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John Steinbeck opens his memoir, Travels With Charley with an account of rescuing his 22-foot motorboat from Hurricane Donna in 1960. I remember reading that story before ever experiencing a hurricane myself, and I was impressed by Steinbeck’s willingness to risk his life for his beloved boat, wading into the waters of a harbor on Long Island Sound to free her from the clutches of some other boats and then power her up and steam safely to a safer anchorage. Since then I’ve repeatedly suffered the peculiar paternal anxiety of a boat owner confronted with the possibility of losing a boat, especially during those terrible storms where there just isn’t enough time to pull it safely from the water. When that happens it’s just wait and watch.

I own a 26-year old 33-foot Endeavour sloop — the Bald Eagle Too – a gift from some good friends who were going to consign her to a charity auction after her last owner passed away (I’ve retained her name out of the superstition that a renamed boat is bad luck). The boat is a total joy — who can argue with a gift? — and it has become the center of summer life for me and my family these past three years.  The first  twinges of boat anxiety began to build when Irene started to threaten early last week. I phoned the local boatyard on other business — to organize the pullout of the yacht club’s motorboats — and the owner answered his cell phone with an abrupt: “If this is about your big boat, tough titty…..” I never expect to be on anyone’s priority list for boat hauling as I maintain the boat myself to save money. Big spenders get pulled first so they can continue to spend.

On Friday my son and I stripped off the sails, took down the dodger and spent an hour attending to the mooring lines, insuring the chafing gear was in the bow chocks and running a third backup line from around the mast, down the bow roller for the anchor line and then down to the splice in a bowline where the mooring pennant met the chain in a blob of sea squirts and barnacles. Somewhere down there in the black muck was a fairly new 500-pound mushroom anchor. Hefty, but still, past hurricanes have ripped moorings that size out of the mud before. When we finished pumping the bilges dry, switched off the electrical system, and made one last paranoid check we motored up the harbor to check out a hurricane mooring I was given last year during the threat of Hurricane Earl. Alas, it had a little swim float tethered to it — 2,000 pounds of serious yacht insurance for a little wooden float — but hey, not my mooring, not my place to bitch and moan, and the Bald Eagle was just going to have to tough it out on her own.

All around us, out on the edge of the mooring field, the other owners of the big sailboats were making the same preparations we had. You can instantly gauge the saltiness of a boat owner from how thoroughly they approach their storm preparations. My good friend the Judge, who has been through hurricanes dating back to the Great Atlantic Hurricane of 1944, was doing the same thing I was — get all the canvas off the spars and spend a lot of time on the mooring pennants and chafing gear. Less experienced owners were leaving their roller reefed jibs on — a fatal mistake as the gusts will pick them open until the boat is literally sailing unattended at the mooring, wildly tacking back and forth until the mushroom is dislodged.

The danger in a mooring field isn’t necessarily what happens to one’s own boat, it’s what the 0ther boats that break free will do to you. In fact, late during yesterday’s storm a very new and hot looking racing sloop just to windward of me broke free late in the storm — probably due to the lines rubbing through, and blew down wind, just missing me but hanging up stern to bow on a small sloop that had stoutly made it through the worst of the blow, only to get dragged off by the combined weight of its own hull and the runaway. If I were the owner of the second boat I would be irate this morning, as he’s totally high and dry on the northern beach next to the boat that took him out.

I first went down to the water at 6 am on Saturday, just when the first storm bands were blowing in, and things looked fine. A party barge had broken free, but otherwise it was a good eight hours before the peak gusts were scheduled to arrive around 2 pm. I took the family out to breakfast at a seaside restaurant, but the windows were moaning so loudly in the gusts we lost our appetites. We returned home and for me, the worst was just starting.

The helplessness one feels during a storm is overwhelming.  You stand at the shore, pick a good angle to view the boat, and with every hard gust that blows the tops of the waves into the air, every blast of green water that goes over the bow, the boat hobby-horsing on its tether at a 45 degree angle up and down into the air and troughs ….. Yes, I could have spent the storm out on the boat. The thought occurred to me. One tactic is to keep the diesel running and then feather the throttle during the gusts to relieve some of the tons of pressure from the mooring. But, as I learned in my younger days as a surfcaster when a wave nearly flooded my waders and drowned me while I was fighting a striper –no fish, and no boat, is worth drowning for.

The crowd at the foot of Old Shore Road was mostly gawking at a motorboat thrown into the middle of the street and the occasional sailboat dragging down onto the sands. A gorgeous Tartan sloop from Annapolis came in right at my feet, the mooring float still tied to the cleat on the deck, the boat a victim of bad chafing gear. The fact the sails were still on the spars and a big inflatable dinghy was still hanging from the stern davits was an indication the owner hadn’t prepared for the worst, yet I heard him on his cell phone being very angry with the boat yard that rented him the mooring.

I’d watch for an hour then walk back up the hill to the house for a drink of water, some food, and a few minutes of pacing around telling myself que sera, sera – no need to go back down, what will happen will happen and there isn’t a thing you can do about it. That blithe rationalization lasted about a half hour until I pulled the orange Grunden back on and made my way down the shore road, nervously watching the tree limbs over my head, convinced I would get crushed by a falling maple branch on the next puff.

At noon the police arrived and kicked everyone off of the landing, putting up crime scene tape at the top of the hill to keep gawkers from driving down. High tide followed 30 minutes later at 12:30 — the storm surge coinciding with the new moon extreme tide — and Old Shore Road flooded, carrying a sportsfisherman right onto the road and blocking it closed. A big cruising catamaran, the Split Ticket, dragged ashore — the wind catching under the cabin sole between the two hulls and just muscling it slowly down the harbor into the beach grass. Blocked by the police from the beach and losing my mind at the house, I called a friend who lives on the water and has a view of my boat to see if I could come pace and fret on his lawn.

“I’ve got bad news,” he said. ”She’s gone.”

That sucked. She had broken loose. “Do you see her on the beach?” I asked.

