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I hate my iPod — dumb device (the Nano) with a singular function — playing music. This Sony device, once given a camera, will completely realize the dream of a Dick Tracy wrist watch with incredible multi-functionality. It’s been said that the smart phone killed the wrist watch; that may be the case. I don’t wear a watch. But I also don’t want a portable music player that only does music and lives on its own island. I don’t want to use my EVO as a music player — far too bulky for the rower.  The fact this sony device can be paired with any Android phone is simple genius. I may need to get one.

Tip of the hat to Scott Beale at Laughing Squid. Anyone who’s ever launched rockets or flown RC airplanes will appreciate this space launch.

A friend just asked for some maritime reading suggestions following my endorsement of Susan Casey’s The Wave.

Here, in no particular order, are some good ones from my bookshelf.

• Nigger of the Narcissus, Conrad
• Two Years Before the Mast, Dana
• Moby Dick, Melville
• Typee, Melville
• Wanderer, Sterling Hayden
• Voyage, Hayden
• Looking for a Ship, John McPhee
• Steaming to Bamboola, Chris Buckley
• Sailing Alone Around the World, Slocum
• Around the World Singlehanded, Harry Pidgeon
• Voyaging Southwards from the Strait of Magellan, Rockwell Kent
• N by E, Kent
• The White Dawn, James Houston
• The Captain, Jan de Hartog
• The Strange Last Voyage of Donald Crowhurst, Tomalin and Hall
• anything by Edgar Rowe Snow
• The Long Way, Bernard Moitessier
• The Caine Mutiny, Herman Wouk
• Ice Brothers, Sloan Wilson
• A Night to Remember, Walter Lord
• In the Heart of the Sea, Nathaniel Philbrick
• Down by the Docks, Rory Nugent
• Perfect Storm, Sebastian Junger
• Heavy Weather Sailing, Adlard Coles
• The Venturesome Voyages of Captain Voss, Voss
• A Fighting Chance, Ridgway and Blyth
• Crunch and Des, Philip Wylie

I’ll add others as they come to mind. Suggestions appreciated.

The best thing that can be said about the dead-tree era of publishing that sustained the world for a few centuries was the relative ease-of-use and standardization in operating the delivery mechanism — the book, newspaper, or magazine. Sentences began on the left, went to the right (in the West), eyes moved from to bottom, and when you finished the page you turned it. Need to remember a place? Dog ear the page or use a bookmark of some sort. Need to annotate? Scribble in the margins. Underline the text. Highlight the sentence.

The first digital versions of text tried to ape their paper antecedents. Zinio and other early e-mag technologies were basically smarter PDFs of pages, but they were proprietary, and it wasn’t until HTML provided a common framework and page description language that there was some semblance of standardization on how to read pixels.

Now that we are two years into the dedicated e-reader revolution — starting with the Amazon Kindle and now the notion of iPad apps, all hell is going to break loose on readers with very bad consequences. While others have bemoaned the end of the web as it moves off of standard platforms and onto proprietary ones, my beef is purely based on usability.  Today’s culprit is the vaunted New Yorker’s new iPad version, a “free” app that sticks a $4.99 gun in your ribs as soon as you decide you actually want to read something in it.

Jason Schwartzmann’s cute video instructions aside, the New Yorker is an utter failure as an online reading experience for several reasons.

• Pages are turned by flicking up, not side to side.
• The table of contents is impossible to find
• The standard menu has no option to jack up the font size to make the thing elderly eyes compatible
• It doesn’t remember your place automatically
• It doesn’t appear to have any annotation capabilities
• Getting out of the cute animation of how the cover was drawn was nigh impossible

New Yorker editor David Remnick needs to b-tch-slap his designers and start over. I will not buy an iPad version of the magazine again ($4.99 is a rip off what appears, thanks to the missing table of contents, to be a severely truncated version of the real thing). Whomever coded the thing and made their “enhancements” to the reading experience are the beginning of an ugly trend that is only going to get uglier as formats splinter and digital typographic designers decide to innovate the same way they managed to muck up web design over the years. Amazon enforces a modicum of standardization, so for now my allegiances will lie with the iPad’s Kindle app. But magazines and papers better settle on a defacto standard for tablet/reader publishing or we’re all screwed trying to find out where the table of contents is, the font adjuster and the virtual bookmark. I need to get smarter about these new tablet production tools.

