Churbuck.com

It’s been while since I’ve had cause to commit a clamming post. This recent CapeCast tells the tale of one unfortunate Provincetown clammer who stepped into some sucky mud and lost his boots. I did the same thing years ago on Sandy Neck while cruising around for steamers and years ago my youngest, while wearing waders, got seriously stuck in the muck inside of Seapuit River and needed to be pulled out of the waders to be released from the suction.

Cape Cod muck is horrible stuff, especially the black goo up inside of the bays that smells like the clams that live in it. This is Jurassic muck, black as night and has the consistency of entrails.

The video is notable for the guest star appearance of Provincetown’s shellfish officer, Tony Jackett.

The tradition of a New Year’s Day swim has grown in popularity year after year until it has become as common a calendar celebration as the Boston Marathon or Opening Day at Fenway. Thirty years ago the act of hurling oneself into the Atlantic Ocean from a New England beach on New Year’s was restricted to a bunch of organized lunatics in South Boston: the famous L Street Brownies who started their New Year’s swim in 1904, and as far as I know, a bunch of rowdy miscreants  that included myself and were affiliated with the Cotuit Mosquito Yacht Club.

New Year’s swims are classic photo opportunities for the local newspaper,  and I would guess there were probably 12 swims around Cape Cod today, all competing for front page placement tomorrow in the Cape Cod Times. You know your swim has made it when the television cameras show up, but in days gone past the Cotuit swim took place at night, ostensibly at the stroke of midnight (but usually around 3 am when the party started to stagger and someone got motivated to lead the way), with no one around to spectate and marvel at the insanity but those brave enough to do it.

My first Cotuit swim was in the 1970s at Oregon Beach at the very end of Main Street. Oregon is a very shallow beach — about a quarter mile of foot-deep water before it drops off to any respectable depth. The rules of the swim were simple. First: your swim didn’t count unless your hair was completely wet, so wading in up to the knees and splashing a little was a definite failure. Second, if you were over 30 the swim was optional. And third, he who made it back to the host’s house first, was the only person to get a hot water shower.

The most memorable swim for me happened in 1978 (the winter of the infamous Blizzard of ’78). There was a foot of snow on the ground and the dirt road to the beach was filled with frozen potholes and ruts of frozen slush. The edge of the water was frozen and cakes of frozen saltwater paved the beach down to the water. Oh, and it was dead low tide so it would be a challenge finding enough water to splash in let alone actually swim in.  There were maybe a dozen or two of us planning on swimming/wallowing that year, and the fact that midnight came and went with no move at the raging party to get the swim over with was an indication of how much we dreaded heading outside to meet the 15 degree night. These were not leisurely swims that involved undressing on the sand and carrying towels. We nuded up at the party, ran barefoot down the road, and returned naked.  Nothing about it was smart or good.

Around 3 am my step brother and a good friend, Phil, decided it was time to swim and use the cold water to sober up and thereby breathe a second wind into the party. So we stripped — men and women alike — and off we went down the road to la plage.

My bare feet immediately turned into frozen, totally numb pegs, so I was slow arriving at the beach. Most of the crew was in the water, shrieking and flailing in about six inches of water, rolling around to get their hair wet before ricocheting out and past me on their way to the single shower back at the house. So much for the hot shower. I didn’t wait and consider the consequences, I just went into the water, crunched through some skim ice and starting forging out into the darkness, looking for enough water to flop down in and finish what was quickly becoming the worst thing I had ever done to myself.

I dropped. Hit the bottom. Rolled around. Screamed and stood up. The world went blurry. Had my head shrunk from the shock of the cold water and given me brain damage? Was I that drunk on the Green Death (Haffenreffer Ale) and DeKuypers Peppermint Schnapps?

I had gone swimming with my glasses and they were gone.

I was truly completely Screwed with a capital S. I stood up and looked at the smeary flashes of the lonely navigation buoys out in Nantucket Sound and the orange loom of the lights in Hyannis to the east.  I had to return to college the next day, had no extra glasses, and these being the archaic 1970s, there were no Lenscrafters same-day-glasses places to get a replacement pair.  I couldn’t drive without them. So my initial instinct to just say f%$k it and rejoin the party wasn’t going to work. I was going to stay in the water and find them, my lost pair of gold wire framed John Lennon wanna-be spectacles.

