Churbuck.com

Add to the storm damage from the past weekend the new wind turbine at Peck’s Boats. This is a novel design where the blades are on the trailing edge of the nacelle, or generator pod, permitting them to flex back and away from the mast in a strong gust.

Well, two blades are gone now. I hope this doesn’t set back the cause as I remain a fan of wind power. From the Cape Cod Times:

“This weekend, the gusting winds, at times measuring over 60 mph, prompted Conrad Geyser to check in on the turbine he owns at Peck’s Boats Inc. on Route 28 in Marstons Mills.

“I was looking and listening, and I didn’t see anything off the chart,” he said yesterday. “The thing was going like crazy and moving around a lot, but nothing any more extreme than we’d seen already.”

Geyser said he believes sometime in the early morning Sunday a big gust may have hit especially hard and knocked the blade tips off. He’s not sure how far they landed from the tower. Wind turbine blades can be subjected to enormous pressures, especially in the Cape’s notoriously stormy weather.

“They’re light,” he said. “But anytime you have something falling from the sky, there is concern.”

via Turbine failures stir up concern | CapeCodOnline.com.

Atlantic white cedar is the perfect wood for boat building and is difficult to find these days with the price to prove it. I have four enourmous planks in the old sail loft behind my bedroom, leftover from the days when my grandfather Chat built Cotuit Skiffs in the boat shop. The wood is all but rot-proof.

On Sunday I took my son and the dogs for a walk around one of the best examples of a cedar swamp on Cape Cod, the Almy Cedar Swamp in Cotuit off of Old Post Road. There aren’t many left and winter is the best time to explore. Here’s a link to a site with some good background information. Interestingly, they aren’t technically “cedar” but cypress swamps.

Cedar swamps are unique biotropes found along the east coast from Maine to Georgia. They are true swamps that support a species of tree that is more related to the cypress than the cedar.  Chamaecyparis thyoides is a pretty tree, a definite break for the eye after the typical scrub oak and pines that carpet Cape Cod. The habitat and growing conditions are so unique that I went most of my life without ever seeing a cedar swamp. A few years ago the Barnstable Land Trust and some local conservationists pulled out the stops to preserve a big tract of open space in Cotuit around Cordwood Landing. Included in the parcel was the Almy Cedar Swamp. This is what it looks like from the air — note the definite difference in the foliage.

The swamp isn’t easy to find. One walks north on a dirt road across from the Cordwood Landing way to water, across Old Post Road, and north towards Eagle Pond. A half mile in, on the right, is a hidden path down to the swamp. Winter is the best time to explore because the swamp is frozen and one can actually poke around among the trees. In the barreness of winter it is is strange to step into such a green and verdant space.  The silence is amazing and the woods are cathedral-like.

Flickr Video

The trees are very tall and seem, gauging from their girth, to be a few hundred years old. According to one scholarly paper, the Cape’s cedar swamps are less than 4,000 years old.

Walking around the swamp is very cool. The ice makes it easy to poke around the frozen peat and see the moss knobs around each trunk.

These were valuable trees back in the day, but some have survived because they are so difficult to extract from the swamps. It goes without saying the swamps are endangered, filled in, converted to cranberry bogs, or just dammed up and drowned. The largest is on the outer Cape near the Marconi station — it is 11.8 acres. I have no idea how big the Almy Cedar Swamp is — but know of at least two other smaller ones hidden around Cotuit.

While it’s tempting to wonder if anyone would care if I dragged a piece of deadfall out of the swamp to turn into a new skiff, I guess I should first check the condition of the planks in the sailloft. Cool to think the boat that defines Cotuit is made from wood logged from Cotuit’s swamps.

Saturday and the sun was beaming down and melting the grey snowdrifts. The boat looked lonely. I put the battery on a charger, emptied last season’s remaining gasoline into a jerry can, and refilled the tank with three gallons of new gas and a shot of ethanol treatment.

Backed up to the trailer, connected the hitch, and 500 yards later was backing down a snow covered ramp into Cotuit Bay. I pushed off with an oar, anchored in deeper water, and for three minutes coaxed the dormant Honda back to life with the choke and throttle. When I was 100 percent sure it wouldn’t fart out when I was in the middle of the harbor I came back into the beach, loaded the two terriers aboard, and took off for Dead Neck, the barrier island at the head of the bay.