The main halyard has needed replacing all season — the braided cover frayed and parted halfway up the line and was sliding and bunching up like a snake skin. I’d stand on deck and stare upwards, 52 feet up the aluminum pole and wonder how in hell I was going to re-reeve a new line without going up the mast. The smart thing would have been to temporarily splice a new one to the bitter end of the old one and haul it up through the mast-head sheave … but no, procrastination and a temporary fix tided me over until Tuesday afternoon.

I went for a solo sail in the afternoon, unreefed, full sail, charging out of the channel into the teeth of a boisterous 20 knot southwesterly. Just as I was about to kill the diesel and winch open the jib my phone rang.  A buddy sitting in the parking lot at Loop Beach had seen me steam by and was calling to express his admiration that some idiot would try to singlehand a 33-foot sloop by himself into a smoking Nantucket Sound afternoon. Ha-ha, I said, unconcerned about the single-handed part. Solo sailing isn’t hard. It comes down to using one’s foot to steady the wheel and being very efficient in one’s movements to the main and jibsheets.  It’s actually harder to hold down a small boat in a breeze with one’s weight than it is a 15,000 pound keel boat. One person or two doesn’t make a lot of difference.

I hung up the phone, sheeted everything down nice and tight, turned off the engine, and hung on for dear life as the wind indicator showed 25 knot gusts and started to push the boat around in the chop. Down below, in the cabin, crashes could be heard as the hull heeled and ditty bags, cups, 12 packs of soda, fog horns, boathooks, and other detritus started to fly around.

I enjoyed a very vigorous close-hauled reach out to Bell Eight, on the edge of Horseshoe Shoal where the wind farm is planned. Tacked around, and broad reached back like a comet to Cotuit, making the channel despite an extreme full-moon low tide, and sailing gracefully all the way into the bay without resorting to the engine. Handling the mooring alone is a challenge — my missing left big toe nail is a testament to running forward to snag the pennant and stubbing my toe on a big-ass jib car —  but I manage to get the splice onto the bow clear and run the skiff back to the transom without too much chaos.

The main sail was luffing like a thunderstorm so I got it down quickly, uncleating the main halyard, complete with the frayed off cover, and letting it slump to the deck. Silence. Big exhalation of relief. Safe and sound. I ducked down below to find the sail stops and the shit-stick (my homemade comorant deterrent device) and when I came back on deck I notice an awful lot of 3/16th’s wire cable on the cabin top. Hmm. That’s strange.

The wind had caught the halyard and blown it out into a big belly, sucking the rope part of the steel-rope halyard to the top of the mast. I looked up, mouth open like a gaping idiot. Total amateur move losing a halyard to the top of the mast. I should, of course, have cleated the bitter end to prevent such idiocy from occurring. In the old days the rule was you lose it, you climb and get it. That made perfect sense when I was 16 and my father was making up the rules. At my age there’s no consideration of such aerial ascents.

Pissed, I tugged the remaining halyard and let the whole affair fall to the deck. Now the boat has no main halyard, rendering it esseentially into a big motorboat unless I can find a replacement, buy a bosun’s chair, and con my skinny son into riding the chair aloft while I haul him up with the jib winches.  Taking it to a boat yard will yield a $1,000 bill. The other option — the safer one at least — is not to do anything, declare the sailing season over, and wait until the boat is hauled on October 15 and then make the replacement when the mast is unstepped and laying across a set of sawhorses. Decisions, decisions. This is a nice time of year to sail, would be a shame to throw in the towel now, but do I really want to go through the contortions?

Update: the ever helpful Uncle Fester sent along this video which made me want to vomit.

Stephen O’Grady nails down and confirms what Esteban Panzeri and I saw in the winter of 2009 when we were in discussions with Amazon Web Services to built a cloud application for a hardware project in a former life. Amazon is  much, much more than a store these days, and up on the hill above Seattle, in the old Veteran’s Hospital, looms a revolution in cloud computing that is going to cause a train wreck among traditional enterprise software companies.

When I learned from Pooj Preena that Dropbox was using AWS to host its excellent cloud storage service; and after reading J.D. Lasica’s seminal white paper on identity in the age of cloud computing, I began to grok the implications of Amazon’s servers-in-the-skies. But add on that some higher level services in the stack and things start to get very very very interesting. Here’s O’Grady’s piece:

“Maybe it’s the lingering perception that they’re just a retailer, but the lack of a healthy fear of Amazon is still curious. Even as players large and small acknowledge the dominance of AWS within the public cloud computing market, the lack of an immune response to its continued expansion defies simple explanation.