I started clamming around with my toes, but couldn’t feel anything. They were too numb. My hair froze. I leaned over, dropped to my knees and started crawling around in a foot of water feeling around with hands. Clump of sea weed.  Oyster shell. Rock. There was no one else in the water with me by this point and I started to think about the hypothermia tables but gave up because I had no idea what the water temperature was.  Ten minutes? 30?

Success, improbable, but needle-in-the-hay stack success.  I ran from the water and started down the dirt/slush road back to the house, hit a frozen pothole and flew into the air, breaking the ice with my left buttock and covering myself with muddy water. That same ice gave me a nice cut on the butt and the mud, well, it was not taken for mud when I returned to the party one minute later, crazed and bloody, naked and smeared with brown goo. The elder non-swimming contingent was impressed.

The scene in the bathroom was total chaos with six people wedged into the shower stall and the rest shouting at them to hurry up and let them in. I was last in line but at least I could see.

There were many other swims. None of them were exactly pleasant, but all of them were memorable. As far as tribal rites for my circle of friends, the New Year’s Eve midnight(ish) swim was a big one. Wherever I am on New Year’s Eve, I think of my friends back in Cotuit screaming and splashing out of the water in the darkness.

After a decade-long break from the swim (rule 2, optional for anyone over 30), I decided to swim today at noon, in balmy 50 degree sunshine, participating in a mass swim organized to benefit the Mashpee Food Pantry. Essentially I donated $20 to dunk myself. We were blessed by the village minister and a photographer from the Cape Cod Times was there to record the hilarity. I wore an actual bathing suit, had a towel, and was completely sober. While my son and a hundred people watched I threw myself off the deep side of Loop Beach in a nice shallow dive,  screamed underwater, and emerged babbling to thrash my way back to shore where the towel was handed to me and I could say in all honesty: “That wasn’t so bad.”

Phil on the left, me on the right.

The Official Cotuit New Year's Swim

It was not an extraordinary swim to tell the grandchildren about, but it definitely was a brisk way to mark the beginning of 2012 and I’m glad I did it and I probably will do it next year.

Thanks to Marta, I have my new favorite hero.

Alcohol was involved? No way!

Great profile of Cotuit’s oldest clam company. I love the final paragraph which sums up why we need to encourage more aquaculture and be less concerned with McMansion waterfront rights.

“And the oysters are actually good for the ecosystem, each filtering as many as 50 gallons of water a day and removing nitrogen. The bivalves’ combined effect, says Gargiulo, is like removing 100 houses with septic systems from the waterfront.”

via Splendid Through the Centuries – Cape Cod Life Online.

If you want an idea of what coastal life will be like in 2080, after seventy more years of global warming and the melting of the polar ice caps, then go down to the beach today and tomorrow around noon (in Cotuit) when the tide is high and exhibiting the rare, but annual phenomenon known in the southern hemisphere as a “King Tide.”

King tides are high tides that occur when the moon, sun, and earth line up in a straight shot called “perigee” and “perihelion.” The earth experiences two such King tides per year, always during either perigee or perihelion and during a forthnightly spring tide which occurs on a full or a new moon.

The moon is new now, and we should see high tides at levels, according to the scientists, that will be in line with forecasts for overall, normal high tides in 2080. The New York Times today quotes Kate Boicourt, an ecologist with the New York-New Jersey Harbor Estuary Program: ““What we’re seeing Wednesday and Thursday is probably what we normally will be seeing by 2080.”

I have personally noticed, and others have commented, that the Cotuit shoreline can get especially innudated on a spring tide, making beach walks impossible along popular stretches of sand such as Ropes Beach and Codman’s Point. In fact, on a moon or spring tide I have to remember not to take the dog on a stroll during my lunch hour as high tide in Cotuit during a full or new moon always coincides with noon and midnight.

