Cotuit author Christopher White has published a beautiful essay on the state of the Cape’s bays and harbors in the April 2024 issue of Cape Cod Life magazine. He uses the Association to Preserve Cape Cod’s annual “state of the waters” report as a news hook, and then weaves in the story of Dr. Stanley Cobb’s famous letter to the editor of the Barnstable Patriot after a helicopter from the Cape Cod Mosquito Control Project sprayed DDT over the beach of his house on Cotuit’s Narrows to put some now-and-then context into the pernicious problem of overdevelopment and the slow motion natural disaster happening before our lives over the course of a single life-time.
I’m honored he quoted some of my past thoughts about what has been lost in our waters over the course of my life. I need to correct myself, of making the prediction back in 2012 that I would never see a pufferfish in Cotuit again.
Once I caught a puffer fish (the only one I’ve ever seen on the Cape and which I doubt I’ll ever see again) which my grandfather tickled to puff up before unhooking and tossing it back overboard.”
Last summer I took my grandson Thomas fishing on a boat in Cotuit Harbor for the first time.
Leave it to a fish to teach me to stop being such a dour doubting Thomas when it comes believing another pufferfish won’t come along ever again. Fishermen are hopelessly hopeful that just one more cast will prove to be the one.
The following is my personal opinion as a voter in the Cotuit Fire District and does not reflect the opinion of the Cotuit Fire District’s Board of Water Commissioners. It is offered as one voters editorial opinion about a procedural matter that will come before the District’s voters this weekend.
This Saturday the voters of the Cotuit Fire District will be asked to vote in a special meeting to determine the fate of the former Cotuit Elementary School. The meeting is at 1 pm in the Community Hall of the Cotuit Federated Church located at 40 School Street. Only voters registered to vote in Precinct 7 of the Town of Barnstable are qualified to vote. (I don’t know if non-voters will be admitted to the hall to speak or observe.)
Two articles are on the warrant. The first article on the agenda is to authorize the Cotuit Fire District to spend up to $1.1 million demolish the school. A “yes” vote is a vote to demolish. This article is recommended by the Prudential Committee.
A “no” vote then moves the meeting to consider the second article, which is more or less the same article a majority of the voters approved at the 2021 Annual District Meeting that was held in the gym of the school.
The second article is on the warrant because of a citizen petition circulated by the Cotuit Community Center , a nonprofit group advocating for more time to study possible re-uses of the sixty-nine year-old school and its potential as a village community center. The article asks the Fire District to:
(1) “study the feasibility and estimate the cost of restoring and rehabilitating all or a portion of the former….school….for the use of the District residents, funding a professional analysis of the building for potential reuse and potential recreational and other uses of the grounds…”
(2) Study the cost of demolition of the property and the restoration of the site to a natural state; and
(3) “to hold a Special District Meeting to allow voters to determine the District course of action related to the school property, by request of a Citizen Petition.
A “yes” vote on Article 2 is not a commitment to spend money to renovate the old building. No sum of money is included, just a request to give the school some more time to be professionally studied and inform the district’s voters of the facts, costs, options and possible uses for the structure. A yes vote will cost the district some money next year to maintain the property but it won’t fix any serious problems or repair things like leaky roofs or pay for a new heating system. The Prudential Committee does not recommend this article.
I’m voting “no”on the first article and “yes” on the second .
I feel the Prudential Committee hasn’t followed through with the vote to re-open the district space needs study approved at the 2021 Annual District Meeting.
Article 17 of the 2021 warrant states:
“Upon motion duly made and seconded, the District voted to transfer and appropriate a sum $207,500 from Certified Free Cash to: (1) Re-open and fund the District Space Needs project to include consideration of the School Property at 140 Old Oyster Road comprising the School Building and surrounding 8.5 acres in the Study findings; (2) Define the cost of implementing the recommendations of Space Need study and any other specific use of the School Property as determined by the Prudential Committee and/or its delegates; (3) define the cost of demolishing the School Building and returning the area to a green field; (4) fund the cost of a Special District Meeting to determine the District course of action related to the School Property. Passed by a majority.
The Prudential Committee’s first duty to the district as defined by the By-Laws of the Cotuit Fire District[1], Article V, Section 1 is spend the funds approved by the voters at the Annual District Meeting:
“Section 1: It shall be the duty of the Prudential Committee to insure that funds, raised and/or borrowed by the District, are expended for the purposes set forth in the warrant and articles enacted by the District.
I believe the Prudential Committee is acting in good faith and not trying to “pull a fast one” or “pocket veto” the original vote. There was no reason to reopen an expensive study of the school until the school belonged to the district and the deed was transferred to the town. The transfer took more than two years to complete. The official transfer happened only last fall, so to commission a study before the deal was done would have been imprudent. The three commissioners have stated they have the right to not spend the $207,500 approved by the voters.
The Prudential Committee relied on a five-year old survey of the property that was commissioned by the the town’s asset management committee. Delivered in 2019, the “Habeeb Report” estimated it would cost the town around $4 million estimate to renovate the school back to a school. The demolition estimates the 2021 vote to reopen the Fire District’s space needs study asked for, have been estimated from the Habeeb Report’s estimate and the actual cost of the demolition of the Marstons Mills elementary school last year (around $750,000).
