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HIGH RISK OF RIP CURRENTS. Inexperienced swimmers should remain out of the water due to dangerous surf conditions. Swim near a lifeguard. If caught in a rip current, relax and float. Don`t swim against the current. If able, swim in a direction following the shoreline. If unable to escape, face the shore and call or wave for help.

At the Shore

Current conditions and forecast as of Tue morning

Tide Times

Marine Forecast

From the National Weather Service, Mt. Holly

TUE: NE winds 25 to 30 kt. Seas 9 to 11 ft. E swell 5 to 10 ft at 7 seconds. Light rain likely.

TUE NIGHT: NE winds 20 to 25 kt, diminishing to 15 to 20 kt after midnight. Seas 8 to 10 ft, subsiding to 6 to 9 ft after midnight. E swell 6 to 10 ft at 8 seconds. A chance of light rain in the evening.

WED: NE winds 15 to 20 kt, diminishing to 10 to 15 kt in the afternoon. Seas 5 to 8 ft. E swell 4 to 7 ft at 8 seconds.

WED NIGHT: E winds 10 to 15 kt with gusts up to 20 kt. Seas 5 to 6 ft. E swell 4 to 6 ft at 8 seconds.

THU: NE winds 10 to 15 kt with gusts up to 25 kt. Seas 4 to 6 ft. E swell 4 to 6 ft at 8 seconds. A chance of showers in the afternoon.

THU NIGHT: E winds around 15 kt with gusts up to 20 kt. Seas 4 to 5 ft in the evening. E swell 4 to 5 ft at 8 seconds in the evening. A chance of showers.

FRI: NE winds around 15 kt. A chance of showers.

SAT: NE winds 10 to 15 kt. A chance of showers in the morning.

Plan Your Trip

Data on this page amalgamated from several sources, including the National Weather Service (weather), National Ocean Service (tides), U.S. Naval Observatory (sun), and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (UV index).

Dan Zarrow is Chief Meteorologist for Townsquare Media New Jersey. The Shore Report is generated semi-automatically daily at 5 a.m. from mid-May to late September. Follow Dan's weather blog, Facebook page, and Twitter feed for your latest forecast and realtime weather updates.

The night clubs that gave Seaside Heights its reputation as a party town are long closed, and now the Jersey Shore borough is pushing further to remove the stigma through redevelopment.

Several projects are already underway and even more are in the works, including for the former Karma, Bamboo and Merge night club sites. Most will bring housing and businesses to outdated, shuttered and underused properties.

Now the borough is asking residents and business owners to help shape Seaside Heights’ new identity. It will hold a Community Visioning Workshop Monday night at 6 p.m. at the George E. Tompkins Municipal Complex. Officials want to engage the community in a consensus on what it should look like in 20 years, where it’s headed and what has been done to achieve the vision.

Mayor Anthony Vaz declined to comment, saying he’d rather wait for public comments before expressing his views.

He and other town officials have been steadily steering the town to less dense development since Hurricane Sandy, according to Mike Loundy, owner of Seaside Realty who also works for the city as director of Community Improvements.

“We have been very, very hot here with new development,” Loundy said, adding that in the last two to three years, at least 70 new single family homes were built in the 16-block town. They were all sold and are occupied as second homes, primary homes and rentals.

At least 14 motels have been torn down and developed into single family homes and condos, he said. And more projects like those are in the works, according to Loundy:

“There’s a lot happening here,” Loundy said. “Seaside Heights has been a well kept secret for years. It has a new, beautiful boardwalk. The pier rides are almost all new. The family that runs the amusements spends a lot of money keeping everything fresh and new. And we’re usually ranked one of the top 10 beaches in New Jersey. We’re one hour from New York City, Philadelphia and Atlantic City. And we have a beautiful bayfront most people don’t know about until they come here where you can rent boats, crab, or sit on the beach.”

Home values in Seaside Heights, like the most of the rest of New Jersey, are on the rise.

The median sales price of a single family is up about 12% from $730,000 to $820,000 in the past year, according to data from New Jersey Realtors.