Low tides are also extreme during King Tides, so expect to see some extraordinary exposure of sandbars and mud banks — making shoreside clamming a little more interesting as hither before depths become accessible making the older chowder-sized quahogs vulnerable to raking.

Tidal science is interesting stuff — I got a taste of it in the mid-1990s when a partner and I tried to get a tide table capability on our saltwater fly fishing site, Reel-Time. We gave up, but there is a good example of such a site at Capetides.com.

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.

The more I cook the more I realize I have never gone wrong with Marcella Hazan‘s cookbooks, especially my well worn and falling apart copy of  Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking. On Saturday night I found myself with a lot of quahogs and about four dozen beautiful littlenecks I dug with my son on the falling tide. Littlenecks generally get opened and eaten raw on the half-shell, but I wanted a white clam sauce and some pasta so I turned to Marcella’s bible of Italian and made her version of the classic spaghettini con vongole.

The clams came from a very special spot that I won’t disclose because it’s my go-to spot for littlenecks. Quahogs are graded by size. and the most delicate and tasty are the small ones, about the size of a silver dollar, called littlenecks. A step bigger, the right size for clams casino, are cherrystones, and above them come a sort of neither here nor there middle ground that really doesn’t have a name — save perhaps “clams” — and at the high end, for stuffed quahogs or making chowder are the eponymous “chowder” clams about as big as a big man’s fist.

The smallest clams have to  be run through a steel gauge to make sure they are legal. The basket on my Ribb rake is also allegedly spaced correctly to let juveniles drop through, but I use the gauge just to be sure. Any babies get tossed into deeper water where the gulls can’t forage them and they can grow up to become chowders.

The spot is good because it is a small river — a stream really — that has a lot of water velocity with the rising and falling tide and that means the clams are fresher than the ones in stagnant water. They live in sand, not black mud, and are easy to clean and usually deliver a chewing experience without sand or grit. I also have a respect for funky clams, the kinds that give you 36 hours on the toilet or a permanent case of hepatitis. Let’s just say I don’t eat August littlenecks.

We took all we needed in 10 minutes, coming up a few times with rakes filled with six, seven littlenecks. These are not littlenecks in the picture below, but cherrystones.

We wore waders because it is April after all and waders made a day on the water a lot more enjoyable — no filling of boots, no shivering in the windchill of the speeding motorboat, the air temperature on the water in the early spring feels at least ten degrees colder than it does on land, in the yard, out of the wind. We took our littlenecks, measured them, then set off for another spot to look for bigger clams for an Easter Clams Casino and some chowder base to freeze up for the summer when there is company.

The bigger clams are a little harder to harvest, but in 15 minutes we had our limit, coming up with multiple clams on every pull of the rakes.

We packed it in, climbed back onto the boat and went for a brisk spin around Grand Island to see if Dow Clark the mechanic had success in clearing the clogged carburetor jets on the old Honda. We flew through West Bay, under the drawbridge, and past the boatyard, still in hibernation under a shroud of shrink wrap.

So the recipe? Steam the clams on high heat until the shells pop, then pluck them out and shuck them into a bowl, saving the clam juice. Saute in 6 tbsp. of olive oil about six big garlic cloves sliced very thin and a big shallot. Throw in two diced plum tomatoes, a cup of dry white wine,  two tbsps of red pepper flakes, three tbsps. of chopped parsley and reduce it down. Turn that off, boil a big pot of salted water, cook a box of thin spaghetti until it is almost done — drain, throw in the saute pan with the tomatoes, garlic, oil, etc., toss over high heat until all the liquid is evaporated. Turn off the heat. Throw in the clams and their juice, a dozen torn up basil leaves and eat. One of the better uses of four dozen littlenecks I’ve ever tried. Tomorrow – clams Casino and chowder before the Easter feast.

Geno in the comments brings to my attention another Cape Cod-based maker of clam rakes — K.B. White. He even has a blog to spread the news.

http://shellfishing.blogspot.com/

K.B. White is based in Falmouth and sells online. I can’t testify to their quality as I am a Ribb Rake guy at present, but I will check out their stuff the next time my rake needs put me in the market.

