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Bennett Moberg was at the end of a long season when the junior pitcher took the mound for Point Pleasant Beach in its most important game of the campaign so far.

Moberg had some ups and downs on the mound this year and also has been dealing with back issues since the offseason, but he knew his team was counting on him to come through.

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Moberg delivered for his team, allowing just two hits as he came within one pitch of throwing a complete game shutout.

Moberg struck out eight and issued four walks in second-seeded Point Pleasant Beach’s 5-0 victory over sixth-seeded Delaware Valley in the semifinals of the NJSIAA Central Jersey, Group 1 playoffs in Point Pleasant.

Moberg’s performance was even more impressive considering that, in his 16 outings this season, he had pitched past the third inning just three times and had never lasted more than five innings.

“My slider was deadly today, and they just could not touch it. My spin rate has been higher lately, and staying out of my head has been key to my success,” Moberg said after the game.

Point Pleasant Beach coach Angelo Flore said a couple quick innings and a strong defense behind him aided Moberg’s effort.

“He had two good innings where he had nine pitches and seven pitches, and that was able to help him push further into the game,” Flore said. “He made that pitch when he needed to or relied on his defense, which also did an outstanding job today.”

Point Pleasant Beach (20-7) is looking to repeat as Central Jersey, Group 1 champion for the fourth season in a row. It advances to the final on Thursday, when it will be on the road against top-seeded Middlesex, which advanced with a 10-0 victory over fourth-seeded Shore.

Delaware Valley entered this contest having upset third-seeded Metuchen, 5-1, in the quarterfinals last Friday to earn its first semifinals appearance since 2016.

Point Pleasant Beach began the bottom of the first inning with four straight hits.

It began with a leadoff single to right field by Tommy Conroy. Brody Powers followed with an RBI double that scored Conroy, giving Point Pleasant Beach a 1-0 lead. The offense continued with another RBI single from Noah Banick. Danny Lubach rounded out the scoring in the inning with an RBI single to make it 3-0.

Point Pleasant Beach added two more runs in the bottom of the third inning with a wild pitch that scored two runs, thanks to a throwing error by the catcher after retrieving the ball.

Delaware Valley had multiple scoring chances but was unable to get runners home.

In the third inning, after Danny Cialone was hit by a pitch to lead off the inning, then Gabriel Miller drew a one-out walk to give Delaware Valley runners on first and second. Jimmy Hintenach then hit a line drive right to Powers, who doubled off Cialone at second base to end the scoring chance.

Delaware Valley left a total of seven runners on base.

Banick led the Point Pleasant offense by going 2-for-3 with a double, an RBI and two runs scored. Powers went 1-for-2 with an RBI and two runs scored.

Coach Fiore was proud of his offense and said, “One through nine, our offense is a solid roster. The guy batting eight is as good as the guy batting leadoff. One of the things that we’re really good at is that we effectively put the ball in play all the time.”

Jimmy Hintenach and Chris Cialone recorded the lone hits for Delaware Valley (11-12). Brady Reardon pitched a complete game, allowing five runs (four earned) on seven hits while striking out eight and walking two.

“We had opportunities with guys on base but couldn’t finish. Point Pleasant Beach pitched well, and they had a good first inning and took advantage of it,” Delaware Valley coach Marty White said.

“We grew a lot as a program throughout the season. We got better towards the end and knocked off a very good Metuchen team. We got to the semis and we competed. For the guys coming back. that’s something to build off of.”

Moberg held a no-hitter going into the fourth inning before giving up a leadoff single to Delaware Valley’s Chris Cialone.

Moberg had recorded two outs in the seventh inning before walking Danny Cialone on a full count, with the maximum pitch count of 110 being reached on the final ball.

Noah Banick then came in from the bullpen to record a strikeout for the final out of the game.

Moberg was thankful for getting the chance to deliver such a strong outing at this stage of the season.