As my son said when he declined my offer to accompany me, “You are only doing this so you can say you are the first to do it.”

That was not the motivation. Anyway, there is a simple thrill to doing this in February:

I anchored near Cupid’s Cove, the ancient inlet (now clamming cove) out to Nantucket Sound, careful to keep the boat off the beach so I wouldn’t have to push it off if the tide went out. I offloaded the dogs (who went into immediate mania and starting biting my boots) and satisfied the boat would be there when returned, headed off for a complete circumperambulation of the Island.

I brought a garbage bag and scavenged all the plastic I could find from the wrack line where the moon tides had deposited it.   There was more man-made trash on the inside, bayside of the island, reflective of where the people are in the winter and where the prevailing northerly winds blow from

Around the Point of the island (which received a bit of a trim from the dredge this winter to widen the channel) and down the outside of the beach, flawless and without footprints, just the overwash signs of high tides and winter storms. After a half mile of walking with the wind in the sun I took off my coat. The trash bag was getting full. Halfway down the beach and I popped up on a dune to see if the boat was still where it was supposed to be. It was.

And onwards down to Osterville and the Wianno Cut, where the dredged spoils from the Cotuit end of the island were pumped to shore up the dwindling beach in front of Bunny Mellon’s house.

Without some beachgrass that too will wash away, thanks to the jetties built 100 years ago that now block the natural ebb and flow of the coastal sands.  I sat down for a second, patted the dogs on the head, and then headed back towards the boat.

The dogs and I crossed the island at Cupid’s Cove, where some ice still lingered, and with our bag of trash made it back to the boat. Which was now riding at anchor in much deeper water than I left it. The solutions were:

a. undress , wade out, start boat, return to beach and get dressed again

b. take off boots and socks and attempt to roll jeans up above knees

c. just wade out, flood the boots, and climb aboard and then cruise back home at warp speed before hypothermia set in

I opted for plan C and soaked my self right up to the belt line. flopped into the boat, emptying the seawater out of the boots and onto my face. I was very happy to be the only person on the water at this point as an audience would not have been appreciated.

I phoned home, told my son to meet me at the ramp with the trailer, and fifteen minutes was back home in the shower.

So ended a good beach walk and motorboat ride in February.

By Paul Rifkin

I have a serious jones for a baseball game. How lucky am I to have this in my neighborhood? I knock off work early around 4 pm, walk barefoot or ride my bike to the ball park, buy a Moxie and a bag of peanuts, and for three hours get treated to the best amateur baseball in the world.

My neighbor Paul Rifkin shot this. Click on the picture for a larger version. He is a man of many talents and this is the best shot of the ball park, perhaps the entire town, I’ve seen in a long time.

I have moved out of  my old office in a dark ancient living room — a great winter office due to the cheery little woodstove — but it is a place filled with Civil War sabers, sextants, quadrants, old smelly books and dark oil paintings of long dead ancestors. Given my recent eye surgery and need for some great light, I moved into a sunny room surrounded by windows on three sides — an old summer porch we converted to year round use a decade ago.

I sit in a corner with the windows open, and realize there are two sounds filling the center of the village that I could do without.

• Leaf blowers. These offend me to no end. They burn fossile fuels, they are whiny and loud like a jet ski, and they are horribly inefficient. The days of handymen with bamboo rakes and smoking piles of leaves are long gone — so even the fall doesn’t smell the way it used to. I can remember raking and burning leaves and burying big potatoes in the ashes for a late afternoon reward on the lawn with my grandfather. Now it’s all whining and blowing as the landscape squads move through the waterfront estates and put things to bed for the season.
• Back-up horns: The center of the village is under construction. Once Labor Day arrives the off-season road work begins and since Cape Cod essentially has the same roads it had in 1950, doing road construction or repairs during the summer crush is insane. The  Sagamore Bridge is a good example of the off-season construction phenomenon. A Depression-era steel structure sitting a couple hundred feet above the salty Cape Cod Canal and it needs some serious work. So the traffic on and off the Cape is worse now than it is on a Sunday night in July.  Here in Cotuit the second biggest avenue — Scho0l Street — is under construction and the old gas station at the corner of Main and School is being demolished to provide more parking. All day long — beep, beep, beep. I know it’s good safety: a poor policeman was killed in Centerville a decade ago when a dump truck without a backup horn crushed him. But — between the leaf blowers and the back up horns ….. As the Mission of Burma song said, “That’s when I reach for my revolver …”

Sounds I like?