I spent a rainy Saturday in a wobbly chair in a lecture hall at Cape Cod Community College because of a newspaper headline that said words to the effect of “Cape Coastal Cleanup Could Wind Up in Court.” My curiosity piqued by the organizing presence of the Conservation Law Foundation – a non-profit that literally sued the shit out of Boston Harbor – turning one of the nation’s worst polluted bodies of water into one of the cleanest – I did a little homework, crawled into the back row, and watched a panel muddle their way through a well-intentioned discourse on the disgusting state of Cape Cod’s estuaries, bays, harbors, and coves.

Dead harbors make me mad (after all this blog is devoted to clamming strategies).   Flush a toilet on Cape Cod and eventually, not today, maybe not tomorrow, but eventually, the result is going to make its way into the water. There, the waste over-nourishes the environment and promotes algae blooms, which in turn cloud the water, blocking sunlight from hitting the bottom. Lack of light and the suffocation effects of the algae kills off the  eel grass where the scallops live and breed. Eventually, over three or four decades, the result is a turbid soup of slime and inedible spider crabs.

The situation sucks and is getting suckier, despite a well intentioned panoply of studies, proposals, committees and coalitions.

Enter the Conservation Law Foundation, a non-profit environmental advocacy group that does one thing very well – it sues polluters and gets stuff cleaned up. When the CLF starts talking about litigation, politicians pay attention, and now the selectmen and town councilors of Cape Cod’s 15 towns are realizing that they may not have decades to figure out how to get the nitrogen out of their harbors.

Yes, sure, there are reasons to let the Cape figure this one out on its own. (There is a pool of zero interest cash available to fund these projects, cash that goes away if the borrowers are under court order) But the implications of a massive “big pipe” sewer system, one built regionally to pool the effluent from those 15 towns, is both expensive and staggering to behold. To say taxpayers aren’t going to like it is an understatement. Residents who live inland, away from the Gatsby mansions of the waterfront, are going to be hard pressed to accept any responsibility for nitrogen loading – yet, as we live on a so-called sole source aquifer – a giant sponge of sand, everyone, including me and my septic tank, are going to have to buck up at some point and pay to have our houses connected to a big pipe that will route our personal emissions inland to a big treatment plant. It’s the only way. We can haggle over in-ground nitrogen mitigation solutions, we can blame lawn fertilizer, birds, and dog poop …. But in the end it’s all septic and it’s got to go.

The CLF can accelerate that. It would start by convincing the EPA that the Cape is broken, in violation, and in need of a cleanup. Then the screaming starts. The municipal bonds, the massive infrastructure disruption, the trenches, the plants, the equipment ….

And, even if a massive sewer is put in place (and the voters of Chatham are moving closer to becoming one of the first towns to go down that road to save their beloved Pleasant Bay), it will be decades before the benefits are realized. In the department of unintended consequences, when you take away septic tanks and their discharge as the gating factor in land use, you can suddenly argue that a 12 story condo with 90 units is okay on that little patch of waterfront scrub pine. Can you say Florida or Long Island? The Association for the Preservation of Cape Cod is right – this is a big infrastructure issue and it’s cheaper to treat a cluster of customers than a lot of sprawled out ones.

I’m voting with my checkbook and joining the CLF. I want them to be the catalyst that binds the 15 towns of the Cape together in a truly regional compact and gets my harbor cleaned up.

This is the first time I have written about sewers since I covered the town of Salem. NH for the Lawrence Eagle-Tribune in 1982. I vowed then it would be the last. It isn’t. Sewers remain the most tedious topic on the planet, and yet, one might argue, one of the more important.

via Friendship – Clam rake tussle leads to charges – Government – VillageSoup.

Nothing like a clam rake fight to start off the spring clamming season.  Here in Barnstable the KlamKops pack guns. Now I know why.  Up in Friendship, Maine…..:

“Around 1 p.m. on March 7, Shellfish Warden Neil Pollis saw two men digging clams off Cushing Road. He approached the men to issue a shellfish violation for digging without a license.