“I don’t see it. It might be up in Inner Harbor near the Oyster Company.”

As soon as I dropped the F-bomb my wife and son knew the worst had happened. We piled into the car and starting driving to the section of the bay where she would likely come ashore. As I turned the car past the cemetery the phone rang again.

“Never mind. I see her now. I guess I couldn’t get a good angle from my kitchen.”

I said another bad word. This was like the punchline of a bad doctor joke. “I’ve got good news and bad news ….”

We drove to his house and with a beaming smile (Har, har, April Fool’s!) he handed me a set of binoculars. The Bald Eagle was still out there, getting pounded as hard as I’ve ever seen any boat get hit at anchor. I handed the binocs to my wife. She stared for a few seconds, handed them back, and turned away.

“I wish I hadn’t seen that,” she said.

I snuck back down to the landing and remained there all afternoon. Pacing. Staring. Wincing. You could tell who the boat owners were. We all stood silently, arms crossed, staring. The gawkers and spectators were snapping pictures of the boats canted over the road, laughing, socializing, caught up in hurricane fever; but we owners were together but lost in our thoughts.

The Bald Eagle late on Sunday afternoon

Then more bad news as the gusts started to hit even harder. The Polaris, a gorgeous blue ketch, perhaps one of the prettiest boats in the harbor, was ashore just north of Lowell Point. I felt for the owner and his sons as they slogged through the surf and eel grass towards the spot just out of sight where she was rolling in the shallows. Then the C-Team, a grey sloop went on the beach at Handy’s Point. A sportsfisherman went into the trees under the bluff. The Lowell’s finger pier vanished in a tangle of planks. As I stood and spectated I felt a sharp twinge in my neck, and for the rest of the day couldn’t turn my head without wincing. I dug my finger into the spot — the kind of pain one gets from sleeping wrong — but nothing would make it go away.

My boat continued to plunge. And plunge. And careen under the impact of the williwaws and gusts. The hull heeled at a crazy angle under the force of the wind. At one point I thought I heard a jet engine out over the harbor — perhaps a stormhunter or Coast Guard Falcon jet from Otis Air Force Base? No, it was the sound of the wind honking through the spars and rigging of the 30 boats in the bay, an eerie mechanical, unnatural wail. I started to lose it. Just make it stop now. Throw a switch. Enough is enough. The boat had been riding hard for eight hours. I visualized the mooring lines where they came through the bow chocks and ran back to the cleats: a cartoon image of frayed dacron line, down to one Coyote-and-Roadrunner thread, waiting to snap with a little “plink” …..

I walked through the flotsam and wrack to Lowell’s Point to see if I could help with the Polaris. The owner and his sons were wading big anchors out into the surf and then using the jib winches to kedge the stern off of the beach. Coming ashore at half-tide was a good thing if they could keep her from being pushed any higher up on the sands. The next high tide might float her enough to be tugged free; otherwise, as in Hurricane Bob, a big Sikorsky SkyCrane helicopter with slings might be needed to get her off.

The Polaris ashore

And so it went through the late afternoon. At 7 pm I made my last trek down to the harbor. The wind had veered to the southwest, sustained at 40 knots with an occasional gust up to 60. They had said Irene was not so much a high impact storm as a big, long duration one and they were right. It blew for 12 solid hours. The longer it blew the more chafing I had to fret about, and as boats continued to break free and drift down on her right up until darkness there was no celebration on my part that the worst had passed. Coming home for the last time before nightfall I saw the boat’s mooring ball on the deck. A friend had found it on the beach. Ironic the float made it ashore while the boat didn’t.

I must have knocked on wood a dozen times yesterday, looking for a tree every time I said, “She’s still out there.”

By the twilight's last gleaming ....

At ten I went to bed, mentally exhausted. My wife and son were both exhausted and enervated by the long day of worry and helplessness. We all crashed.

….At so, at six today I woke to bluebird skies and the ringing of the first chainsaws. I pulled on fresh pair of shorts and walked down the lane, stepping over the downed limbs and pushing through piles of green leaves. More boats had come ashore during the night. One had a white hull with a blue stripe …. was it my boat? I thought for a moment my luck had run out.

In the blazing twinkling sun, too bright to see through with sun glasses and a hand visor, I looked out to that space in the harbor where she should have been and with immense relieve saw her hull, placid and bobbing safely on her mooring. She made it. I could safely celebrate without knocking on wood.

And the pain in my neck is completely gone.

I went to the beach at 6 am in time to see the first boat come ashore. Three hours later things were pretty intense, even though high tide was another three hours away and the peak gusts aren’t due to arrive until 2 pm.

Ropes Beach is pretty crowded with gawkers, but I’m glad we pulled the Cotuit Skiff fleet yesterday and got the dock out of the water. My boat is still out there, riding bravely and looking good. For now.

I’ll post more videos until the power goes and I lose my connection.

This first series was shot at the Town Dock.

The annual August arrival of the President on Martha’s Vineyard brings with it a couple plane-loads of black SUVs, burly Secret Service agents, and – according to the New York Times – portable cell phone “towers” to insure the Commander In Chief has four bars on his Blackberry at all times.

Ironic that suddenly the little village of Chilmark has cell phone service when the place is famed for being one of those rare spots where one can take a vacation and never have to worry about what mayhem is unfolding in one’s inbox for the simple truth that you can’t connect. There are no excuses for being unplugged on the western end of MV during the summer — you just can’t get connected there. No wonder I love my annual fly fishing vacation in late September in Menemsha — I can spend six hours baking in the sun waiting for a school of bonito to explode in the channel and not once will the phone ring.

Except of course unless the President is in the area, in which case paradise is temporarily lost to the invasion of the always-on/always-connected tyranny of life in the Blackberry lane:

“But others — especially those who live or vacation in Chilmark because it is remote — rolled their eyes when asked about the improved connection with the outside world.