“If Amazon restricted itself to basic public cloud computing services, that would be one thing. Most of the large systems players have turned their attention to the burgeoning market for quote unquote private cloud services. Whether these same cloud players appreciate the fact that a large portion of their interest in the private cloud is a function of the public cloud economic realities established by Amazon is unclear, but unimportant. Amazon is singularly responsible for the framing that is the public cloud today, a framing which generally relegates those with traditional enterprise margins in mind to private cloud settings.”

via Hiding in Plain Sight: The Rise of Amazon Web Services – tecosystems.

The hunter-gather lifestyle can be a bitch, but that’s the point isn’t it? To don the 19th century hair shirt and try to abide with what one can oneself catch, harvest, gather and transform into something edible? Readers of Michael Pollan’s excellent The Omnivore’s Dilemma will understand the sheer labor involved in preparing food from scratch. Pollan goes so far as to try to make his own salt (a dismal failure) from San Francisco Bay, but I can identify with the satisfaction of pulling something out of the kitchen based on one’s own labors in the garden or on the working end of a clam rake or fishing rod.

Growing up with a grandmother who survived the Great Depression on Cape Cod gave me some interesting insights into how things were done in the days before foodies ruled the kitchen, when salt and pepper was about it when it came to spices, and canning — the act of putting away food in supposedly sterile containers — was a fact of life. The woman made her own ice cream, her own jellies. She lived out of an ancient edition of the Fannie Farmer cookbook and a metal box of index cards bearing printed recipes for some of the world’s most inedible substances, including a particularly foul lime jello mold with a core of horseradish flavored tuna fish. My old man wouldn’t eat fish, and claimed they boiled and canned bluefish to insure protein during the long barren Cape Cod winters. He would eat clams, preferring to find them with his bare feet, but fish was strictly off the list.

Grandmother made jelly every September or October. The prized substance was beach plum jelly, from fruits harvested on Sampson’s Island from among the poison ivy and wood ticks; then later: harvesting bushels of Concord grapes from the ancient arbor in front of the house and turning them into jelly. I remember helping her pick the grapes, wash the grapes, stem them, slip off the skins, seed them, boil them, strain them through cheesecloth …. all for a glass of purple grape juice that tasted precisely like Welch’s Grape Juice. She made jelly, pouring the stuff into little glasses and sealing it off with a blob of molten wax. She made jam, complete with seeds and raisins, which was inedible as far as I was concerned.

A few years ago, long after she passed away, I tried to make jelly with the kids, misunderstood the chemistry of jellies, and wound up with quart jars of vulcanized purple rubber that had the consistency of a Super Ball, refused to spread, and tore the hell out of any bread unlucky to  be selected to receive it.

So what in the world inspired me to do it this year? Who knows. The story is a sad one. Let’s just say I have boiled, canned, sterilized, and watched for three days as my purple grape juice sat liquid in the jars, refusing to gel. So I open up every one of the jars, dump it all back into a pot, toss in handfuls, quarts, pounds of granulated white sugar, boil it, boil it some more, re-ladle it into the jars, resterilize, let them cool, and six hour later declare defeat yet again.

Having just finished the THIRD attempt to make the crap gel I am here to say that a) given the ratio of grape juice to sugar – 4 cups of juice to seven teeth-rotting cups of sugar and b) the addition of the mystery ingredient pectin and c) the realization that the finished product is no different from a jar of Welchs or Smuckers that homemade grape jelly is the single stupidest thing I have done in the kitchen and probably the unhealthiest to boot.

That said, I have fingers crossed that three times is the charm and the crap will finally gel so I can press it onto unsuspecting guests, fingers  crossed that they don’t develop some botulism from my imperfect canning skills.

Thank god for factory farming is all I want to say.

Update: the crap jelled. Wife declares it is no better than Welchs, perhaps worse.

I downloaded Susan Casey’s The Wave onto the iPad yesterday after reading a review in the NYT Sunday Book Review. Definitely a decent book and interestingly, a great multimedia experience if read on an iPad (more on that later).