The two men became agitated and a 17-year-old male circled Pollis with a clam rake, while Jason Olsen, 24, of Friendship threatened Pollis with a clam rake. Olsen and Pollis got into a struggle and during the altercation Pollis was hit with the clam rake, according to Knox County Sheriff’s Deputy John Palmer. Pollis, who said he received some puncture wounds on the arm, was not seriously injured and was not transported to the hospital.

Pollis also had issued Olsen a violation about a week prior to the incident, he said. In addition, he had warned him on shellfish violations on other occasions.”

Tip o’ the hat to Cousin Tom in Damariscotta for the clip.

via CapeCodToday Blog Chowder.

“In the nightmare, the waiter puts a plate of steaming blue mussels on the table. But when his customer digs in, she recoils in disgust. Then she raises her fork and glares: On it is a tiny, dead crab.

Shellfish farmer and dealer Bill Silkes is haunted by scenes like this, both real and imagined. For far too long, his nemesis has been a parasitic crustacean – so puny it’s nicknamed the pea crab – that stands in the way of a thriving mussel aquaculture industry in local waters.”

In my alimentary experience, mussels are the riskiest clam for food poisoning and a sure bet for a long night on the bathroom rug. I haven’t knowingly had a mussel since  1983 at the Union Oyster House in Boston.

So, the parasite thing doesn’t weird me out. I’ve eaten fiddler crabs in Tokyo — shells and all — and a pea crab sounds like a fishy baby aspirin. But a bowl of gaping, labiate orange and black mussels steamed open in a bath of bad chablis and shallots?

Andy Buckley — I discovered this one this morning on Cape Cod Today. His bio:

“Novelist, politician, photographer, game designer, master mariner, clamdigger and investigator, Andy Buckley is an eleventh-generation Cape Codder with a Renaissance flair. His Tours of Cape Cod (Schiffer Books) will be published in May 2008. Read Andy’s Monomoyick column in the Cape Cod Chronicle and visit Monomoyick on YouTube and on Panoramio. Andy can be emailed here.”

“When I bought my commercial shellfishing license towards the end of the May 31 deadline, the number of my license caught my attention. It was low. In years past, if I waited this late to fork over the $200 to the town, the number was close to six hundred. Instead this year, it was about half of that.

“It shouldn’t be too surprising. With the proliferation of aquaculture in neighboring towns and the region, as well as the discovery of a large bed of ocean quahogs in Nantucket Sound, the price of littlenecks clams has fallen from over 20 cents a piece to below ten. Often, four hours or less of work could bring close to a hundred dollars in the summer. Not a bad way to supplement income from other work, and pay the high cost of living in Chatham.

Buckley’s Blog.

He blogs at http://www.monomoyick.com

Seen in Osterville a few weeks ago.

Five pairs of waders. All of them leak.

Row out to motorboat with wet feet, wet socks, inside of expensive wet cracked boots at low tide, 8 am, blustery warm November morning, going to get some clams. Get onto motorboat which is awash in rainwater. Bilge pump has failed. Battery dead. Row by towing the 18-foot water laden dead motorboat with dinghy. A gazillion itty bitty strokes into the blustery wind later, get motorboat to ramp. Get crescent wrench, pop the terminal leads off the battery, load into the back of the car, take home to charge. Will haul boat later today on the high tide and leave it on the trailer.

And so ends the boating season of 2008. Leaky waders. Dead boat. No clams.

Foggy Saturday afternoon in November with temps in the 60s and a low tide means it was time to go clamming after seeing the clam police had opened up my favorite clam spot for fall harvesting. This is a spot you need a boat to get to, so it tends to be hardly hit by the recreational crew. As a somber aside, in my daily sculling this fall I have seen a massive increase in the number of clammers out looking for clams. It makes me wonder if some of this activity — both commercial and recreational — is driven by the economic cycle and the simple fact that people are looking for some income and some protein.

Anyway, I needed some quahogs for chowder and stuffed quahogs. All waders were leaking, including a hardly used pair of new neoprenes some f%$king rodent like a mouse or chipmunk decided to chew up for nesting material. All the other pairs were cracked, a sign of either ozone rot (never store waders near anything with an electric motor, like a refrigerator) or old age. So … I know what I want for Christmas.