As soon as the school became the property of the Fire District, the Prudential Committee convened a meeting at Freedom Hall to hear proposals for alternative uses of the buildings. The committee asked for budgets and financial plans to support any proposals, but receiving none, decided to recommend demolition, save the $207,500 authorized in 2021 to study future uses of the buildings, and apply that money to the demolition.
On multiple occasions at its monthly public meetings, the committee has rejected repeated requests to commission a new study — not a new assessment of the condition of the building but a full survey of the community to see what the public would like to see happen there and how to pay for it. Such a study would be performed by a professional consulting firm with the experience and insight gained from working on similar situations.
The voters asked for that study in 2021 to gather the facts and sentiments of the residents of Cotuit to help decide the future of the property. This weekend the voters will meet to decide the fate of the school based on a set of outdated facts, incomplete information, and what has been a demo-or-die attitude that the school is too far gone and insignificant to save.
What is a Prudential Committee? The Fire District has three commissions or committees, each with three elected members serving staggered three-year terms: Fire, Water, and Prudential. The responsibility of the Prudential Committee is essentially to be the voice of “prudence” and ensure the best interests of the district’s residents by overseeing the district’s finances with the treasurer, maintain Freedom Hall, and manage the street lights in the village.
The Prudential Committee is recommending demolition, and not fulfilling the request of the voters in 2021 to commission a study, because it believes it has enough information to make an informed decision about the future of the school. I think the grey area in the bylaws about who has the final say on what the district spends — either the voters or the Prudential Committee — comes from Article II, Section 3 of the District By-Laws, under the heading of “Finances”:
“Article II Section 3: No money shall be paid from the treasury of the District, except for the repayment of notes or bonds or other financial obligations incurred as above provided, and interest in same, without the written approval of the Prudential Committee or[emphasis mine] by vote of the district.”
For all I know the Prudential Committee — both present and past — has exercised its discretion to not spend voter allocated funds if they feel they can save the district some money. Just because a warrant article is passed with a specific dollar figure for a project, doesn’t mean that figure has to be spent, in fact one would expect the PruComm to be as frugal and possible and minimize the expenditure of tax dollars if it can negotiate a better deal on a project,
I hope the district’s attorney or someone expert in the nuances of municipal finance and law will explain the discretionary spending power of the PruComm versus the will of the voters expressed by passing a warrant article. I know I’m not the only person mystified as to why 2021’s vote on Article 17 hasn’t been fulfilled despite repeated requests to do so, then I think the District may need to amend its bylaws to clarify the authority of the Prudential Committee to interpret the outcome of a vote on its own and decide whether to fulfill it as discussed, debated and voted by the district at its regular annual meeting or decide to table it, return it to the warrant at the next meeting to ask the voters to cancel it or modify it, etc.
I think the question we need to ask on Saturday isn’t so much to demolish or not demolish the school– but why we are voting on a weekend afternoon in early May and taking time away from painting a boat, jigging for squid, or planting our garden to make a decision that was supposed to be informed by a new professional study approved three years ago by the voters. Yes, that vote three years ago directed the PruComm to call a special meeting to determine the fate of the school, and so the topic has been called out on its own and not included on the warrant for this year’s Annual District Meeting. The timing, the venue, and the rush to spend up to $1 million without the facts the voters asked for seems misguided to me.
Ask yourself if the way this decision is coming to a conclusion feels a bit as if the pro-demolition forces who voted against Article 17 in 2021 have managed to nullify the decision made by a majority three years ago. Ask yourself if you are okay with destroying a substantial building and turning it into a piece of open space because a three-person committee decided the alternatives don’t feel viable enough or within the limited realm of the District’s presently defined purposes — fire services, water, Freedom Hall, streetlights — to even spend the money to study the situation.
I think the question to answer before the decision is made is this : who has the ultimate authority to expend funds? The voters or the Prudential Committee? The acts of the Massachusetts legislature that established the Fire District in 1926 don’t spell out such superseding power to the Prudential Committee [2]. I believe the word “or” in Article II Section 3 of the district by-laws needs to be clarified. “…without the written approval of the Prudential Committee or by vote of the district.”
I am concerned if we rush down the path to demolition at Saturday’s special meeting that we the people will be blessing a dangerous precedent whereby any future warrant article passed by a majority of the District’s voters could be nullified simply through inaction — aka a “pocket veto” — by a future Prudential Committee.
I respect that the purpose of a prudential committee is to apply “prudence” to the governance and budget of the Cotuit Fire District and I respect the judgment of the three members of the current committee. They have —along with the special school subcommittee (of which I was a member) — given a great deal of time and discussion to the future of the school and securing it to first and foremost to protect the district’s drinking water supply (The school is located 800 feet from the well known as “Station 3”).
I know a lot of people want the building torn down and others are upset the town isn’t paying to do so. After initially being in favor of a village/community center, I’m on the fence now and haven’t made up my mind yet because I believe either the school lives on as a vital part of what makes Cotuit the place it is; or it becomes a memory for the hundreds of village residents who were educated there, or, like me, sent their kids there to be educated in the community where they lived. If we hang onto the school it will mean higher taxes. Liability insurance. A new heating system. A new roof. A new septic system. Annual maintenance and utilities. For the district to become a landlord and lease it to some unknown tenant — say a school, non-profit, or business — will mean going to the state legislature to expand the district’s enabling legislation. But once it’s gone it’s gone and I’m concerned a future generation will be asked to fund some unforeseen project that could have been fulfilled by the school and someone will stand up and ask, “What were those fools thinking when they tore down a perfectly good building.”