Casey wrote an account of the great white sharks around California’s Farallon Islands, The Devil’s Teeth, but The Wave is a better book, for me at least, in that sharks are lurid enough of a tired topic that I wasn’t particularly enthralled by an account of them (more of the scientists who spend weeks at a time on the forbidding lumps of rock due west of the Golden Gate). The Wave, for the most part, is a good tale of big wave surfing, an act requiring huge skill, massive cojones, and someone to tow the surfer onto the wave with a jetski. It chases, grail-like, the quest for the 100-foot wave, the monster that hasn’t been ridden, butthe  far more interesting yet scant part of the book is about the effects of oceanic rogue waves on shipping. Apparently a ship or two is lost every week in general — primarily tired bulk carriers that are pressed into service too long by greedy owners and driven in conditions by delay-conscious captains when sane seamanship says its time to heave to.

I would have preferred far more on the type of maritime disaster tales related by Adlard Coles in his classic Heavy Weather Sailing than descriptions of the machismo surfer culture that doubtlessly will make the book more popular to the masses. To her credit, Casey does spend a great deal of time along South Africa’s Wild Coast, describing the terrible toll the monster waves there make on shipping. And her description of the 1,700 foot  mega-tsunami of 1958 in Alaska’s Lituya Bay is enough of a superlative to make all other waves mere pond ripples.

The fun part of reading the book on the iPad was the ability to switch over to YouTube and find the actual video clips of specific surfers surviving specific waves Casey writes about in Tahiti, Maui or Half Moon Bay. The true wonder of the world that I did not know about before reading it, was the description of Cortes Bank, 100 miles west of San Diego where the Pacific abruptly shelves up from thousands of feet to a submerged seamount a scant six feet under the surface. That people cruise out there with the intention of surfing in the great void simply astounds me, and as a terrified sailor, the notion of cruising along and seeing a 120-foot comber breaking in the middle of the empty sea would cause me to void into my underwear.

Good book, read it with YouTube nearby, put up with the constant Laird Hamilton surfing stories, suffer through the scientists opining drearily about the end of the world, global warming, and the coming days of chaos, and you will be entertained.

Technically, the leaves have to turn and a frost has to arrive and the temperatures need to go back into the 70s before one can declare oneself in a true Indian Summer. This weekend has certainly had its glorious effects, starting with three things.

Chowder races: the Cotuit Skiff fleet that stays in the water races through September in a series of weekend pickup races. Afterwards the skippers and their crews enjoyed chowder prepared by my old Latin teacher, Tom Burgess and his wife Pieter.

Yesterday I harvested ten pounds of Concord grapes from the arbor in the alcove, washed them, skinned them, and boiled them into a huge mess of purple pulp which I then strained through an old threadbare pillow case. This morning I turned the juice into jelly and “canned” more jars of the stuff than I know what to do with. Many neighbors will be receiving gifts shortly and the house smells grapey.

Last night, under clear skies, came the plaintive wail of the Eastern Screech-Owl that lives in the woods behind the boat garage. I’ve heard it most of the summer, but last night it was very close and very eerie. I don’t think I’ll ever catch a sight of the nocturnal bird, and it may explain why the chipmunk population is off this summer.

At McKinsey, when one is in between engagements, that state of uselessness is known as “being on the beach” — a term borrowed from the Navy and the apocalyptic tale of post-nuclear Australia by Nevil Shute.

I’ve been on the beach since early June and trust me, if one has to develop new career options, one can’t do much better than being beached on Cape Cod in the summertime. But as the season draws to a close and my itch to do something substantial takes over, the beach is vanishing under the tide of future employment.

This past weekend, while returning from a boisterous sail in 25 knot breezes, I was shadowed by a Wianno Senior. As I entered the bay I noticed it was hugging Dead Neck awfully close, something possible at an new moon tide. Alas, in the morning  while running the chowder races, I saw the boat had been beneaped at the entrance to Cupid’s Cove.

Today was glorious in the way only mid-September can deliver on Cape Cod, so I made a few chicken salad sandwiches, loaded up the cooler, grabbed the iPod and my eldest son, and set sail for nowhere. The goal was lunch in Oak Bluffs, but the wind pooped out and things turned into a slatting drifter. Just before the wind faded, we steamed along like no one’s business.

Back I go tomorrow. The boat is scheduled to come out of the water the weekend of October 15, and I suspect this endless summer will be ending in Manhattan just about then.

The Red Sox are out of it, the Concord grapes hanging in the arbor smell ripe in the sun, I’ve got more cucumbers than a man has a right to have, and it cormorant season in the harbor, and I may need to open a guano factory if I can’t get the filthy buggers off the spreaders of my sailboat.