“A lot of the people who vote here, who live here year-round, couldn’t care less if the people who invade them in the summer get to talk to their Hollywood producers in the middle of the Chilmark store,” Ms. Fox said.

Ms. LoRusso said the lack of cell service “keeps things up-island and rural.” Mr. Ford, who has spent the summer working on a farm here, said: “Personally, I like being disconnected. I like the privacy.”

Yesterday my friend Om Malik remarked on my screed about Cape Cod crime and asked me to expand on this digression:

“I came here full-time in 1991 in my early thirties as a technology enabled telecommuter and even went so far as to write a  big utopian story for Forbes on how tech was going to transform the hinterland into a paradise of ISDN-enabled day traders, software programmers, and affluent bohemian “knowledge workers” who would phone it in via telepresence technology. Ha. As one old timer told me early on at the village post office, “You can’t be a fireman unless you live near the fire.” The story of my career has been: “Raise the family on the Cape, earn the living elsewhere.”

So I did. Here is the story of me and telecommuting and ultimately how we’re all telecommuters:

Among my many journalistic mistakes was a story I wrote for Forbes Magazine in the early 90s that painted a utopian picture of a wired rural society where ISDN-enabled “knowledge workers” would revitalize quaintly inexpensive farm towns and resorts with their  Manhattan-sized pay checks direct deposited into their accounts at the Bailey Building and Loan Association. Goodbye to the tyranny of two-hour commutes and endless NPR fund drives, freed from the tedium of office cubicles and petty office politics and hello to Jetsonian H.246 teleconferencing, parents who could actually raise their kids (and home school them!) and a return to local life for the first time since the Industrial Revolution ripped our great-great-grandparents from the farm and chained them to a machine in a mill.

Ha. Having evenly divided my career between newsrooms/offices and home offices in bedrooms and various outbuildings, I am here to pass on what one old retiree told me in 1991after I decamped from Boston with my family to Cape Cod in search of pre-schools less competitive than Harvard, an actual backyard, and a quieter pace: “How can you be a fireman if you don’t live near the fire?”

Consider that twenty years ago – when I was writing that silly article — fax machines were marvelous things, most companies didn’t have email (if you needed email then you had MCI Mail or CompuServe). There was no Internet. The fastest PC was a 486, John Scully mismanaged Apple, and the height of wireless technology was a Motorola cell phone that resembled a Humvee. Videoteleconferencing cost a gazillion dollars. Digital cameras, let alone web cams were years away.  Basically, life was lived at 9,600 baud on a Hayes modem, dialed into pre-Internet services like The W.E.L.L. and various BBSs.

I ordered an ISDN line from Verizon. They sent men in white coats and hard hats to come look at my house. I wrote an entire story about the ordeal. I was a pioneer. I was wired.  CallerID was coming. I couldn’t wait.

The tools I needed to work from home came down to a PC that could dial into Forbes’ ATEX production system using a floppy-based program called “Send/Fetch,” the aforementioned fax machine to receive story proofs, and a touchtone phone with a headset for conducting interviews. That was it. Life was lived on the phone since no one had email other than a few geeky sources. I woke up, got the kids on the school bus, cleared the decks for the day, made a pre-emptive call to my editor to punch the virtual clock and then worked until three or four in the afternoon until the kids got off the bus. After dinner was when Forbes went to work – editors or fact checkers would call and keep me busy until nine. It was good. I started flowers from seed and learned how to fly fish.

This life was revolutionary at the time. None of my colleagues – present or former – did anything remotely similar. Everyone I knew worked in an office.

I grew my hair long. I wore atrocious slob clothing, attempted a moustache, and gained weight from seeking inspiration in the refrigerator. I joined the local library board.  I was 32 years old and growing senile on what the optimists were calling “The Silicon Sandbar.” In all my time telecommuting from Cape Cod I never met a fellow “knowledge worker,” just carpenters, landscapers, fishermen and retirees.  Where were the hedge fund managers? The coders? The novelists?

Given that Forbes only published 26 issues a year, it wasn’t surprising that I became one of the most prolific writers on the magazine’s masthead. I wrote out of boredom, looked forward to my monthly visit to Forbes’ elegant headquarters on lower Fifth Avenue, and was constantly bugging my editor for permission to travel to Silicon Valley or Seattle in search of cool technologies to write about. In other words, I was bored.

Within three years of arriving on Cape Cod I needed some cultural and social stimulus and a decent Indian restaurant. Those wishes were fulfilled in 1995 when I started Forbes.com and suddenly had a business to run and a staff to manage. What followed were five years of weekly plane rides on a Beechcraft 1900 from Hyannis to LaGuardia, living out of a suitcase, and trying to ride the Web 1.0 wave in Silicon Alley while maintaining a family 250 miles behind me on Cape Cod. All the video teleconferencing in the world wouldn’t have permitted me to manage Forbes.com, so, like a good fireman, I went to the fire. Any time I tried to get things done from the Cape all hell broke loose in some bizarre variant of Murphy’s Law. When my staff at Forbes.com broke the Shattered Glass expose I was in Paris trying to enjoy my 40^th birthday with a Toshiba laptop, a useless cell phone, and a stack of useless phone and voltage adapters.  So much for being there.  My head wasn’t in France and my ass wasn’t in the newsroom in the midst of its biggest scoop ever.

The cultural swing between the work week in the city that never sleeps and the deserted winter beaches of Cape Cod was a bit too intense. The best advice on going home I received at the time from a fellow Cape to NYC commuter was: “No one missed you while you were gone, so when you get home, find a chair, sit in it, and eventually someone will come sit in your lap.”

Generally that someone was the family dog.

When I left Forbes and journalism to join McKinsey another wise soul said, “The virtual office virtually works.” Right. I found myself commuting 80 miles a day by car from the Cape to the lifeless Route 128 suburb of Waltham to sit in a cubicle and produce endless Powerpoints. Thankfully that operation had its plug pulled by McKinsey and I was transferred back to New York City, and once again was living the Cape Cod to Manhattan lifestyle I thought I had escaped in 2000. The only time telecommuting at McKinsey was actually a blessing was in the terrible days following 9/11 when flying was out of the question and very few people wanted to be in the city, including those who lived there.