When we went to the landing to get the boat I discovered some Cape Cod version of a horse thief had taken a set of bolt cutters to my dinghy’s lock-up chain. Fortunately the dinghy didn’t get pinched, but now I am in a high state of paranoia that either some yacht club moron officer is deciding a new policy that no dinghy’s shall be chained to the yacht club fence, or the town is going to get serious about cleaning up the abandoned mess of abandoned dinghies, canoes, catamarans, scows, punts, and skiffs littering the shore around the landing. In any event, I need to go down there with some sort of waterproof plea to leave my dinghy alone as I intend to continue using it until mid-December. Any way, if you who wields bolt cutters is reading this, do me a favor next time? Post a notice or call me?

Like I said, it was foggy. But this time of year there isn’t much boat traffic to worry about, and the course to the clams is basically head due south from the mooring for two minutes and stop.

Son and I focused right on chowder sized clams, the ones with shells as big a closed man’s fist. Instead we found some decent ones — right between cherrystones/littlenecks and true chowders. Here Fisher lives up to his name and demonstrates some jerk rake technique (a Ribb jerk rake no less).

I came up with this in my rake, a perfect baby horseshoe crab. Horseshoe crabs are right out of the days of dinosaurs, living tribolites, so I wanted to make sure this one survives to make more. They are hard hit by commercial fishermen who cut them up for trap bait.

I went sculling this morning under grey, windless skies, taking advantage of a rare chance to get out on smooth water in November before things shut down late next month. I walk down Old Shore Road with the shell on my head, and launch at the bottom of the hill next to the new boat ramp. As I stepped into the shallows I saw this cool creature, about eight to ten inches long, dead, but only recently so gauging from its good condition.

This is a mantis shrimp – at first I thought it was a lobster tail some well-to-do bait fisherman had discarded after an expedition for a big striped bass (lobster tails are legendarily good bait, but at current prices, better in one’s stomach) – according to Wikipedia, mantis shrimp are so named for their resemblance to a Praying Mantis, but they are not shrimp. They are also known as “thumb splitters” by scuba divers because of their ability to destroy an appendage brought too close to their mandibles. Indeed, they can allegedly shatter aquarium glass and are apparently highly intelligent creatures.

The Chinese call them “pissing shrimp” for their penchant to void their bowels while being cooked.

I have never seen one of these on Cape Cod before, but know from saltwater fly fishing that they do “move” into southern New England waters in the fall and have the fastest “strike” time of any creature in the world. The Cape is their northernmost range on the eastern seaboard, and I know from experience that the south side of Cape Cod, jutting out as it does into the Gulf Stream, is last stop for a lot of tropical species which work their way up the coast all summer, only to get stunned and stranded by the first chills of the fall. A manatee died last month after making its way to Dennis, and there have been catches of tarpon, barracuda, and tiger sharks in Nantucket Sound in the past.

Here’s a video of one attack a crab.

What could be finer?

1. There is no wind at 8 am so I am about to go for a pleasant fall scull around the harbor.
2. The dogs are frightened and avoiding me because of my bellicose behavior at 1:30 am when J.D. Drew homered to bury the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim in the second game of the ALDS.
3. Hence my new motto, courtesy of Surviving Grady is: “WE ARE THE MOTHERF@#KING BOSTON RED SOX, CHUMPS, AND THOSE WHO OPPOSE US WILL TASTE THE LIGHTNING!”
4. I am on vacation. Ten days of being and nothingness. It’s time for the Fall Run and I am off to the Great Backside Beach to stand in foamy surf, sling eels into the darkness, and ponder my existence while staring across the Atlantic at Portugal.
5. I am going to cook a roti de porc au lait for my dinner tonight.
6. Perhaps I shall seek bivalves in the mud later today. Must check tides.

So, whereabouts this coming week? Going nowhere. How to contact me? Don’t. Blog probabilities? Low, except to lie about fish I haven’t caught, and to gloat about the BoSox.