“It’s great that my coaches trust me enough,” he said. “It’s a combination of my teammates and coaches trusting me, along with the work I’ve put in throughout practice and the offseason.”

At Sunray Beach on New Jersey’s Delaware Bay shore, Susan Linder dug a series of holes in the sand where she hoped female horseshoe crabs had laid their eggs during this year’s spawning season. It’s an event that draws thousands of migrating shorebirds to feast on the energy-rich food bonanza.

Linder was in luck: In several of the holes, she found clumps, each measuring an inch or two across, of pink, gray or greenish eggs buried up to 8 inches beneath the surface. If the eggs stayed buried for several more weeks, they would stand a chance of becoming the young horseshoe crabs for which the Delaware Bay is famous. If not, they would be driven by wave action to the surface, where they would become food for hungry shorebirds en route to breeding grounds at the northern ends of their migratory routes.

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The measurement of egg density, conducted on Delaware Bay beaches by Linder and other conservationists for the last 11 years, is important because it is a way to gauge the health of the bay’s population of horseshoe crabs. The crabs are ecological lynchpins that feed not only migrating birds, but also marine species such as sea turtles, sharks and weakfish.

Unless the bay’s horseshoe crab population is vigorous and growing, conservationists say it won’t support a web of life, and some of those species have declined since the commercial fishing industry removed too many crabs for bait from bay beaches in New Jersey and elsewhere starting in the late 1990s.

Threats persist

Although the bait harvest is now regulated, the practice continues in three of the four bay states, alongside the unregulated harvest of crab blood for biomedical purposes, fueling naturalists’ claims that the threat to horseshoe crabs has not gone away.

Bird numbers crashed in response to the indiscriminate removal of millions of horseshoe crabs some 25 years ago, leaving little food for red knots, semipalmated sandpipers and other bird species that migrate thousands of miles each year from South America to Arctic Canada via the Delaware Bay, their most important stopover.

New Jersey banned the harvest of horseshoe crabs for bait on its beaches and in its waters starting in 2008, but the other bay states of Delaware, Maryland and Virginia still allow the catch, albeit now restricted by a federal fisheries regulator to males only.

The Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission said in a 2024 stock assessment that the Delaware Bay contained about 56 million mature horseshoe crabs in 2022, the year for which the most recent data is available, and that the population is increasing thanks to the ban on female harvesting since 2013. The commission attributed the increase to a system called Adaptive Resource Management, which it has used to set horseshoe crab quotas in the Delaware Bay for the last 13 years.

“Mature female horseshoe crabs have been steadily increasing in the region since the implementation of the initial ARM Framework in 2012,” said Tina Berger, a spokeswoman for the regulator.

But conservationists say crab numbers still haven’t fully recovered from the overharvest a quarter-century ago, and that’s shown by the continuing low egg-density level by comparison with historical numbers.

Important measurements

That’s where Linder’s intricate measurements on the beaches come in.

The average density of horseshoe crab eggs on or near the surface of New Jersey’s Delaware Bay beaches was 7,569 per square meter between 2015 when the annual surveys began and 2024. Last year showed a surface egg density of 7,619 per square meter, above the 10-year average.

That’s nowhere near the density of roughly 50,000 per square meter that prevailed before the overharvest of horseshoe crabs, and conservationists say it’s well below the level needed to sustain numbers of crabs and birds seen when the Delaware Bay’s shorebird migration was viewed as one of America’s great natural spectacles.

Last year was especially strong for surface egg density, and the data for 2025 so far is also headed in that direction, Linder said. But she argued that two years of data on egg density aren’t enough to conclude that there’s a strong recovery in horseshoe crab numbers, or to corroborate the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission’s assessment that crab numbers in the bay are increasing.