I recommend the district takes another year and spends up to $35,o00 to maintain the building for a little while longer, and pony up the money to pay for a professional study that considers the future possibilities for the building and offers some creative solutions to making it an asset and not a liability. And please: we must stop letting it deteriorate. It’s a shame how the building has been abandoned and allowed to deteriorate while the deed transfer wound its way through the lawyers and multiple readings by the town council. Volunteered offers to by concerned residents to help clean up the grounds have been denied because the powers that be have deemed the place to be a health hazard and liability.
As I finish my first term as an elected Fire District official and get a first-hand lesson in local government. I’m not editorializing about the school as a water commissioner, but as a resident who has always been a supporter of the Fire District as an important sovereign definition of the village that defines how the village is managed by the villagers participating in the last pure form of participatory democracy we have left. Without a strong district and committed voters who care enough about it to turn out for its election and meetings, who watch the meetings on Zoom, who show up at Freedom Hall to ask questions … then we risk losing our only opportunity to show up and decide for ourselves.
Please share your thoughts in the comment section below:
On New Year’s Day I threw a turkey in the oven and took my son to see The Boys in the Boat; George Clooney’s movie adapted from Daniel James Brown’s bestseller. The theater was packed. This surprised me, probably because it was only the second time since Covid that I’ve been inside a movie theater. Yes I loved the book and long before it was published knew (and missed) the story of the University of Washington junior varsity’s victory at the 1936 Berlin Olympics from the research I did on The Book of Rowing in the mid-1980s. Both my step-brother and my daughter’s godfather rowed for UW, and I’ve visited the Conibear Shellhouse several times, as well as the old Pocock boat shop.
So I had a reason for being there in theater number three, wedged into a seat beside my son sharing a tub of popcorn and some peanut M&Ms. But what had inspired a couple hundred other people to be there? The holiday? The popularity of Brown’s book? The fact that another best seller, Laura Hillenbrand’s Unbroken, also featured a protagonist — the runner Louis Zamperini — who competed in the so-called “Hitler Olympics” on the same American Olympic team as Jesse Owens? Were they all rowers or the parents of rowers, or former rowers like myself?
I can confidently say there has never been a good movie made about rowing, nor a single rowing scene in any movie or television show that manages to depict actual actors rowing a boat without the use of experienced doubles and trick shots. Rowing has to beone of the most tedious spectator sports. There’s an absence of action, just the monotonous metronomic heaving and ho-ing of some strong young men who know no “moves” other than the four-part sequence of catch-drive-finish-recovery.
There are no bicycle kicks, penalty shots, or Hail Mary passes in rowing. The only thing that changes over the six minutes of a 2,000 meter race is changing distance between the boats and the facial expressions of their crews, most of whom finish the race in an exceptionally exhausted state characterized by anoxia, lactic acid poisoning of the quadriceps, and occasional vomitus. The most exciting and insightful line in The Boys in the Boat, is when U Washington crew coach Al Ulbrichtson tells the squad “Eight-man crew is the most difficult team sport in the world. The average human body is just not meant for such things. It’s just not capable of such things.“
Most popular sports celebrate the unpredictable surprises of exceptionally talented individuals as much as the team they play for. Rowers pull an oar 200 times during a typical race. Each and every one of those 200 strokes is the same as the stroke before and the stroke that follows., except done at different rates per minute, with a racing pace around 36 strokes per minute and sprints going into the mid-40s . The rowers sit facing astern and never dare look out of the boat, eyes locked on the back of the rower in front of them.
The boat starts with all eight blades submerged and locked into the catch position. It weighs 200 pounds, is 60-foot long, one foot wide, and has a round bottom. The eight rowers and coxswain weigh 1,700 pounds. The rowers sit on seats with wheels set in metal tracks. Their feet are strapped into special shoes that can be torn open with a single tug should the shell ever capsize and. They hold a 12-foot carbon fiber oar locked into a swiveling oar lock hung a few feet out over the water. When the oars are out of the water, the blades dripping and swinging forward in perfect unison, the rowers roll astern on their wheeled seats calmly and composed, “recovering” before the snap and explosive drive of the catch when their legs are compressed in a tight sitting squat and their bodies lock into a chain of back, shoulders and straight arms, their hold on the oars through the fingertips in a claw-li
Simply sitting in a long, needle-shaped boat without capsizing is enough to make a novice clench the oar handle with white knuckles, but to row decently with seven other rowers generally takes at least three or four months of daily practice. To row perfectly, on camera, with zero prior experience is nothing short of a miracle, yet the actors who portray the 1936 UW crew did just that in a feat no other rowing film has ever managed to accomplish. One has to give credit to Clooney and the screenwriters who adapted the book for resisting the Hollywood urge to embellish the facts with some faux rowing drama and investing in the time it took to teach the cast how to actually row. No one catches a crab and dives overboard. Boats don’t collide or smash into docks.
Yes there is the obligatory love interest, and the film doesn’t begin to capture the true essence of Brown’s story of Joe Rantz, the impoverished young man who toils in the timberlands of the Pacific Northwest and struggles to make it through college on his own. As a piece of nostalgia the movie made me choke up due to the boat — the Husky Clipper — the same type of Pocock shell I learned how to row in fifty years ago on the choppy waters of North Andover’s Lake Cochichewick. Only a few years later I’d be rowing in a fiberglass shell, and few years later in college in the first carbon fiber shell. Those long varnished needles of wood flexed and creaked and cracked and flew through the water on occasion when me and three other wet, miserable teenagers managed to pull together and make it move well enough to make us want to make it do it again.