Saturday morning was blowing blustery out of the north and I joined the last sailors of the yacht club in running a short informal race up and down the harbor, running the committee boat and blowing the starting horn. Feeling imperious in my role as ad hoc commodore, I sped down the harbor to make sure there was a leeward buoy and on the way back to the fleet, Red Sox cap turned brim back so it wouldn’t blow off in the gusts, I noticed another motorboat speeding alongside me. The harbormaster. Blue lights flashing.

I slowed and stopped. The harbormaster was an unhappy man and began shouting at me for speeding. I went into full obsequiousness, trying to explain in between repeated “SORRIES!” that I was a man on a mission to oversee my flock of nine Cotuit Skiffs. He would have none of it and started looking around for a reason to write me up.

“Where are the lifejackets on that thing!?!” Thing? This was my boat. I refer to it as “she,” not it. The fleet was approaching, yawing and deathrolling its way from the Inner Harbor down to Codman’s Point. My friend Philip glided by. I was embarrassed. I dug into the big cooler that serves as a seat and personal flotation device storage unit and pulled out a lifejacket suited for a munchkin. “ARE YOU KIDDING ME?!??” I kept digging and grabbed another random orange jacket. “PUT IT ON! SHOW ME IT FITS!” I put it on and it barely made it around my neck. “WHAT SIZE IS THAT?!? READ THE LABEL ON THE BACK AND SHOW ME!”

I took it off, looked at the label: “Adult Universal.” I showed it to him. He shook his head and launched into a lecture about going slow, no matter what the excuse. I thanked him for his diatribe and finished the race, explaining my infraction to all.

This morning, rolling out of bed, I came down stairs to see a flock of wild turkeys on my lawn. I’d seen the birds a couple years ago in Menemsha on Martha’s Vineyard, when one walked up to me and tried to beg some food. These were the first I’d ever seen in Cotuit. The dogs threw a conniption and I proved, yet again, that shooting video from a smartphone means shooting pictures of my fingers.

Another race this morning, another sail on the guano boat, and in a month the yachting season ends when the boat gets pulled and propped up on stands in the back yard. Might as well make the most of it while it lasts.

Now to Google some Concord grape jelly recipes and trash the kitchen.

Three driving trips to NYC from Cotuit over the past month has taught me the importance of a decent car iPod dock — mine having failed and degenerating into weird behavior — or a decent set of FM radio presets to keep me from going insane on the long stretches through southeastern Massachusetts, southern Rhode Island and the interminable stretch between New London and New Haven. The trip is exactly 250 miles from the village to mid-town and I can do it in four hours, rush hour traffic and late summer road construction permitting.

Phone calls cut the time the fastest, interesting how interacting directly with someone cuts the sense of time. My second preferred form of aural entertainment is podcasts (remember those?), ranging from college courses downloaded from iTunes (I tend towards history and philosophy), cycling podcasts, and geek casts like the Gillmor Gang (if I can find it as it comes and goes). With the iPod dock in bad shape, I have devolved to the radio, and this past trip resolved to take one of the band of presets and once and for all organize a series of station pre-sets to coincide with the 250 miles haul.

One thing stands clear — I am a left-side of the dial guy. Why the crap stations dominate the 100′s is a mystery, but down in the 80s and 90s live the little college stations and NPR affiliates, places where anarchy and eclecticism rule the airwaves and the advertising is nonexistent.

National Public Radio can be a good thing. And I start the trip at 5 am in the dark listening to the BBC World Update — the Economist of the ether — catching up on the suicide bombings and coups in various banana republics as read by the prickly and sometimes sanctimonious Dan Damon. WGBH — one of the oldest public radio stations in the country, has a monster signal that reaches from Boston to the Cape. The joke locally is GBH either stands for Great Blue Hill (the location of the transmitter in Milton) or God Bless Harvard because the studios are so close to Harvard Stadium in Allston. Locally, the NPR affiliate is WCAI at 90.1. I like CAI (Cape And Islands) because its general manager Jay Allison was such an early force on The W.E.L.L. in the 1980s and their local programming, particularly the local food report, is generally excellent. What I cannot abide is John Hockenberry’s The Takeaway due to their pernicious belief that adding high-tech noises to intros and outros makes the news cool.

GBH and CAI could carry me through Providence Rhode Island and beyond, but once I get to Mattapoisset and Marion I switch over to theUniversity of Massachusetts Dartmouth station, WUMD (89.3) because I love student DJs and some of the very bizarre stuff they play in the early morning hours. UMD isn’t the strongest station in the world, and catering to the local Portugese population one can find a lot of Brazilian pop which — language issues primarily — is unlistenable after a song or two. Some of the more progressive programming is interesting though.