• Ten feet behind me, in the grape arbor, hangs a ripening crop of purple Concord grapes. Under the white framework, in the dark shadows under the vines, is a collection of bird feeders. I am a big bird feeding person, and because the arbor is in an alcove formed by my porch, the house, and the front porch, it is a very secure place for birds to hide from hawks and cats. Because my wife and I feed the birds year round the feeding tubes are very busy and a flock of at least 100 English sparrows has taken over — moving off of the birdseed and into the rose bushes and morning glories with a huge whooshing exhalation behind my back, like an immense lung. The sound is amazing. The birds will probably eat the grapes before I can harvest them and try to make jelly.
• I miss the cat-like peeping and screeching of the ospreys cruising along the bluff behind the house for snapper bluefish, menhaden and herring. I realize today they have left — on the way south for the winter. I love watching them over the baseball field in the summer, gliding overhead with a fish in their talons.

Can you tell I am procrastinating?

Tropical Storm Danny is futzing around to the south, due to hit the Cape in the form of some windy rain tomorrow.  I headed out to the Osterville Cut at noon for a service in memorial of the son of a friend who tragically died last weekend diving off of the Oyster Harbors Drawbridge. The skies were bruised and ominous — fitting for a sad day — but I wondered how a Wampanoag felt four hundred years ago, standing on the shores of Coatuet and Cotacheset, looking out at Nantucket Sound with a hurricane over the horizon, no idea what was coming, but perhaps tuned into some natural indicators that I’m too technically enabled to see.

Now I can track this stuff on the National Weather Service … or Wunderground … or Accuweather or gazillion weather sites, all loaded with Flash-enabled graphics, and probability cones, and hourly predictions that tell me to expect a 30 mph gust tomorrow at 3 pm.

Whatever. I rather be the one who looks at the sky and says, “Going to be a blow tomorrow.”

So out of the water came the motorboat — more for a powerwashing to get the mid-season slime and barnacles off the hull than fear of some meterological disaster. The big boat sits where it sits. I may pop out there early in the morning and take off the sails so the wind doesn’t unfurl them and cause mayhem in the harbor. The weather service is calling for gale conditions with winds in the high 40s – enough to make a mess, but not a disaster zone.

This incredibly rainy summer has resulted in my Cape Cod lawn actually living and thriving through August like some fescue exhibition test farm owned by a lawn products company. The damn thing is growing despite my best efforts to kill it, replenished by the banks of rain that have ruined baseball games, made children sullen, and horrified poor renters who have dropped $2,000 a week to sit inside and stare at the verdant wet green lawns of Cotuit.

A year ago HBO produced a mini-series on the lif e of President John Quincy Adams based on David McCullough’s wonderful biography. The scenes that struck me the most were of Adams’ homestead in Braintree, south of Boston, and the chaos that was his so-called lawn. A mess of flowers, waist high grass, and a living lawnmower or too that bleated” Baaa.”  Oh to be a colonial and not own a Honda power mover or pay the landscaper $100 every week to keep the weeds at bay.

Reverend Jeremy popped by yesterday to commiserate about the fall of the Kettleers and to ask if one of my kids would mow his lawn while he travels. Seeing as we’re both smack in the center of the village, across from the green and the library, there is a bit of a social contract to keep the place looking nice, so I gladly volunteered Junior for the task.

But what if there were no mowers? I suspect in this summer of foreclosures there are a lot of unmowed lawns in America. I read an article recently about one midwestern city that just shows up and mows a property owner’s turf and then sends them a bill.  So now we can add short grass to taxes and other losses of our libertarian rights ……

Back I go to cut yet more grass, a fine waste of a sunny Sunday before popping over to Beijing for a week.

I am missing the Cape Cod Baseball League finals this week — and was a bit annoyed I had to go to NYC yesterday and on to North Carolina during the last week of the season when the Cotuit Kettleers have a good shot at the championship. I saw three games this past weekend — Friday’s victory over Wareham, Saturday’s away victory over Eastern Division champs Yarmouth-Dennis, and Sunday’s 10-5 home loss to Y-D. Missing the end of the season hurts.