Brownie passed away this week. He was a great friend, a surrogate father, and as salty a man as there has ever been. My condolences to his family.
(his obituary as published in the Worcester Telegram)
Retired U.S. Chief Magistrate Judge, Charles Brown Swartwood III, known to all as Brownie, died peacefully in Boston, Massachusetts on November 16, 2023.
Brownie devoted his working career to public service and the law. Brownie was employed by the Worcester law firm of Mountain, Dearborn, & Whiting, where he developed and maintained an active trial practice in both State and Federal Courts. In 1993, Brownie was appointed the first full-time U.S. Magistrate Judge assigned to the U.S. District Court in Worcester. He served as the Chief Magistrate Judge from 2005 to his retirement in 2006 from the Federal Court. He then went to work at JAMS in Boston as a mediator, arbitrator, and case evaluator. In 2009, Brownie was appointed by Governor Patrick as Chairman of the Massachusetts State Ethics Commission, where he served until his term expired in 2013.
Brownie was born to Charles B. Swartwood, Jr. and Beulah Washburn on March 3, 1938, in Wellsville, New York and lived in Ithaca, New York while his father obtained his undergraduate and law degrees from Cornell University, before the family finally settled in Elmira, New York. Brownie’s paternal Dutch ancestors were early settlers of New Amsterdam. His paternal grandfather was a New York State County Judge and his father was a New York State Supreme Court Judge. Brownie’s maternal English ancestors (Washburn) were early settlers of the Massachusetts Bay Colony who eventually settled in Worcester, where they were involved in manufacturing and public service.
Brownie was a member of many clubs in Worcester and Boston and a life-long member of the Cotuit Mosquito Yacht Club. Brownie’s real home and heart were in Cotuit, where he was the third generation of both his mother’s and father’s families to spend summers there and where he was an avid racer of Cotuit Skiffs and Wianno Seniors. Cotuit is where he discarded his bowtie and polished shoes in exchange for a faded orange bathing suit and no shoes at all. Brownie’s idea of a quick sail could easily last 8 hours. After his racing days were over, he spent more than 40 days a summer sailing his Swedish Sloop: “Halve Maen.”
Brownie didn’t suffer fools, but he always had time for a friend in need and the great Judge Swartwood rarely judged. He was a brilliant conversationalist and storyteller; dinners around the table could go on for hours and feel like minutes. After his retirement, he could be found most mornings with his friends at the Coop, most afternoons coercing anyone he could find to sail with him, and most evenings around the great dining table in Cotuit. He earned the name Nono to his grandchildren because he would shake his finger at them, admonishing, “NO! NO!”. While they quickly learned that his bark was worse than his bite, the name stuck.
Brownie attended the Park School in Brookline, the Hotchkiss School, from which he and three others were dismissed for borrowing the school jeep for a midnight ride; graduated in 1957 from Hebron Academy (Maine); in 1961 from Brown University; and in 1964 from the Boston University School of Law.
Brownie is survived by his daughter Hellie, her husband Malcolm Carley, and their three children: Sam and Sam’s wife Nikita, Ali, and Will; his son Alexander and his wife Cindy and their three children: Charlie, Sophie, and Whit; his son Thayer and his wife Heather and their twin sons: Auggie and Ham; his long-time companion, Heidi Baracsi; and his former wife, Judith Swartwood. Brownie’s first wife, Gaysie Curtis, died at age 29 and was the mother of his two oldest children. Additionally, Brownie was the oldest of six children; two of Brownie’s brothers, Peter and Jonathan, predeceased him, and he is survived by his sister, Caroline Blash and her husband Bill, his brother Slater and his wife Kathryn, his sister Penny Brewer, and many cousins, nieces, and nephews.
In lieu of flowers, donations in his memory can be made to the Association of the Cotuit Mosquito Yacht Club for the enjoyment and future of Cotuit skiff sailing. (Checks payable to ACMYC and mailed to ACMYC, PO Box 1605, Cotuit, MA 02635 or online at http://www.acmyc.org/ Memo: in memory of Brownie Swartwood).
Different methods of oyster propagation explained by the National Estuarine Research Reserve System
How can oyster farming peacefully co-exist with waterfront property owners and reduce nitrogen levels in coastal ecosystems? A research project conducted by Dr. Dan Rogers of Stonehill College with the help of the Falmouth shellfish constable at the Waquoit Bay National Estuarine Research Reserve gathered data and resulted in the publication of a “A Best Practices Guide for Nitrogen Remediation using Oyster Aquaculture.”
If you’re contemplating writing a letter to the Town of Barnstable to support the 175-year tradition of commercial oyster farming in the Three Bays estuary, but want more facts to support your opinion, I recommend the paper linked above.
To get a sense of the type of arguments and exaggerated claims wielded by waterfront property owners in the name of preserving their property values, I suggest reading this letter by Chris Matteo, president of the North Carolina Shellfish Growers Association, refuting the claims made by a retired judge who moved to the coast wanted to protect his view.