The worst telecommute was Zurich to Cape Cod. Once big time zones get introduced then telecommuting becomes a misery. Swiss managers – to hopelessly generalize – like their staff to be under their noses.  Trying to manage my staff from the Cape or the company’s Wall Street offices was impossible. After Zurich I worked for a Chinese company with offices in Raleigh, North Carolina and there I discovered commuting to work meant flying from Boston to the Research Triangle only to sit in an office staring at pine trees and spending most of the day on massive global conference calls while making fun of whoever was talking through instant messenger with my colleagues. The only difference between taking those phone calls from Cape Cod was latitude and better barbeque. Woe to the call participant who forgot their mute button. We learned to know the barks of each other’s dogs, the screams of unhappy children ….. The amount of travel – Bangalore, Beijing, Istanbul – meant I was basically telecommuting again, but instead of doing it from Cape Cod and a former whaling captain’s house on an IDSN line I was doing it from one hotel room or business lounge after another on $20 a day Wifi.

Today? Three days a week I work out of a nice townhouse near the Museum of Modern Art on 54^th Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues – pretty much right in the middle of the action. With one child remaining at home with only a year left before college, my wife and I are 13 months away from moving back to a city and letting Cape Cod revert back to being a weekend/vacation spot.

We’re all telecommuters now and it’s not paradise in the mountains or on the islands. We still live in the angry suburbs, commute bumper to bumper and cheek to cheek, but this time we’re also expected to be 100% available and well informed all the time, be it in the car, on the runway, or in a beach chair.

Enjoy your beach chair this August. The office will be waiting for you when you come back.

The New York Times has made Cape Cod’s dirty secret national news this morning with a story on the property crime epidemic spawned by pain killer addicts looking for flat panel televisions and GPSs to feed their pill problem.

I experienced it first hand one night last summer when my cars were ransacked in the driveway, unlocked as they have been forever, gleaned of anything worth fencing. The police came, expressed their sympathy and said we were only one of many Cotusions to get hit in recent weeks.

Since a set of keys were stolen from one of the cars the locksmith was called and the locks were changed on the house. Hasps and padlocks went onto the garage doors and suddenly, I was locking my doors in Cotuit for the first time in 50 years.

The culprits aren’t urban invaders or some “new” element that has arrived along with sprawl and pollution, but young white kids: teens to young adults living in what I would consider to be one of the worst places for a young person to begin a life in terms of economic opportunity and urban excitement.  I’m urging my children to get out and stay out until they find some opportunity elsewhere, and then they can return as vacationers.  I came here full-time in 1991 in my early thirties as a technology enabled telecommuter and even went so far as to write a  big utopian story for Forbes on how tech was going to transform the hinterland into a paradise of ISDN-enabled day traders, software programmers, and affluent bohemian “knowledge workers” who would phone it in via telepresence technology. Ha. As one old timer told me early on at the village post office, “You can’t be a fireman unless you live near the fire.” The story of my career has been: “Raise the family on the Cape, earn the living elsewhere.”

The Cape, following the torrid building boom of the 70s through the 90s, has never generated much of a year-round economy. A few tech companies here and there, nothing major and certainly no “Silicon Sandbar” as was hoped twenty years ago. There’s no manufacturing to speak of, and of course the resort/vacationer economy that has been the mainstay of the region for the last sixty years dies every winter, when even the local restaurant owners close their doors and head south to escape the snowless tedium.

The Cape has a large elderly population, mostly middle-income retirees drawn here by the prospect of light snow and the Patti Page mythical idyll of “Olde Cape Cod.”  They appear to be especially victimized by the spate of home invasions as the addicts rifle through their medicine cabinets in the middle of the night.

On the good side, at least we don’t have a meth epidemic, though I should watch my words and knock on wood.

Meanwhile the doors are locked and something has been lost that isn’t coming back ever again.

The definition of melancholy came to me last night in the top row of the home side bleachers at Cotuit’s Elizabeth Lowell baseball park: it’s watching 30 college freshmen and sophmores dressed in white and cranberry pin-stripes hug each other goodbye at the end of their first summer swinging a wooden bat in the Cape Cod Baseball League.

The last game started at 4:30, a half-hour earlier than usual due to Cotuit’s wonderful lack of lights and inability to play ball deep into the gloaming. I arrived on time, scorebook in hand, and staked out the top row for myself and my two kids while they bought t-shirts and caps from the Kettleer’s Store with my credit card. For some reason I thought Cotuit had a shot at making the playoffs, but alas, that was not the case. The team that won the championship in 2010 was finishing the western division of the CCBL in fat last and yesterday’s game was the swan song, the final act, curtains on an all-too-brief season that began in early June, seemed to never end in July and suddenly, like the day after Christmas, was over and done.

The worst part for me is February, when bored out of my mind and numbed by the black and white colorless movie that is Cape Cod in winter, I eventually turn my car into the parking lot and and idle in front of the home plate gate, staring through the chainlink backstop at the blue tarp protecting the pitcher’s mound and the stand of pines arced behind the outfield fence.

“Somehow the summer seemed to slip by faster this time,” wrote A. Barlett Giamatti in his famous sad ode to the game. It’s been accelerating for years it seems.  Where summer used to end in a procession of station wagons with bikes strapped to the roof on the afternoon of Labor Day, sad faces pressed to the windows in the line of traffic waiting to cross the Sagamore Bridge, it now peters out in mid-August, as the schools open ever earlier, pre-season soccer eats into sailing, and hurricane season lurks off the coast of Africa waiting, making me fret: “Will this be the year of the big one?”

