Bayshore. The problem, he said, is the sand berm, the one on the Maurice River that was deteriorating for years and then collapsed in the hurricane. Now, at high tide, even during ordinary rainstorms, water rushes through the opening in the berm, washes over a nearby dike and floods the only road that separates Bob’s property from the river and bay.

“I don’t have much left to lose,” he says wearily.

Bob takes another long drag on his Marlboro. So does Billie Jo on hers. They’re both quiet. When asked about his own worries, Bob answers by saying he’s been smoking more cigarettes lately. He elected to collect his Social Security retirement benefits before reaching 65 so he has some steady income, and on his next birthday, his 65th, he’ll be eligible for Medicare. In the winter he gets heating assistance from the state, and because he has no health insurance, relies on “charity care” at Inspira Medical Center in Vineland. Three weeks ago, he was treated for a painful infection in his right leg and given antibiotics.

In the old garage where Bob stores much of his equipment, he lines up the watery prizes he scoops up occasionally with his crabs. The shelf is only about 6 feet long, but since Sandy his dredges and pots have brought up basketfuls of bottles, an old shaving cup, a large urn, even a 5-foot tall, barnacle-encrusted anchor. Things that were never there before, at least where he set his pots for more than 30 years.

“No doubt about it,” he said. “Sandy moved a lot of things around.”

THE LAST VICTIM

When the 40-foot Linda Claire capsized in April and Bob’s nephew Josh, local officials declared the accident was caused by underwater debris. That part of the Delaware Bay where Josh was lost was clear of debris, according to the most recent navigational map used by the watermen — clear, that is, before Sandy.

On Oct. 29, 2012, the day of the worst natural disaster in New Jersey history, Josh celebrated his 23rd birthday. Six months later, he was dead. Thirty-five days after that, his body was found on Fowler Beach, on the other side of Delaware Bay.

Behind the Haleyville United Methodist Church, built in 1864, the cemetery spreads out well beyond the old cedar trees that stand sentinel around the oldest graves. The weathered limestone monuments bear faded names of some of the Bayshore’s oldest families, names like Sheppard and Sharp, Blizzard and Bateman, Stiles and Stubbs. Walk at an angle, toward the far corner of the cemetery, and you will see the generations come and go. There are Catletts here, too — James D. Catlett, 1897-1984; Ben Catlett, 1933-2004; Mary Catlett, 1926-2009.

In the back of the cemetery, in an area farthest from the church, a musty smell rises from the recently turned soil. A patch of grassy sod, stitched onto one of the graves, is decorated with oyster shells and artificial flowers. In one corner, a child’s shiny blue pinwheel suddenly pauses in the brisk breeze, uncertain which way to spin.

A simple silver plate marks the place where a monument will soon sit. The plate isn’t very large, just large enough to hold a name and two dates: Joshua M. Catlett, 1989-2013. A son of South Jersey, a waterman — the last victim of Hurricane Sandy.

MORE SANDY BAYSHORE COVERAGE

• Hurricane Sandy aftermath: N.J. Bayshore's boating industry was left high and dry

• Hurricane Sandy destruction in Bay Point turned paradise into nightmare

• Hurricane Sandy's impact on South Jersey: A precarious situation that's only likely to get worse

• Interactive map: Hurricane Sandy's impact on N.J.'s Bayshore region

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