No oyster farmer is wanting to ruin a sunset view. In fact, we love them too. But here’s the thing… you don’t own the viewshed. You don’t even lease it. In fact, the shellfish industry made a good faith effort to negotiate some parameters with DCM for floating structures before that effort was blown up by ignorant NIMBY folks. At any time, an oyster farmer could have simply purchased an old rusty barge of any size and anchored it on ones’ lease and conducted farming activities aboard. Still can. If you were a judge, read up on maritime law. If you’re bold enough, I suggest you try to change it. Good luck! (Basically, there is nothing you can do to someone anchoring in your viewshed, even if they keep smelly shrimp heads on board baking in the sun, just to spoil your sunset cocktails).
Chris Matteo, March 2, 2022 from a letter to the editor of Carteret Country News-Times
The town of Barnstable can put this issue to rest for once and for all by taking the following steps:
Encourage aquaculture in the new local comprehensive plan (LCP) now under development by the planning department. The most recent LCP (dated 2010) devoted one paragraph to aquaculture and stated: “As these same coastal areas become more desirable for recreational users, conflicts have arisen. This conflict must be examined and resolved through a thoughtful public process.”
Educate real estate agents, builders, and owners of waterfront property about the benefits of aquaculture and recreational shellfishing to preserve property values and restore compromised waters in front of their homes
In August of 2023 a group of at least five property owners with homes on the ironically named “Oyster Harbors” in Osterville, sent identical complaints to Barnstable’s town manager about the presence of floating aquaculture equipment on the oyster grants owned by the Cotuit Oyster Company in Tim’s Cove and the Narrows between Cotuit and North Bay.
The use of such equipment was the topic of a fight 16 years ago that was initiated by another group of aggrieved Ostervillians in 2007 who banded together under the umbrella of the “Friends of West Bay.” At that time the former town manager ruled against the applications made by two commercial shellfish companies. These latest complaints — all more or less identical — ask the town to declare a moratorium and develop a “comprehensive and balanced plan for the appropriateness of such devices.”
“Rack-and-bag” oyster bags adjacent to the Cotuit Oyster Company pier
Complaints by waterfront property owners annoyed by the presence of oyster farms near their estates are surging from Maine to Key West. Their annoyance and sense of entitlement has been around forever. Locally the complaints include the Osterville resident who I once witnessed as a Cape Cod Times reporter tell a town board in 1980 that the clammers in the waters in front of her waterfront home were “only a nine-iron shot” away. And who can forget the sheer gall of the Popponesset Bay plutocrats (including Patriots owner Bob Kraft( who in 2014 paid a Boston lobbying firm to convince a lame duck, off-Cape state representative to tack an amendment onto a budget bill that attempted to establish a “marine sanctuary “which conveniently happened to coincide precisely with the map coordinates of a Dick Cook’s commercial oyster grant which they feared would spoil their million-dollar view of Cotuit’s undeveloped shoreline?
A copy of one of the complaints and the response by Chris Gargiulo, owner of the Cotuiot Oyster Company can be downloaded here:
I write in support of the Cotuit Oyster Company (COC) in the face of objections made earlier this month by a group of Oyster Harbors residents upset by the presence of floating aquaculture equipment on the COC’s aquaculture grants in Cotuit Bay and the Narrows.
This issue is neither a new nor a unique one for the town. In 2007 a different group of Osterville residents known as The Friends of West Bay persuaded the former town manager to deny the application of two commercial oyster companies to use similar “rack and bag” systems on their grants. I believed then and continue to believe today that Mr. Klimm made the wrong decision.
The Cotuit Oyster Company is one of the oldest continuously operated oyster companies in the country. It is a beloved institution in the village that made the name “Cotuit” world famous. The commercial harvest of oysters in Cotuit extends back to 1850. Three of the Oyster Harbors complaints were filed by property owners who only purchased their properties between 2020-2022.
The crux of their complaints are three issues: 1) the safety and the alleged health threats the floating bags pose to swimmers and boaters; 2) the commercial misuse of a public resource and; 3) the “public trust doctrine” that establishes the waterfront rights of private property owners and the public use of the waterways offshore of those properties.
Navigational impacts
The portion of the COC’s rack and bag equipment in the Narrows is tucked between a phalanx of private piers that encroach into the aptly named Narrows from the Oyster Harbors shoreline between Cotuit and North Bays.
In no way does the COC’s equipment in the Narrows or Tim’s Cove pose a navigational challenge to watercraft transiting the Narrows – either within or outside of the marked channel. As a rower who uses those waterways daily, I am grateful to the COC’s for placing its equipment between and inshore of the ends of the piers located at 220, 200, 180, 166 North Bay Road.
The map below (fig.1) is derived from an aerial photo found on the the Town of Barnstable’s GIS property map. It shows the location of the marked navigational channel (green hash marks), the adjacent and unofficial lane used by small boats that runs parallel to the south of that channel (yellow hashmarks), and location of the COC’s equipment (outlined in red) placed between the aforementioned piers where no watercraft can safely navigate due to the decision of the town’s conservation commission and waterways committee to grant pier permits to those Osterville property owners. Those piers, (which the residents of Cotuit were able to ban from its side of Cotuit Bay in 2007 despite the strenuous objections of Osterville’s town councilor), are true private taking of the public waters. In no way does the Cotuit Oyster Company’s equipment impede access to the privately owned piers in the Narrows.