‘There haven’t yet been enough years to say that egg density overall is increasing on Delaware Bay.’ — Susan Linder, Wildlife Restoration Partnerships

“A year or two of the data doesn’t make a hard case for the population increasing,” said Linder, horseshoe crab egg density team leader for Wildlife Restoration Partnerships, a company formed by Larry Niles, a former biologist at the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection.

“We’re only about a fourth or a fifth of what it was before the overharvesting, so we know that the ecosystem’s carrying capacity was much greater than it is currently,” she said.

How measurements are taken

During a six-week spring season, the team measures egg density on 19 of New Jersey’s Delaware Bay beaches, covering each three times.

At Sunray Beach in Cape May County, Linder used a tape to measure a 9-meter “transect” from a wrack line of dead reeds and other debris at the top of the beach to where the falling tide had been. Using a small shovel, she then dug holes 20 centimeters square and 20 centimeters deep, spaced 1 meter apart, where female crabs seemed likely to have laid their eggs. Most eggs are laid between 8 and 12 centimeters below the surface.

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Her excavations at the drier top end of the transect failed to find clusters of crab eggs, as she predicted. But as she got closer to the tide line, she found the egg clumps, whose appearance was little different from the sand, and so required a practiced eye to see. She pulled some from their hole for a reporter to see, and then carefully reburied them to maximize the chances of them becoming the next generation of horseshoe crabs.

Eggs within five centimeters of the surface are treated as “surface” eggs. Cores of sand from that section of the beach are collected and put in plastic bags which will then be taken to a lab where the eggs are individually counted, and will contribute to the overall egg-density assessment.

By mid-May, about half-way through this year’s spawning and migration season, this year’s surface egg density was above the 10-year average, although not quite as strong as an “exceptional” 2024, Linder said.

The latest egg numbers may have been buoyed by rising water temperatures; if so, that may reflect climate change or an absence of storms that can bring cooler water to the bay, Linder said. But it’s too soon to say whether the latest egg increases show a long-term improvement.

“You can say the population is increasing but next year, it could be back down to where it was,” she said. “There haven’t yet been enough years to say that egg density overall is increasing on Delaware Bay.”

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BAIT COMMERCIAL FISHING DELAWARE BAY EGG DENSITY HORSESHOE CRAB POPULATION HORSESHOE CRABS MARINE SPECIES MIGRATING BIRDS OVERHARVESTING RED KNOTS SHOREBIRDS

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Jon Hurdle is a freelance writer who regularly reports on water and other environmental issues. Jon can be contacted by email at jonhurdle@gmail.com.

The National Weather Service has issued a tornado watch until midnight for Monmouth and Ocean counties.

This a wide-ranging tornado watch that includes portions of four states: New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware and Maryland.

In New Jersey, the watch includes eight counties besides Monmouth and Ocean. They are Atlantic, Burlington, Camden, Cape May, Cumberland, Gloucester, Mercer and Salem.

Additionally, the weather service issued a wind advisory from 2 a.m. to 8 a.m. Saturday for southern New Jersey, Delaware and northeast Maryland, in which west winds of 20 to 30 mph, accompanied by gusts of up to 50 mph, were expected.

In New Jersey, Ocean, Atlantic, Burlington, Camden, Cape May, Cumberland, Gloucester and Salem counties were all under the advisory.

The weather service warned that power outages were possible, and that the wind gusts would blow around unsecured objects and possibly bring down tree limbs.

Anyone driving overnight was warned that the winds anticipated could make operating a vehicle difficult. Extra caution was advised, the weather service said.

What is a tornado watch?

A tornado watch means that weather conditions are ideal for the formation of a tornado. As such, tornadoes are possible, but not imminent, according to the weather service.

When a possible tornado is detected on radar or a tornado is otherwise observed, the weather service will issue a tornado warning. That means that a tornado poses an imminent risk to lives and property.

Under a tornado watch, people are advised to be prepared to take action. Under a tornado warning, immediate action is required and everyone under the warning should take shelter.