New Bedford at sunrise is a poignant place, recalling one November morning in 1978 when I was hitchhiking from the Cape back to New Haven to make classes after a sad weekend with my father. I stood in the breakdown lane across from the crematorium in the Fairhaven Cemetary, flapping my arms in my thin denim jacket, singing “Black Throated Wind” and swigging from a pint of blackberry brandy to keep my spirits up. Years later,  over coffee at Farley’s on Potrero Hill, I told John Perry Barlow, the writer of that song, about that morning, and how a capella I had managed to make BTW my favorite Grateful Dead song, even if it had first appeared on Bob Weir’s Ace album. He was, I think, flattered.

Then I was picked up by some teenagers in a fast TransAm and had to endure some head banging music which destroyed the mood until they were pulled over for speeding in Stonington.

In Fall River, as the car crests the eternally repainted Braga Bridge, I take advantage of Narragansett Bay and the strong signal beaming up from the south from the University of Rhode Island’s station, WRIU, 90.3, where on Thursday morning the DJ played a solid hour of Les Paul’s work, delving into interesting digressions about how Les Paul did not design the famous Gibson guitar bearing his name, but lent his name to it. That was awesome, listening to Les Paul and Fred Waring, and other stalwarts of popular radio from the late 30s, 40s, and 50s, the signal getting stronger as I plowed through Providence and down the long scrubby stretch of West and East Greenwich, Exeter and South Kingstown, site of the infamous massacre of the Narragansetts in 1675 by the combined forces of the colonia militias in what is known as the Great Swamp Fight.

WRIU can be my favorite station on the entire four hour trip, but it dies in New London where a huge void opens up in the dial space as there seems to be no great station there. I need to tune into WCNI, Connecticut College’s 2000 watt transmitter on the next trip, but haven’t dialed into it as of yet.

Coming out of New London, in the space between the Thames and the Connecticut Rivers — near Lyme, famous for the tick and the disease it carries — I tune to WPKN, 89.5, the University of Bridgeport station, which is one of the oldest and most progressive public radio stations on the coast. Yesterday I was pleasantly surprised to hear Jim Motavelli, on the air as the DJ. He interviewed me in the late 90s when I was at Forbes.com in a book he wrote about the impact of new media on the traditional press: Bamboozled at the Revolution and described my “droll, preppy demeanor.” PKN was in the middle of its fall fundraiser — usually a sure repellent that has me hitting the buttons for the next non-mendicancy station.

By Stamford, with NYC just a few dozen miles away, I switch to the final station of the trip, Fordham University’s WFUV, which is another NPR affiliate that plays a ton of good music. FUV, which is based in the Bronx and has a strong transmitter, stays with me down the FDR and into whatever mid-town garage is going to take me down for $50 in parking.

I’m sure my next car will have XM radio and stay tuned to the Grateful Dead station most of the time — a predictable shame given the delights of college radio.

Cotuit: Tuesday-Wednesay 9/7-9/8

NYC : Thursday 9/10

Philadelphia: Friday 9/11

Short week due to yesterday’s holiday. It’s like a switch has been thrown on Main Street here in the village. Even though summer seems to end in mid-August the number of cars swooshing past has dropped to crawl of contractors and tradesmen and the occasional school bus filled with sad students. Off to NYC for more job interviews, then perhaps Philly before returning late Friday night.

From the Cape Cod Times:

HYANNIS – A man forgot to wear more than his waders when he went out clamming Friday afternoon off Harbor Bluff Road.

Police arrested Savery Antone, 38, of Falmouth, for open and gross lewdness, after he was seen clamming in 2 feet of water completely in the buff around 4:30 p.m. Friday, said Sgt. Sean Sweeney.

A neighbor called the police to say Antone was offending residents and beachgoers alike.

When police arrived they saw Antone and a male friend about 35 feet offshore in the shallow water.

Antone had a bucket to collect shellfish. His genitals were above water and in full view, Sweeney said.

When police called him on shore, they noticed his slurred speech, and placed him in protective custody, and charged him with open and gross lewdness.

via Naked clammer arrested in Hyannis | CapeCodOnline.com.

Fizzled. Non-starter. Lots of rain, some puffy gusts, then off it went, falling apart to the north. We never lost power, the chainsaws aren’t singing their september song, and now to resume our regularly scheduled late summer activities.