Cotuit went out with a win over Brewster. A crisp 3-0 win where all went well, no major dramatics, some heroic catches and the usual eccentricities of Cape baseball. I ate a hot dog and popcorn. My children were next to me, their friends next to them. A friend I hadn’t seen since 1974 introduced herself and her children and I think we both felt older because of it. Ivan Partridge, the ageless booster of the Kettleers, who stands steadfastly at the chainlink fence and yells “Have a Hit!” at every Cotuit batter, stood before us in the stands and exhorted us to make some noise and “let the boys know how much you appreciated them this summer.” And so we cheered, dropped our bills into the plastic kettles passed out by the children, bought our 50/50 raffle tickets from the players working the stands, and scurried to the snackbar when the announcer declared it was two-for-one time as the concession owner tried to empty the shelves before lowering the shutters and locking up for the next nine months.

I started to regret every missed game, those lost chances to sit in the stands for three free hours and watch the timeless game, a little maudlin that this team would vanish forever, to be replaced by a new one next year, in the same uniforms but all different young men. Some would become stars in the big leagues. This year’s designated hitter, Victor Roache, was a pleasure to watch every time he came to the plate, and yesterday he received the top prospect award from the major league scouts who prowl the games looking for talent. So one never knows looking at the rosters which few will go on to become the next Chase Utley, Buster Posey, Jacoby Ellsbury, Nomar Garciaparra — but some will, and knowing that makes the process of getting acquainted with every year’s new team so worthwhile, so that someday you’ll be able to say: “I remember when he played for Harwich in 2008 …..”

Regret is a silly thing, so I stood and applauded while the boys hugged each other out in the middle of the diamond, stuck my pencil behind my ear, collected my trash, and headed for home.

“I need to think something lasts forever, and it might as well be that state of being that is a game; it might as well be that, in a green field, in the sun.” A. Bartlett Giamatti, former commissioner of Major League Baseball and president of Yale, The Green Fields of the Mind, from A Great and Glorious Game: Baseball Writings of A. Bartlett Giamatti

My step-sister’s husband (step-brother-in-law?) was out fishing in Nantucket Sound near the test tower for the wind farm. He came across the carcass of the whale that the Coast Guard has been warning mariners about the past week or two.

He gave me permission to post these pictures. He said the smell was terrific and alleged there have been reports that some great white sharks have been snacking on it. After reading “In the Slick of the Cricket” — the story of Montauk’s Frank Mundus, one of the models for Quint, I can believe it.

An interesting project, Hear Cape Cod, is recording sound samples at select locations around the peninsula to create a record of what life on Cape Cod sounds like in 2011.

The integration with Google Maps is very cool. Click on a waypoint and the recording will launch. Everything from gulls squabbling at the Pamet River to the wind turbine at the Falmouth wastewater treatment plant.

The Starter Castle Movement that has raped the Cape’s coastline since the late 1980s shows no sign of abating.  The ongoing tear-down and replacement of the original inventory of old shingled summer mansions built at the turn of the 19th century with wedding caked, turreted displays of Pella windows and Chem-Lawned swards of grass is enough to make me launch into a jeremiad of nostalgia. The view has changed, at least for we peons who sail by and have to peer up at the messes, but for the wealthy waterfront homeowner, the view out the window towards Nantucket Sound remains as pristine as ever. No coincidence that this upper echelon of the public led the hue and cry against the construction of a wind farm three miles offshore: the thought of anything sullying their vistas broke out the checkbooks in a flurry of environmental hand wringing.

Another thing that drives me nuts is the new obsession with outdoor lighting and the resulting light pollution. Some of these quaint $20 million haciendas are lit up like ocean liners at night, their balustrades and eaves covered with big honking spot lights to either deter pain-killer crazed burglars or show off the nitrogen-leeching Kentucky Blue Grass growing under the sprinklers. For someone on the opposite shore, the glare is beyond annoying and inspires fantasies of a Seal Team 6 sniper with a scope the size of a wine bottle.

When I was a cub reporter for the Cape Cod Times in the summer of 1980, one of my beats was the waterfront.  At a hearing of the department of natural resources on the legality of clamming with hydraulic pumps, an interesting clash of the two poles of Cape Cod society occurred in town hall. On one side of the room were three dozen commercial quahoggers: eternally tanned, biceps the size of footballs from wrestling with a bullrake all day,  hands stained black from the primordial mud at the bottom of the bays, mostly moustachioed and bearded like a biker gang. On the other side was a half dozen waterfront matrons dressed in Lily Pulitzer pink and green. They hated the sight and sound of the quahoggers working the shallows in front of their manses and wanted it stopped. A local real estate agent kicked things off by reminding the town fathers that these poor ladies paid a disproportionate amount of taxes, only resided in the town three or four months out of the year, and at the very least deserved some peace and quiet. Then, one brave matron took to the microphone and in describing how close the clammers came to her rose garden said, “They’re out there, making all this noise, about a nine-iron shot away.”

I’m convinced the  clammers won the right to keep clamming thanks to the golf reference.

Thirty years later and the current hypocrisy of the burghers of Popponesset Island has to remarked upon. Popponesset is in Mashpee — probably one of the most weirdly incorporated and developed towns in the State thanks to its historical status as the “reservation” of the Wampanoag Indian tribe. Property ownership and development in Mashpee has always had some controversy, with land titles clouded, ancient burial grounds unearthed as nitrogen-spewing golf courses are bulldozed,  and the tribe constantly rattling the legal threat of reclaiming its ancestral lands.

A commercial clammer — the term now is probably “aquaculturist” — sought permission from the Town of Mashpee to maintain a shellfish grant off the shores of Popponesset Island, a place my alma mater Forbes Magazine allegedly deemed one of the most affluent places in America thanks to an average household income of $250,000. He was given permission but the waterfront property owners swung into action, claiming, first and foremost, that the clamming operation would interfere with their view. Let’s keep in mind the waters are public property and aquaculture is a big business in most Cape towns, let alone the fact that clams are a sign of a healthy harbor.