Fig. 1 The location of the Cotuit Oyster Company’s equipment inside of the Narrows
Why are the bags where they are today, and not elsewhere? Raising oysters from seed stock to a size sufficient for transfer to the COC’s grants off the western shore of Grand Island requires constant attention and care. Relocating any of the bags in Tim’s Cove or the Narrows to another portion of the Cotuit Oyster Company’s permitted aquaculture grants is unfeasible and would present a hardship to Chris Gargiulo and his employees, who require proximity to their oyster nursery operations as rack-and-bag cultivation demand constant sorting, transferring, and cleaning of the equipment.
Fig 2: The Tim’s Cove location of the oyster bags
Safety concerns
The complaints claim the bags pose a safety risk, echoing the same complaints made in 2007 about Al Surprenant’s operations in West Bay. One of the “Friends of West Bay”, Missy Kalat of Osterville told the Cape Cod Times in a story published March 2, 2007:
“It looked like a football field of floating bags,” said Kalat, who lives year-round in her home. “What scared me the most was seeing the kids around it. Sailors, swimmers and kayakers. I was so concerned they would get hurt.”
Aside from opening her statement with a comment about the visual appearance of the bags, Ms. Kalat worried about a threat that simply doesn’t exist and has never occurred. I cannot find one instance where an aquaculture grant caused an accident or injury to a swimmer, sailor, or kayaker. Nor am I aware of any incident where floating oyster bags caused injury, damage, or inconvenience to any member of the public or their vessel.
Health risks
Oysters are the only thing (aside from a few I/A septic systems) presently working to reduce nitrogen levels in the Three Bays. An oyster filters 50 gallons of water a day. The COC has up to six million oysters in the bay at various stages of maturity. That is 300 million gallons of water a day being filtered by a natural process that requires no electricity, bond issues, or massive infrastructure projects. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Fisheries Division, one acre of oysters provides $6,500 in denitrification services, and shoreline stabilization benefits valued at $2,125 annually.
These complaints utterly defame the quality of the Cotuit Oyster Company’s oysters by implying they are raised in “fecal infested” waters contaminated by “repeated high fecal counts” and that the COC is breaking the law by moving clams from areas subject to seasonal closures by the town’s shellfish warden to “clean” locations before being sold. Such reckless claims, expose the complainants’ ignorance of the town’s long-standing practice of seasonal closures for many recreational shellfishing areas such as Cupid’s Cove on Sampson’s Island and Cordwood Landing. Many portions of the bays are closed during the summer months due to elevated levels of fecal coliform attributed in large part to bird feces. Many quahog relay areas —including those at Cordwood Landing and Handys Point across from Grand Island — are closed during the summer months for that reason. Those clams are eventually moved to non-compromised locations for recreational and commerce harvest where they are given enough time to flush themselves before being tested for harmful bacteria. The same holds true for the immature oysters grown in the COC’s seed bags. Once the seed oysters outgrow the bags, they are transferred to the Oyster Company’s grants on the west side of Cotuit Bay and placed in cages which much be tended and cleaned regularly before the oysters reach a saleable size.
If the five property owners from Oyster Harbors are concerned about high fecal counts and the health and safety of the public, then I look forward to reading their future letters to the Board of Health warning people to stay out of the water, especially the swimmers they must feel are endangered by swimming in the same waters where these oysters are grown.
“Industrial scale”
It is risible to describe any aspect of the Cotuit Oyster Company as “an industrial-scale” operation. It is a small business which employs five to ten people.
Impacts on dredged channels
As for the complainant’s’ speculation that above water equipment “may also undermine the massive investment of public funds in the dredging of the Cotuit Narrows.” I am unaware of any recent dredging in that area and to the best of my knowledge much of the recent dredging in the Three Bays was confined to the entrance of Cotuit Bay between Sampson’s Island and Riley Beach. Past dredging projects have been funded by a combination of private and public funds. My research shows the town spent the “massive” sum of $22,000 in 1968 to dredge the Narrows between Cotuit and Osterville.
Justification for above-water rack and bag propagation
A 2004 study by the University of Rhode Island’s Department of Fisheries and Aquaculture reported in a paper published in the Journal of Shellfish Research[1]:
“These findings indicate that shellfish aquaculture gear provides habitat for many native species of recreationally and commercially important fish and invertebrates in their early life history stages throughout the year. Therefore, we conclude that shellfish aquaculture gear has habitat value at least equal to and possibly superior to submerged aquatic vegetation.”
Rack and bag aquaculture equipment is not used out of greed or convenience, but a matter of business survival. Oyster farms once bought seed oysters acquired from elsewhere. For years, Barnstable oysters began life in places like Connecticut and Buzzards Bay and were translated as seed into local waters. Unfortunately, that practice of planting seed oysters sourced off-Cape nadvertently introduced protozoan diseases into the local stock which devastated the industry and nearly caused it to collapse.
Dick Nelson, the previous owner of the Cotuit Oyster Company had to, according to a 2006 story in the Barnstable Patriot, “…confront an unfortunate event when the company bought seed that turned out to be contaminated, setting the business back for several years.”
Fortunately for the Cape’s aquaculture industry, a disease resistant strain of oysters was found which some experts say was the catalyst kicked off the oyster craze that has put a such premium on Cape Cod’s oysters from Cotuit to Wellfleet. Advances in the cultivation of brood stock through upwellers and the use of the same mesh bags the complaints object to have helped dramatically reduce protozoan diseases such as Demo, MSX, and SSO, while protecting vulnerable seed oysters from predators that prey on them when they are planted on the bottom of the bay.