Since alcohol and tropical depressions fit hand in glove, we sat on my cousin’s porch dressed like crab fishermen in orange Grundens, drinking dark and stormy’s (dark rum and ginger beer) watching the gusts blow bursts of rain down Main Street. An expedition to the town dock to stand on the end and face into the howling northeast breeze, and back to the porch to tell stories of storms past and grouse about how Earl was such a dud. One of the sure signs of approaching senescence is my happiness over non-storms. People too young to have lived through a week of coffee brewed on the weber grill and 19th century lifestyle options (you go to bed when it is dark, bathe in cold water, smell bad), tend to miss the big display of nature’s special effects the most.

Now to put the boat back in the water, return the big boat to its normal mooring, and figure out how to get in three Skiff races before Monday’s prize ceremony. And I have a heck of a hangover ….

Ironically recorded in 1938, the September that saw the Great Hurricane of ’38 totally trash Long Island and New England.

The yacht club dock was pulled on Friday morning — a big group effort marshaled by Conrad Geyser, the yacht club’s wharfinger. The grounds were cleared of any potential flying debris, the doors locked and the place put to bed until tomorrow when we’ll probably start returning the skiffs to the water for the final Labor Day series. The dock had  been scheduled to come out on Saturday, so the timing was right.

I made a final check on my sailboat, riding pretty on its hurricane mooring off of Cordwood Landing. 2,000 pounds and some chafing gear and winds out of the northeast and I should be copacetic.

The first winds are hitting us now at 8 pm, and should escalate up to 40 or 50 mph. No rain yet, the first bands are just crossing Nantucket. Earl is still a category 1 hurricane, but it has tracked far enough east of the outer Cape that we should see tropical storm conditions and nothing apocalyptic. I’m betting we lose lights around midnight when some limbs come down on the wires, but other than that. Shouldn’t be too terrible.

Today was a ballbuster – starting with the purchase of a new chainsaw, two gallons of gas, some files,  more flashlight batteries. But otherwise a sunny, hot day, finding me glued to the National Weather Service for the 8 am advisory, then out to the big boat for one last round of worrying and fiddling. As I was ready to leave my phone flashed a voice mail from a friend who said to call him, he had another alternative for me to ride out the maelstrom.  As his boat is in Rhode Island his 2,000 pound hurricane buoy was vacant and I was welcome to it. I jumped into the motorboat, headed up harbor to check it out, phoned his wife, went ashore to pick up a mooring bridle, and an hour later was riding on a massive mooring with a mooring float the size of half-submerged Volkswagen.

That was the morning. As soon as I got ashore I scarfed a lunch and headed back out with my son to start bringing the Cotuit Skiff fleet ashore for the planned 5 pm pulling of the boats. The Cotuit version of a barn raising only somewhat in reverse. We pulled the boats ashore with the motorboat two at a time, lining them up along the yacht club beach — back and forth for two hours until some reserves arrived and another boat was pressed into service. I turned to the yacht club’s motorboats and other equipment and at 5 the pulling began to accelerate, with four trucks and trailers in constant circulation between the boat ramp and the beach and the Ropes Field at the top of the hill, a big four acre pasture near the ballpark where the fleet has always sought refuge during big blows.

The field filled up over the span of two hours, and just as the sun set and the boat ramp was clogged with panicked boat owners trying to get their boasts out before darkness, I made one last run for a friend, got his catboat into the field, then locked things up and waited for another friend to return from a hurricane hole in Popponesset Bay where he was stashing his antique catboat for the duration.

The Cape and Islands are operating under a hurricane warning. The current track has it passing sixty miles east of Chatham — that’s eighty miles from me, but it seems pretty certain that we’re going to be under hurricane conditions from 8 pm Friday until dawn Saturday, with three to six inches of rain, sustained winds of 50 knots, and gusts into the 70s.

I’ll make one last run out to the big boat in the morning, check the chafing gear, then help pull the yacht club pier out of the water.  My motorboat will get hauled, then a late trip for a ton of ice since we’re certain to lose power and the refrigerators will fail, then settle in for an increasingly wild afternoon, culminating with a full hit at nightfall.

Seventy years ago I’d be oblivious to what was coming. Now I know too much and what I know sucks. Starting Sunday I started keeping an eye on Hurricane Earl, a category 4 storm that is now forecasted to pass extremely close offshore of Cape Cod. Very close.