This is extremely ironic since their view is of Cotuit, where, thanks to the philanthropic efforts of one extraordinary old summer family and the Barnstable Land Trust, most of the southern shores of the town is pristine, undeveloped saltmarsh and pine forests.  If you stand in Cotuit on those undeveloped lands — Ryefield Point or Crocker Neck — and look southwest across Popponesett Bay to the proposed site of the aquaculture grant (which is submerged and would be marked by a few buoys) you see Starter Castle after Starter Castle, some ablaze at night in a riot of floodlights, packed together, jetskis tied to the docks. Doing their best to poison the shore.

The Cape Cod Times writes this morning:

“The view from any of the homes on Popponesset Island is nothing less than postcard-perfect.

The picturesque island enclave boasts beautifully constructed homes and even more stunning natural views of the surrounding scenery.

Home prices stretch into the millions, and in January the area was named one of the nation’s most affluent neighborhoods by Forbes magazine.

Reaching the island requires a boat, or a drive over a one-lane bridge.

It’s this off-the-beaten-path charm that attracted its affluent residents — and that has pitted a group of them against the Mashpee Board of Selectmen for approving a shellfish grant homeowners believe will destroy it.

“This impairs their private property rights in a number of respects,” said attorney Brian Wall of Sandwich, who represents a group of 18 residents. “It’s basically going to be a commercial operation 30 feet away from a residential property.”"

The head-shaking news that the Cotuit property of Frank and Jamie McCourt, (the battling divorcing destroyers of the Los Angeles Dodgers) is on the market for $50 million and knowing fate and circumstance, will probably be carved up into a nest of new McMansions by some developer/real-estate-agent-to-the-stars; the tear-down of Cotuit’s historic Hotel Pines; and the ongoing trashing of the harbors by human waste … Thirty years ago the preservationists of the Cape were warning the peninsula was on the road towards becoming the next Long Island. I fear we’ve arrived.

I’ve blogged in the past about maritime Android apps I find useful on my HTC EVO. I can definitely see a future where a marine-version of an Android Honeycomb tablet is fixed to the binnacle of my sloop and offers me a multi-function nav device for GPS enabled chart plotting and a wealth of navigation data from tide tables to an anchor-drag alert. A new app will definitely be on that device.

Vernon Grabel, who founded Cape.com (my ISP) and is a personal baseball/sailing friend, has released a free app into the Android Marketplace called Currents. The premise is drop-dead simple but very convenient as it acknowledges that for most sailors the most important tidal information is not necessarily the time of high and low tide at a specific point, but the velocity and direction of the current caused by the ebb and flood of the tide.  A boat’s track from point A to point B is affected by “set” — the lateral movement of the hull due to leeward drift (which is why sailboats have keels or centerboards) and general current direction. which can accelerate speed if coming from astern, slow down if coming head on, or push the boat downwind or upwind.  Currents in constricted areas, such as canals, guts, and harbor entrances, can mean the difference between successfully transiting an area or meeting with disaster.

For more than a century, Cape Cod mariners have relied on the familiar yellow covered annual edition of the Eldridge Tide and Pilot Book to determine the current’s velocity and direction for any given point and time. The process of calculating current based on the time of the tide in the major observation points listed by Eldridge and then off-setting that time for the specific spot being transited (e.g. if one is entering Cotuit Bay, one needs to find the time of the tide in Boston and add one hour and seven seconds for high tide, and subtract 45 minutes for low) … it’s time consuming, a serious pain in the ass under sail, and a distraction as one pops below for the book, brings it up to the cockpit, and starts flipping pages back and forth.

Grabel nails the problem with Currents for not only New England but most of the coastal United States. By using the public data published by the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration  (NOAA), mashing into Google Maps, and overlaying arrows of varying thickness and length and direction, Currents gives a perfect, zoomable, and accurate current and tide reading for the hundreds of coastal stations tracked by NOAA.

So, this may be the year I save $14,00 on yet another copy of Eldridge and rely on my phone for yet another essential piece of navigational information.  Currents is listed in the Google Marketplace under “currents” or “yoyana” or you can scan this:

Truck Day is a week away and even though the snow is falling in Cotuit the 2010 Cape Cod Baseball League champions Cotuit Kettleers have posted their 2011 roster-in-progress. To continue the tradition started last year, here’s the line-up with some analysis gleaned from a little Google/BaseballAmerica/college roster analysis.

First, the roster itself and the caveat that this list will have NO bearing whatsoever on the team that actually takes the field on Friday June 6 at Cotuit’s Elizabeth Lowell Park.  The College World Series, Team USA, and other post-season enticements will see some of these players opt out of a stint in Cotuit next summer.

Returners: Returning from last summer’s championship team are sophmores:  Deven Marrero, the shortstop from Arizona State; Michael Faulkner, the outfielder from Arkansas State; Michael Yastrzemski, the outfielder from Vanderbilt; and Brady Rodgers, the right hander also from Arizona.

The three position players were crowd favorites last summer, with Marrero finishing the season incredibly strong with a hitting streak (.328 avg) that extended into the championship series against Wareham, Falmouth, and finally Yarmouth Dennis. A 2009 17 round draft pick by the Cinncinati Reds, it remains to be seen if Marrero will reappear this coming summer.  The same holds true for Faulkner and Yastrzemski — the latter a crowd favorite because of his illustrious grandfather, but who emerged in his own right over the course of the summer to become one of the best outfielders on the team, and a key hit producer with several spectacular long balls, including a championship home run in the final game of the season.  Faulkner, who hit .254 over the summer, is a strong outfielder who showed huge improvement over the summer as he settled into the wooden bat experience.

BradyRodgers, the right-hander pitcher — had a strong start in the championships despite an injury, and threw a great 2.54 ERA over the season — a 1.17 in the finals.

Newcomer Position Players:

Torsten Boss: 2B Michigan – cited in BaseballAmerica’s 2009 Michigan state roundup as a name to watch.