The Public Trust Doctrine and waterfront property rights
Massachusetts is the only state in the country to grant waterfront property owners rights to the “wet sand” below the mean high-water mark. The COC has been nothing but respectful and accommodating of those rights, and despite allegations made in the complaints, the COC has tried to minimize the impact of its gear by submerging it underwater in the winter and placing far less visible equipment on its grants than it is entitled to place there.
It’s all about the view
Why are aquaculture operations along the entire east coast fighting to stay in business in the face of growing opposition and expensive lawsuits brought against them by wealthy waterfront property owners?
The complaints, for all their pious handwringing about the public good, are about protecting property values and views.
“Up and down the East Coast, as fishing has become less profitable, fish piers have been replaced with condos and fishing boats have been pushed out by yachts, according to Bob Rheault, the executive director of the East Coast Shellfish Growers Association.
“We live in a rural area, so there’s a ton of space to do things, but our access is limited when it comes to the waterfront,” said Black. While she has found that aquaculture farmers in the area don’t lack places to live or clean their equipment, she has noticed in recent years a growing tension between farmers and people moving in. In her experience, newcomers don’t often understand what an oyster farm is and don’t want one in their backyard.”[2]
In 2019 the North Carolina Division of Marine Fisheries issued a “Study On How to Reduce User Conflict Related to Shellfish Cultivation Leases” which sums up the true motivation behind the surge in property owners complaints against aquaculture in their front yard:
“Many user conflict cases brought by riparian owners adjacent to shellfish lease locations seem to be driven by a concern for viewshed. Viewshed is not a public trust right traditionally acknowledged under North Carolina common law.”[3]
Please dismiss these complaints and clean up the bays
I implore the town to dismiss these complaints and consider the source. I assume the five parties on Oyster Harbors have the funds to sue the town and most likely will if the town doesn’t kowtow to their demands. I say bring it on. These complaints are only the skirmish in what promises to be an expensive court battle and an attempt to deny the Cotuit Oyster Company a renewal of its permits when they come due next year. Please shut down this blatant attack on the character and health of the waters of Barnstable and send a message to these latest so-called “Friends of the Bay” that this is a town that was built on the water by people who made their living on the water, and not a one ruled by those who sell the land around it and build the homes that overlook it. Revise the commercial shellfishing regulations to encourage the cultivation of shellfish. They are the proverbial canary in the coal mine and action is needed now – not twenty years from now – to revise the CWMP and prioritize “time to travel” septic systems for immediate connection to a sewer, I/A system, or composting toilets.
Sincerely Yours,
David Churbuck
cc:
Town Councilor Gordon Starr, Councilor Eric R. Steinhilber, Councilor Betty Ludtke, Councilor Nikolas Atsalis, Councilor Paul Cusack, Councilor Paul C. Neary, Councilor Jessica Rapp Grassetti, Councilor Jeffrey Mendes, Councilor Tracy Shaughnessy, Councilor Mathew P. Levesque, Councilor Kristine Clark, Councilor Paula K. Schnepp, Councilor Jennifer L. Cullum, Derek Lawson, Director, Marine and Environmental Affairs, Amy Croteau, Shellfish Constable, Stuart Rapp, Chair-Barnstable Shellfish Committee, Brian W. Taylor, Harbormaster, Chris Garigulo, Cotuit Oyster Company, Ed Gargiulo, Carol Zais, Cotuit Santuit Civic Association
[1] Journal of Shellfish Research, Vol 23. No 3 867-875 2004, Dealteris, Kilpatrick and Rheault
Last night at the meeting of the Cotuit Santuit Civic Association a moment of silence was observed for the victims of the Maui wildfire which swept through Lahaina last week. As I stood with bowed head it occurred to me that for many Cotuit sailors in the 1850s, Lahaina was their winter port of call, a favored port for provisioning, repairing and finding new crew for their whaling ships.
I honeymooned in Lahaina in the early 1980s and poked around the old port looking for vestiges of the golden age of whaling in between the t-shirt and saltwater taffy shops, and the sidewalks thronged by weed sellers who carried their buds of Maui Wowie on overturned Frisbees which they would reveal with a discrete little “voila” and a whispered offer to purchase some “kind bud.” It was difficult to look out at the anchorage and imagine dozens of whaling barks anchored off the beach, but the connection to Cape Cod was still palpable more than century after the end of Pacific whaling. For many Cotuit whalers in the first half of the 19th century, Lahaina was more familiar to them than Boston.