Want to take a paddle on the Delaware River, or ride a bike along the Delaware Water Gap park's McDade Trail — without needing two vehicles for the trip?

The park's free summer shuttle bus service is scheduled to resume on Saturday, May 24, and run on weekends through Labor Day. The shuttles, which include a trailer for boats and bikes, run every Saturday and Sunday but not on holidays such as Memorial Day, the Fourth of July or Labor Day.

A partnership between the National Park Service and Monroe County Transit Authority which began in 2020, the aptly named River Runner Shuttle will pick up and drop off from the Kittatiny Point parking lot on the New Jersey side of the DWG and then operate along the Pennsylvania side of the river.

The service runs from the southern end of the park to Milford Beach at the northern end. Stops are at the park's Pennsylvania river access points and each shuttle can carry up to 10 kayaks or canoes, and four bicycles.

At 8 and 9 a.m. each weekend morning, the route will begin at Kittatinny Point and head north. Later northbound routes will originate on the hour from the park and ride lot in the borough of Delaware Water Gap, Pennsylvania, until 1:15 p.m.

The southbound route begins at Milford Beach at 10 a.m., with shuttles running every hour until 3:05 p.m.

Visitors can board the River Runner at several additional "flag stop" locations along the route, including some parking areas for the McDade Trail.

"Using this service allows solo paddlers or people looking for a one-way trip to do so without issue," said Ranger Chance Babish, who coordinates river safety education for the park. “All visitors have to do is load their paddle craft or bike on the trailer, enjoy the northbound ride, and then paddle or pedal back to their starting point.”

Additional information on the shuttles in the park is available on the MCTA website for shuttle routes within the park. More information on Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area, including recent road closures, is available at the park's website.

The Delaware Water Gap National Recreational Area will close roads and trails on both sides of the river as it works on bridges in both New Jersey and Pennsylvania, the National Park Service announced.

The Park Service has closed the area around Dingmans Falls for the summer, including access roads, a visitor center and the trail system while it replaces the bridge that crosses Dingmans Creek and does work on the trail and stairway at the falls.

On the New Jersey side of the river, crews will also be working on the bridge which carries Old Mine Road over Van Campens Brook, just south of Millbrook Village. That bridge will have one-way traffic during the length of the project.

Park officials have not said how much the two projects will cost, but got the nod to proceed this past week.

Dingmans Falls project

While the Dingmans project proceeds, the visitors center will be closed with its operations moved to Bushkill Meeting Center on Route 209.

Operations there will begin May 23, and visitors can find information, park souvenirs, maps and books. Also available will be NPS passport stamps, exhibits and Junior Ranger activity books. The visitor center will be open Fridays through Mondays from 9 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.

Some ranger-led programs normally held at Dingmans Falls will be relocated to George W. Childs Park, which reopened last year after extensive repairs.

Updates and information on visitor center operations and ranger-led programs will be available at the park's Facebook page.

In addition to the bridge replacement on Dingmans Falls Road, crews will also be working on the staircase which leads to the observation deck for the falls. During the bridge and trail work, all vehicles, cyclists and pedestrians are prohibited from the area.

New Jersey DWG closures

There will also be bridge work on the New Jersey side of the park with repairs scheduled for the span which crosses Van Campens Brook on Old Mine Road, just south of Van Campens Glen.

The road will remain open, with single-lane traffic during working hours leading to possible delays. Repairs are expected to be completed by the fall.

According to embossing on the bridge, the structure dates from 1953 and was built by Warren County when Old Mine Road was a county highway.

Old Mine Road, reputed to be the oldest industrial road in the U.S., begins at the Delaware Water Gap and was said to be constructed by Colonial Dutch miners to haul copper, iron and other ore from mines on the western side of the Kittatinny Ridge north to settlements such as Poughkeepsie on the Hudson River.

The Park Service began $11 million in upgrades for the road last year.

Email: bscruton@njherald.com Twitter/X: @brucescrutonNJH