Are you an agent, buyer or seller who is active in this changing market? Do you have tips about New Jersey’s real estate market? Unusual listings? Let us know.

More real estate coverage:

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You'll have to wait just a bit longer to take a ride on Seaside Heights' iconic carousel.

Most of the historic merry-go-round is in Ohio, where it's being restored by Carousels & Carvings, a company that specializes in building and repairing carousels.

Its new home, the carousel building on the north end of the boardwalk between Sampson and Carteret avenues, is ready to house the 1910 Dentzel-Looff merry-go-round when it returns, which Mayor Anthony Vaz said is likely to be in mid-June.

"We are rooting for July 25, which would be Carousel Day," Vaz said of a possible grand-opening date for the ride. "If that doesn't pan out, we're rooting for the beginning of August."

The carousel building will also include a museum of Seaside Heights history.

The carousel will be shipped back to Seaside and reassembled in its new home. It's expected to take three weeks to reassemble, and the ride will have to be inspected by the state before visitors can once again climb aboard.

More:15 food and drink festivals coming to the Shore, from food trucks to a restaurant tour

There are more than 50 wooden horses on the iconic ride, as well as two chariots, two camels, one lion and one tiger.

The horses, other animals and chariots have been stored — and repaired and repainted — in a Bay Boulevard building.

The carousel, built in 1910, was originally located at Burlington Island Park near the Delaware River. A 1928 fire destroyed most of that amusement park but only damaged the carousel. It was fixed, disassembled and moved to Seaside Heights during the Great Depression.

More:Breakwater Beach Pavilion opens in Keansburg with boardwalk bites and beach delivery

In 2014, Casino Pier's owners, the Storino family, announced that they planned to sell the merry-go-round, as ridership had declined and maintenance costs were high. Seaside Heights acquired it in 2017 after agreeing to swap 1.36 acres of beach with Casino Pier, allowing the rebuilding of the pier on the sand after it was badly damaged by Superstorm Sandy.

The ride shut down in April 2019.

The carousel is named after Ortley Beach resident Dr. Floyd L. Moreland, who oversaw the restoration of the badly deteriorated carousel in the 1980s. His friends and family members spent countless weekends inside the then-unheated carousel building in the off-season, painstakingly repairing the historic structure.

Seaside Heights also acquired the parking lot next to the boardwalk in the deal, and that's where the carousel will now reside.

It won't be much longer before it's spinning once again.

Jean Mikle covers Toms River and several other Ocean County towns, and has been writing about local government and politics at the Jersey Shore for nearly 38 years. She's also passionate about the Shore's storied music scene. Contact her: @jeanmikle, [email protected].

Seaside Heights is making moves to rid itself of the party town reputation it cemented when Snooki and the gang spent time there.

The borough planning board last week voted to approve a site plan to build 11 single family homes on two side streets and a mixed use building on the Boulevard that would have two businesses on the ground floor and four apartments on top.

Now this week the planning board will consider whether to designate two more parcels — the site of the former Karma nightclub and another property on Franklin Avenue — as areas in need of redevelopment.

The owner of the former Karma site wants to build a five story mixed use building with condos on the upper floors and businesses on the ground level. The town currently owns the Franklin Avenue property, which had a dilapidated multi-family dwelling that was frequently given housing code violations. That property does not yet have a developer, officials said.

By designating the properties as areas in need of development, it streamlines the process for them to be repurposed.

“It provides a different tool box for redevelopers and towns,” said Christopher Vaz, administrator for Seaside Heights. “The developers can apply for PILOTS (tax break agreements) and it also opens different ways for them to have their redevelopment plans approved.”

Seaside Heights declared the entire town as an area in need of rehabilitation in April 2011. Officials have reworked their master plan and pursued properties that are in violation of its codes.

Also on the Boulevard, there was a steel structure built but nothing was moving forward. “The owner wasn’t doing anything to have the property redeveloped in the near term, so we acquired the property,” Vaz said.

The idea is to create a secondary draw for residents and visitors besides the boardwalk and beach.