Cory Spangenberg: 2B Indian River State – 2010 Baseball America Freshman All-American team (2nd team with fellow freshman Deven Marrero).  hit .370 at VMI and was voted Big South Conference Freshman of the Year

Chris O’Dowd: catcher Dartmouth – Ivy League co-rookie of the year, hit .384, third best average in the Ivies. Was a 40th-round pick of the Oakland Athletics in the MLB First-Year Player Draft.

Stefan Sabol: catcher Oregon – highly touted freshman prospect – you can see the MLB scouting video here. Was thinking of signing with the Braves and is viewed as one to watch. Some doubts about his chances behind the plate, perhaps he’ll end up in the outfield.

Patrick Biondi: OF – Michigan. Teammate of Boss, Louisville Slugger Freshman All-American Team (among others). Wolverine coach said of Biondi: “…he’s a really, really good center fielder—he’s special.” Hit .313 as a frosh.

Logan Vick: OF/INF Baylor – made Baseball America’s first team in its 2010 College Freshman All-America team, putting him in very select company indeed. Hit .329 and set a record for most walks (among others) in his freshmanyear.

Jacob Morris:  OF Arkansas – switchhitter, made Baseball America’s list of top High School prospects in 2008.  BBA says “Jacob Morris (Coppell (Texas) HS) is physical specimen with a combination of speed, strength and agility. Also a standout high school football player, Morris took up switch-hitting just over a year ago.” Drafted by the Nationals in 2009 in the 35th round.

Newcomer Pitchers:

Michael Clevinger: RHP Citadel – Southern Conference All-Freshman Team after going 5-3 with an ERA of 5.15 in 92.2 innings pitched.

Michael Cunningham: RHP U Arizona — no one on the roster, but there is a Nick Cunningham, RHP. Will keep looking.

Ryon Healy: RHP 1B Oregon – teammate of Sabol, played in the California Collegiate league last summer and was clocked at 95 mph a few times.  BBA touted him as one of the best two-way player sin that league. Hit .360/.432/.522 with a league-best 17 doubles.

Keenan Kish: RHP Florida – BBA wrote about him as a high school senior : “Kish presently throws his fastball in the upper 80s to low 90s and also mixes in a changeup and a curveball. He has an athletic frame with projection remaining and smooth mechanics that help him to throw a lot of strikes. But he’s also a good third baseman that hits from the left side and plays the game hard.”

Randy LaBlanc: RHP Tulane – Aaron Fitt at BBA scouted him and wrote: “Tulane might have found itself a true ace in 6-foot-5 righthander Randy LeBlanc (92), an unsigned 16th-round pick who turned down second-round money from the Marlins, according to Tulane’s coaches. “I love him—I think he has a chance to be a Friday night starter pretty quickly,” one scout said. “He’s tall, projectable, and has a really quick arm. The kid’s got a chance to pitch at 92-95, 96 mph in the next couple of years—a chance to sit there. He has a good breaking ball and a pretty good changeup, and he competes his butt off.”

Dillon Overton: LHP Oklahoma – one of two southpaw hurlers for the Kettleers this coming summer.  Pitched his high school to a state championship. According to his profile on the Sooner website: “Threw 97 innings and recorded a 15-2 record with 164 strikeouts and less than 20 walks as a senior, when his team became State Champions”

Kevin Ziomek: LHP Vanderbilt – From Amherst Mass, the Bay Stater was drafted last summer by the Diamondbacks in the 13th round.

In closing ….

Coach Mike Roberts and the Cotuit Athletic Association have put together a fine squad, drawing as usual from Arizona, Arkansas and Vanderbilt where they have found some great talent in recent years. I’ll keep an eye on the Kettleer website for any roster changes as the spring goes by, but with five months to first pitch, al lot can happen between now and then.

Some ancestor had a thing for trees that drop crap on the ground. At one corner is a black cherry about 100 feet tall, pruned and ravaged by too many hurricanes but still hanging in there enough to drop a crop of inedible black gooey cherry-like things on the ground every fall. In the other corner is a chestnut tree — pretty in the spring when it blossoms into big white splendor that reminds me of Paris — but evil in the fall when it drops spiked nut casings on the sidewalk where I walk barefoot with my scull on the way to the water for a morning row.

In the back corner is a honey locust — a tree that by all rights should be dead given its gaunt and splintered appearance, but which throws off a prodigious number of seed pods that for lack of a more delicate simile look like big brown curly tree turds.

These things have been a fact of life around the old homestead my entire life — laying on the ground, feeding an occasional squirrel, rolling like maracas across the yard during a strong blow, but useless somehow, stiff, leatherlike, foot-long curlicues of tree feces with no discernible function other than to insure the spawning of more honey locusts.

I can think of no more unattractive tree for a family back yard than a honey locust. My friend Dan has one in his yard down the street and has hung a tire swing from it. Nice except for the satanic spikes that bristle from the trunk, waiting for some nine-year old kid to swing in and impale himself like a gore scene from Omen 666.

The turds are tenacious, and hang onto the branches long past the usual leaf-fall in October and November. They hang there still, rattling in the winter winds, cascading down at the rate of one a second during wet snow storms, littering the landscape as if a pack of neighborhood dogs convened and decided to use my lawn for a mass defecation ritual.

Yesterday I drafted (against his will, but bribed with a cheeseburger club sandwich) Junior into helping me rake up yet another cubic ton of tree poop. Of course it snowed last night and another bumper crop has fallen, but it was semi-nice to do yardwork in January and find an excuse to escape the stifling indoors.

A long hike in Wellfleet on a frigid late fall day on the verge of the winter solstice yielded some surprises, mostly deceased.

Great  Island is a  long series of dunes, marshes, scrub pine forests and ocean vistas that is probably best explored in the cold because of its long distances relative to most other Cape Cod hikes. The combination of bayside, woodland, and ocean beaches makes it one of the most varied hikes I’ve done on the Cape, with three varying distances depending on one’s destination. My daughter and I did the middle distance segment — not making the full trek out to Jeremy Point because of the short afternoon and waning sunlight.