The last forecast from the National Weather Service put Cape Cod on a hurricane watch – meteorological speak that it’s time to consider the options and possibilities. With a 33′ sloop sitting on a 500 pound mooring less than half a mile away, I am definitely considering the options and none of them, with 48 hours to go, are great. So this morning I went to the firehouse and asked the chief for some old firehose, grateful when he cut me off a couple sections of 2″ hose so I could split them and wrap them around the mooring pennants where they rub in the boat’s chocks. My son and I brought the boat into the town down and took down the sails and the bimini awning, anything to reduce the windage and prevent the wind from picking open the sails and causing definite mayhem. I’ll return tomorrow to lash things down and fret some more.

My options now are:

1. Stay on the mooring, hope the forecast holds, go to bed and pray the mooring holds for eight hours of 50 knot winds and some gusts over 60 miles per hour.  The tackle is only two years old, I’m on the outside edge of the mooring field, and right now the wind direction is out of the north, over land, so I will get some protection in the lee, but not a lot. The worst direction, if we were in the northeastern quadrant of the cyclone, would be south or southeast, then the entire length or fetch of the harbor would kick up some very big waves.  The other fear is the storm surge, but thankfully low tide is at 2 am, so the peak of the winds will come as the water is falling, not rising.
2. Stay on the mooring but also stay on the boat. This means actually sitting out the storm with a lifeline wrapped around me, tied to the helm, with a pair of swim goggles to keep the driving rain from blinding me, and then using the diesel and the throttle to keep the boat into the wind and the pressure off of the mooring. This is the crazy man option.
3. Try to get it pulled tomorrow morning, but that is not a sure thing — the hauler has to be in the mood and he is sure to have an extremely hectic day. That entails a trip to the dock, a visit by the crane truck to pull the mast, then a trip up into Prince’s Cove to be hauled and then parked in the back yard by the trees on four jackstands. Hurricane Bob in 1991 did some massive tree damage and who knows if the jackstands would keep the boat upright anyway. Hauling means no fall sailing – once out, then the boat is out and the season is over.
4. If it comes ashore — well, it comes ashore and the damage will be bad. Nothing to do but shrug and hope it doesn’t.

I’ve got a 18′ motorboat to pull — that will come out right at the last minute on Friday afternoon. A friend needs to borrow it to get his catboat tucked away into a hurricane hole inside of Shoestring Bay on the west side of town in the next series of bays. To make things more interesting I just became president of the association of the Cotuit Mosquito Yacht Club, and tomorrow is going to be spent making sure the yacht club’s launches are taken care, of the dock is pulled, the kid’s boats are stowed, and then 50 Cotuit skiffs hauled and stored in the Ropes Field to ride things out.  Hurricane boat pulls are the Cotuit version of an old fashioned barn raising. Several cars with trailers, a couple crews on the beach to de-rig and pull masts, another team on the water in motorboats hauling in the boats, then another crew with 4″ x 4″s to lift the boats on the trailers and another in the field to lift them off. Tomorrow ought to be busy, especially if this heavy heat persists.

The phone has been ringing all day, and everywhere you go the question is the same: “Do you think it will hit?” Smart money says it goes east off of Chatham, putting us in the northwest quadrant where the counter-clockwise spin means the winds will come in from the landside.  Forecast has it 30 miles southeast of Nantucket . That’s 50 miles from where I sit. Way too close. Way, way too close. Let’s hope it stays out there. A short jog to the west and complete devasation is a sure thing if it comes ashore. Bob was barely a hurricane and we were without lights for nearly a week, the tree damage was incredible, every pissed off homeless yellow jacket on the Cape was out for revenge …. and nearly every boat in the harbor was trashed and thrown onto the beach. If Earl does the same it will not be a very good September. All the food will spoil. People will snarl at each other in the gas lines at the gas station. I guess i need to go buy a chainsaw and a new power washer. The first lesson learned from Bob is wash the house as soon as possible given that every green leaf in the neighborhood gets shredded to confetti and pasted to the paint with salt spray. Lawn furniture to stow away … badminton nets, hummingbird feeders ….. tomorrow is going to be a long, long day.

Here’s the wind profile: The little flags point in the direction the wind will come from and the small bars indicate the wind velocity. Sustained winds over 70 mph make for a hurricane. The forecast has us gusting with peaks around 65 mph. Sunset to 3 am … it’s going to be a long nasty night. And if the power goes — well, no blogging for a long time to say the least.

Think I’m over-reacting? Napatree Point – 1938