My great-great-grandfather Thomas Chatfield first sailed into Lahaina in 1849 on his first whaling voyage as the cabin boy aboard the Massachusetts, an Edgartown whaler captained by Seth Nickerson, Jr. of Cotuit. The ship called at the port after escaping San Francisco at the peak of the Gold Rush, when many Nantucket whaling ships succumbed to gold fever and rotted at anchor off the shore of San Francisco, abandoned by their crews who were prospecting in the gold fields of the Sierra Nevada foothills. Nickerson had his wife and children with him for that voyage, but his baby daughter died enroute to San Francisco from Callao, Peru when the captain decided to give passage to a mob of desperate prospectors trying to find passage to California, likely bringing aboard yellow fever which killed his daughter. Nickerson was able to rally enough crew to get the Massachusetts out of San Francisco Bay and back to sea to resume its original voyage. Chatfield wrote in his 1904 Reminiscences:
“We anchored at Lahaina the latter part of October. Uncle Seth, Aunt Rose and the children immediately went ashore to remain during our stay; and the following day every man jack of that crew had gone too, leaving the black cook Jordan and myself to take care of the ship, just as we did a year before when we arrived at the same port from San Francisco. It was while at Lahaina that Uncle Seth sent an undertaker on board with a zinc lined casket; and between us we took Baby Ella out of the cask, cleared the little box which the little lady lay in, and put it into the casket. A pane of glass had been placed over the face, which had become loosened and slipped from its place, so that its features were exposed to view. The rum had all leaked out and been absorbed by the lime. Still, the features were perfect in form and only slightly discolored, a very light brown, probably caused by the rum. The man sealed it up very carefully, using solder, and then went ashore again, and I made a strong box of boards, put the casket into it, and then replaced it on the topsail, where it remained until we arrived home some months later. Neither Uncle Seth or Aunt Rose saw their baby’s body: and he never alluded to it in my presence: and she only once, when she asked me in what condition it was. I was glad to be able to tell her; and she seemed gratified to be told that it was in good condition. I have always thought that Aunt Rose had a sort of mother love for me, big, awkward boy as I was that time: and she certainly trusted me entirely. Uncle Seth sent me some native sailors, and with them I filled water, rebent sails, replaced chopping gear, all of which had become badly worn during the cruise and the rough and tumble passage from the north. So I was kept busy all the time we were there. “
Rear View of Lahaina by Edward T. Perkins circa 1854.
“According to Henry L. Sheldon, “the business of the entire population was the furnishing of supplies to whalers and entertaining the crews”. Sailors who had been hunting whales for months at a time went to Lahaina to drink grog and meet women. By 1825 a kapu prohibiting women from going out to ships for the purpose of prostitution was proclaimed by the Hawaiian chiefs (ali’i ). Enraged that they could not cajole, coax, or coerce Hawaiian women into violating the kapu, the sailors turned their frustrations on the American missionaries, whom they blamed for the emergence of this new unreasonably strict moral law. Whalers opposed any rules governing alcohol and prostitution, and blamed missionaries for influencing the Kingdom of Hawaii to enforce such rules. Riots broke out at least four times—in 1825, 1826, 1827, and 1843. In the 1827 riots, sailors on the John Palmer fired their cannons at the home of missionary William Richards and threatened the safety of the community.”
Chatfield avoided Lahaina when he was in command of the Massachusetts. Inflated prices for provisions, the temptations for the crew, and the slow decline of the port in the 1850s caused him to prefer San Francisco despite that port’s reputation as a graveyard for whalers. A bitter rivalry grew between San Francisco and Lahaina for the whaling fleet’s business, but for Chatfield and other Cotuit whalers, San Francisco was a better place to sell their whale oil and bone in between the summer season in Siberia’s Sea of Okhotsk.
My condolences to the people of Maui who lost family, friends, and their homes to the fires. Cotuit’s fire chief, Sean Brown, is in Lahaina now with the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s Urban Search & Rescue Task Force on the ground assisting with recovery efforts and the sad task of locating and identifying victims of the blaze.
Ezra George Perry was a real estate promoter and developer from Bourne; a self-described “Cape Cod Boy” who marketed the sublime pleasures of owning a Cape Cod summer estate in an illustrated guidebook, “A Trip Around Cape Cod.”
“At the end of the nineteenth century, Perry came back to Bourne, his hometown, where he began buying up pastureland around Phinney Harbor and developing it into lots to be sold to the urban rich for seaside summer estates,” writes John T. Cumbler in Cape Cod: An Environmental History of a Fragile Ecosystem.
Ezra George Perry
Perry’s book is the first time I’ve ever seen the full extent and scale of some of the old estates and seaside hotels and the different styles and grandeur of estates that were marketed by Perry as a more moral and natural alternative to the excesses of Newport. President Grover Cleveland turned his 110-acre estate, Grey Gables, into the Summer White House from 1893-96, which in turn brought the railroad, electricity, and telegraph to the region for the first time.
Ezra Perry’s colorful career and shameless hucksterism comes through his copywriting in A Trip Around Cape Cod. He spun a grand, compelling vision of the Cape that enticed more tycoons and scions and developers to follow and spur the development of grand estates and establishing a number of exclusive summer enclaves in Cotuit, Oyster Harbors, Wianno and Hyannis Port that began to fill in the economic void left by the decline of whaling, shipping, and the traditional Cape Cod arts of shipbuilding, shellfishing, and shipping and the related need for salt to preserve fish, wood to build saltworks, rope, sails, and the other components of the maritime culture that faded after the Civil War, done in by the railroad, petroleum and steam. In their place followed the grand hotels and guest houses and eventually the private clubs along the shores of Buzzards Bay and Nantucket Sound.
Gray Gables, 1890
The book is available for free online – Google Books is where I found a copy that can be downloaded as a PDF or read in a browser.
I took the liberty of making copies of the Cotuit photographs from A Trip Around Cape Cod. I’m sure Ezra Perry would appreciate the back links were he still flogging land on the Cape today.