I aspire to earning a nickname when all is said and done. Something like the one the Byzantine Emperor Basil II earned, First I need to do something either heroic or heinous:

“Finally, on July 29, 1014, Basil II outmaneuvered the Bulgarian army in the Battle of Kleidion, with Samuil separated from his force. Having crushed the Bulgarians, Basil was said to have captured 15,000 prisoners and blinded 99 of every 100 men, leaving 150 one-eyed men to lead them back to their ruler, who fainted at the sight and died two days later suffering a stroke. Although this may be an exaggeration, this gave Basil his nickname Boulgaroktonos, “the Bulgar-slayer” in later tradition.”

Basil II – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

I noted a while back the controversy over dinghy storage in Chatham. Let’s tag this one under the “clamming” strategy aspect of this blog, as part of my ongoing crusade on waterfront access, riparian rights, water quality, and the old ways of life around the Cape Cod shorefront. Expect more ranting on my part through this fall as beachwalk season commences and I start to spend more time contemplating issues ranging from the dredging off of 600 feet of Sampson’s Island to nitrogen loads in Cotuit Bay to the evolving nature of waterfront policy around Cotuit and the Cape at large as population pressure and escalating waterfront values pit the public against the private. Anyway — here’s the Cape Cod Times on a compromise in Chatham to let people continue to store dinghies on the beach. This is an issue in Cotuit and I find myself fiercely guarding my dinghy slot by being the first on the beach every spring. Yet the beach is cluttered with abandoned hulks and needs to be purged.

“CHATHAM — The dinghies can stay, but only if their owners play by the rules.

That is the essence of a new policy that grew out of a confrontation over the winter between a Stage Harbor property owner, the town and the owners of small skiffs used to access boats offshore. The small boats have historically been left on private beaches around town.

Harbor Master Stuart Smith and the owners of the property near the town landing at Champlain Lane, identified as Champlain Realty Trust, have agreed on a solution that will preserve the age-old tradition and allow the owners to have an orderly, clean beach.”

CapeCodTimes.com – Chatham resolves dinghy controversy.

Mister O’Grady is on vacation in Wellfleet, and posts an excellent discussion on the state of shellfishing, invasive species, and other bellwethers of coastal life. Good fodder for the lagging clamming content lately. I have seen no Chinese clams yet.

“What I did on the Day Two of my vacation: visited an oyster farm in Wellfleet, MA. For serious. These sustainable – “call it green, sustainable, whatever you want” said one oyster farmer today – shellfish fisheries are an interesting canary in the coal mine in several respects. As we’ll see.”

tecosystems » What I Learned Today: Shellfish, Fisheries, Oil, and More.

Ben at Walking the Berkshires and the Cape Cod Times (and its excreble daily video show CapeCast) are sounding the tocsin over that-which-should-not-be-eaten, Tomalley, or the vile green goo found inside the bodies of lobsters.

Apparently lobsters, who personify the term, “bottom feeder”  are utter scavengers who dine on whatever lands on the bottom, store a lot of toxic crud in their tomalley, which is essentially a two-organs-in-one deal for the lobster, playing the role of both liver and pancreas.

Lobsters lying in state

Sorry, but I don’t know about you, but I tend to use my liver to deal with stuff like toxins. Indeed, back in my glory years when tequila shots were my bane, anyone who ate my liver, Prometheus style, would have been struck dead faster than a spy biting on the cyanide molar implanted in their jaw.

My mother, a native of the New Hampshire sea coast, gets more mileage out of a lobster than a parasite. We’re talking Outer Limits/Twilight Zone sort of behavior — with much meticulous sucking and picking away until there is nothing but a red husk on the plate. She is one of those whack jobs that declare “tomalley” and its nasty red twin, “coral”or the roe, to be a delicacy. Ben’s mom apparently is the same way. Me, I believe tomalley is a soft, meconium sort of substance that one usually finds on a dock after a flock of sea gulls meets the fleet on a hot day.

So when the State of Maine health department and then the Massachusetts BOH declare tomalley to be bad for you, I’ve got to ask: “Who in their right mind ate it anyway?”

Check out the photo on this Cape Cod Times story. Hungry? And my respects to anybody who would brush their teeth with tomalley, you are my hero.