The hike is all within the National Seashore and begins in a parking lot near the end of Chequessett Neck Road at a three way intersection with Griffins Island Road. Trail maps are available at the trail head near the port-a-potties. The trail is well marked in the early going, down a set of steps to the beach inside of the Gut, or head of Wellfleet harbor. Across the hard packed sand to the the southwest is a wide trail that passes by the controversial Blasch House — appropriately labeled the “Abominable House” by one architecture critic. This project caused a furor in Wellfleet as the town tried to stop the construction of the starter castle on such a prominent view. Others hailed it as a triumph of property owner rights.

As the trail curved east towards the old whaler’s taven we noticed a lot of dead eiders, sea ducks that had expired for some mysterious reason in the wrack above the high water line. I guessed some form of red tide did them in, but a quick bit of research revealed they had died from a parasite called a “thorny-headed worm” which they pick up when their normal diet of mussels isn’t sufficient and they turn to crabs and shoreside berries. (update: it appears that source is unreliable and the mystery of the eider die-off continues) I was surprised to find three dead porpoises —  big mummified corpses that looked very eerie with their exposed rib cages and cadaverous grins.

Less morbidly, we did discover a huge expanse of wild oysters sitting on the bottom exposed by the low tide. All instincts to scavenge like paleolithic aborigines kicked in, but were thwarted by thoughts of getting busted by both the Wellfleet clam cops and the federal rangers for a combined felony-rap of clamming without a clue.

Leaving the beach we worked through the woods to the site of the tavern that served the coastal whalers in the 17th and 18th centuries. Aside from a cellar hole in the woods, there was little to see, so we kept ducking under pine cones and branches until the trail widened and this memorial to the last private owner of the island — Priscilla Alden Bartlett — emerged.

We emerged from the woods over another salt marsh strewn with dead elders, walked inside the dune along Cape Cod Bay until we found an acceptable point of passage that wasn’t marked with skull and crossbone warnings against erosion and crossed over to the bay side beach. The arctic wind coming down from the northwest was exhilarating and did a number on our sinuses, but the view of Provincetown to the north, and the blue hill of Plymouth to the west reminded me that early December was when the Mayflower first sailed into these waters and the men of the party cruised the coast in their shallop for their first encounter with the Nauset indians.

The beach walk was easy going and I kept an eye open for cold-stunned turtles, but found none. We crossed back into the gut-side of the trail before the Abominable House and made it back to the parking lot in under two hours. Great Island is definitely my new favorite Cape Cod trek. Bring water and provisions as this is a true hike and not a brief stroll.

A few posts back I composed a maritime reading list and included a book by a relatively unknown author/adventurer/illustrator, Rockwell Kent, who wrote two great books about adventure cruising in the antipodes — N by E which recounted his cruises around the shores of Greenland and eventual shipwreck there and Voyaging Southwards from the Strait of Magellan. Both are fairly hard to find outside of a library, but are great not only for their writing but Kent’s distinctive illustrations, the art he is best known for, a strong muscular style embodied in his famous illustrations for the 1930 Lakeside Press edition of Moby Dick, the first edition of the American classic since its rediscovery in the 1920s by the critic Carl Van Doren.

This past weekend, the second in December, I was handed a pair of tickets to Verdi’s interminable opera, Don Carlo, and its big screen telecast at the Cape Cod Cinema in Dennis. I went with my wife, not so much for the opera which was fine and amazingly performed, but the cinema itself, an amazing specimen  built in the 1930s at the apogee of the Cape’s bohemian art movement by Raymond Moore.

Designed to resemble a dairy barn, with a Greek classical facade that mimics a Congregational church in nearby Centerville, the cinema is famous for its mural, designed by Kent, which was hailed as one of the largest in the world, bigger than Tintoreto’s Paradise in the Doge’s Palace in Venice. It is one of three Kent murals that remain, but curiously was not painted by the artist who refused to enter the Commonwealth of Massachusetts because of the state’s role in the infamous Sacco and Vanzetti case, a cause celebre that rallied the liberal movement of the time.

The Berkshire Review of the Arts has a great gallery of photographs of the mural, but nothing comes close to capturing the amazing dichotomy between the austere white clapboard exterior of the building and the amazing art deco experience within the theater itself. The seating is comprised on hundreds of fine wooden armchairs designed by Paul Frankl, each with a white seat cover, and the sound system (from the front row where my wife and I were stuck thanks to a late arrival) more than sufficient.

Kent may not have painted the mural directly, but he did show up for the unveiling at the grand opening of the Cinema, breaking his self-imposed exile from Massachusetts. He passed away in 1971.

The opera? I snuck out during the first intermission. I swear my wife and I were the youngest people in the place by at least 30 years and the know-it-all sitting behind us made the experience excruciating. Great way to spend a winter’s late afternoon on the normally barren Cape.

While walking the outer beach on Cotuit’s Sampson Island on Sunday I came across the carcass of a leatherback sea turtle. It had come ashore at some point in the last week since my wife and I walked that same stretch of sand last weekend.

Leatherback’s are the largest sea turtles (fourth largest of all reptiles after crocodiles) and this one was huge — the shell was at least six feet long — and according to the literature they can weigh over 1,500 pounds. The carapace, or shell, had been split in half, either because of a propeller strike or just decomposition. My guess is it died in the water and drifted ashore where it came to rest above the high water line. It looked, from a distance, like a dinghy sitting bottom up on the sand.

Leatherbacks can tolerate cold water and range across most of the world’s oceans — so I doubt this one was stunned by the rapid drop in water temperatures over the last two weeks. Right now the water is about 54 degrees, two weeks ago it was in the low 60s. They are endangered, so it is a shame to see such a magnificent animal lying dead and beached.  They are reported to live as long as 150 years. That would mean this dead specimen could have been born as long ago as the beginning of the Civil War.

I’ve seen turtles in the water off of Craigville Beach in August, but never have come across any on the beach before. The stranding network swings into action this time of year to help the Kemp’s Ridley turtles that get cold shocked and stunned.

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.

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.