“Seaside has been very quietly getting better each year since Hurricane Sandy,” said Mike Loundy of Seaside Realty, who is also part of the Business Improvement District. “Nightclubs are just not the thing anymore. Seaside wanted to get away from that. So it created a vision plan to create some real commercial space with retail shopping — all sorts of uses.”

There have been about 60 new homes added to Seaside Heights in the past two years, Loundy said, that are selling for $750,000 to $1 million and fetching weekly rents of $5,000 to $7,000. “There’s a need for another commercial district for those people to go,” he said.

But Seaside Heights might still have a ways to go before it shakes its party town reputation.

“I still think Seaside Heights is looked at more speculatively despite the improvements,” said Matthew Schlosser, vice president of Schlosser Real Estate in Lavallette. The boardwalk and nightlife is always going to differentiate it from the towns north of it that are more family-oriented. But I think everyone sees the progress and we all think it’s positive for the shore and for property values.”

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New Jersey environmental officials closed the bay beach at Hancock Avenue in Seaside Heights to swimming on Wednesday, Aug. 9, after rounds of water testing showed high levels of a bacteria commonly found in the feces.

Concentrations of enterococcus exceeded the state's safe swimming standards during both Monday and Tuesday's rounds of testing, according to the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection.

Enterococcus — which is common in the intestines of humans and animals — is used as an indicator species to signal that other illness-causing bacteria, viruses and protozoa could be present in water.

While environmental officials closed the Hancock Avenue beach, they lifted water quality advisories at 15 other beaches along the Jersey Shore, where advisories for high bacteria counts were issued earlier this week.

Atlantic County

In Atlantic City, seven ocean beaches — at Michigan Avenue, Arkansas Avenue, Connecticut Avenue, Kentucky Avenue, South Carolina Avenue, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Boulevard and New York Avenue — are now considered safe for swimming, according to the Department of Environmental Protection.

Monmouth County

Bacteria counts had dropped to levels considered safe for swimming at the bay beach at the Highlands Recreation Center, Miller Beach in Highlands, the Roosevelt Avenue beach in Deal, the Elberon Bathing Club and the Ocean Beach Club in Long Branch, the ocean beach at Broadway in Neptune, and the New York Avenue beach in Sea Girt, according to the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection.

Ocean County

A water quality advisory was lifted Wednesday at the river beach at River Avenue in Point Pleasant.

Levels of enterococcus often rise in rivers and bays after rain and storms, when pet and wildlife droppings are washed into local waterways. Leaky sewers, septic systems and livestock can also contaminate lakes and rivers.

Swimming in feces-contaminated water can cause serious illness, particularly in young children, elderly adults and people with compromised immune systems. Some of the most common illnesses from exposure include gastrointestinal distress and infections of the eyes, ears, skin and lungs, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

Monmouth U. work could lead to better water alerts

On Wednesday, Monmouth University researchers announced they were studying the enterococcus levels after rain and developed a new model for predicting bacteria spikes at Jersey Shore beaches.

Environmental officials test beaches on Mondays, and only retest in the same week if Monday's tests show high bacteria counts. But Monmouth University researches said they found ways to predict bacteria spikes at beaches when accounting for rain, location of stormwater discharges and water temperature.

"If it happens to rain on the weekend or early Monday, you’re going to get a lot of exceedances when you measure on Monday," Monmouth University Endowed Professor of Marine Science Jason Adolf said in a news release.

"But if it rains on Tuesday through Saturday, the beaches we studied are likely to exceed enterococcus levels within 24 hours and will probably be clear by the following Monday (but have no water quality alerts issued)," he added. "We recognize the logistical challenges to daily sampling, but our research suggests you can supplement weekly monitoring with modeling that predicts the water’s safety based on environmental parameters which are already being measured all the time."

The researchers said their new model could be used to supplement the state's water quality alert system, despite limitations to the weekly water quality tests.

Earlier this week:16 Jersey Shore beaches have high bacteria counts

Amanda Oglesby is an Ocean County native who covers education and the environment. She has worked for the Press for more than 15 years. Reach her at @OglesbyAPP, [email protected] or 732-557-5701.