The make or break game was yesterday back at Dennis, series tied at 1-1 with the first pitch at 3 and I was in a meeting overlooking Bryant Park on 42nd Street in a nasty muggy August heatwave.

I got into the back of the cab to LaGuardia and googled on my blackberry for a score. Instead I discovered an 800 number I could dial for a live play-by-play.  So I dialed, and as I rolled along in the back of the cab along the East River I heard the disembodied voice of the broadcast interns, Aaron Pepper and Josh Weinstock, say Cotuit was leading an astonishing 11 to 1.

I started cheering.

At the airport I found a 3G connection and lit up a live video stream, watching the game to its incredibly lopsided 18 to 4 conclusion. Is it me, or do we indeed live in an age of miracles when a little wooden bat college league can transmit itself to a tiny audience like me? The long tail indeed.

Tonight, more of the same at 7 pm in the best of three finals at Bourne. if you are remote, then the miracle of the interwebs will bring you all the game action from the first pitch through the last out.

Mosquito Boats: The First Hundred Years of the Cotuit Skiff

The Association
of the Cotuit Mosquito Yacht Club held a dinner dance recently at the Cotuit Son’s of Italy hall to raise some funds, eat some spaghetti, and conduct a launch party of sorts for a 15-year project, a massive piece of research and writing that spans over a century of one of the oldest American one-design racing boats.

Larry Odence is a stalwart sailor of Cotuit Skiffs — he was a contemporary of my late father — first learning to sail the boats as a summer kid in the 1930s aboard his first skiff, the Watersprite. Today he is still out on the waters of Cotuit Bay, racing his beloved Swamp Fox with his grandchildren. His masterpiece is finally in print and was worth the wait.

Fifteen years ago, when the Skiff fleet was beginning its massive revival, Larry began to research the history of the design by taking an unusual and very intimate approach. He focused on each individual boat, rather than their sailors or builders, creating in effect a detailed genealogy around each and every Mosquito. The task was massive – records were loosely kept, stored in a drawer at the Cotuit Library – memories faded, some builders kept no records (I know, Larry was tireless is asking me if my grandfather, Henry Chatfield Churbuck had kept any records of his short-lived Skiff building activities in the late 1940s) and some owners had hazy memories of who owned what, and what sail numbers went with which hull.

Larry’s efforts have been published and given to the ACMYC as a fund raising tool. But what comes through after a thorough reading is this is a remarkable history on three or four levels.

First, the Odence book is the history of an eccentric, uniquely American boat design that was derived from a simple inshore working boat and adapted to local waters by a very innovative and enigmatic designer, Stanley Butler. Butler refused to standardize, he was an inventor and an innovator, so no two of his boats were alike and his customers – the first summer people in Cotuit – began to get unhappy with the unfair differences between one boat to the next.  The concept of one-design sailing is founded on standards — to remove the advantage of technology and to make the competition about the sailor, not the boat or the sail. Children would come home, doubtlessly unhappy that their boat was slower than their friend’s, and before long the history moves from one of experimentation to standardization, a pattern that would repeat itself over the decades, time and time again. Debate over standards persist to this day.

The Mosquitos were handmade boats, built from oak and white Atlantic cedar, canvas and iron nails. Little 14-foot hulls with impossibly big sails, designed for rounding short courses inside the lake-like harbor of Cotuit Bay. Hurricanes took their toll, as did sloppy maintenance, corroding fasteners, and waves of popularity and decline caused by wars, economies, and other distractions. I majored in American maritime history in college and have read a lot of histories, especially indigenous boat design such as Howard Chappelle and others. Larry’s work is the equal of those academic works and in many regards, superior to them because of the intense amount of detective work he did in gathering profiles of more than 150 boats and the personalities behind every one of them.

Second, the book traces the history of a community formed around a yacht club that for years owned no property, had no clubhouse, and was run by young people with little help from their parents. Not until 1960 was a parent’s association formed to pay for motorboats and sailing lessons – before that it was a club of unmarried juniors under the age of 25 who tolerated older sailors on their own terms. By emphasizing the ownership of each boat, the book brings forth a very interesting story of families than came and went through the town – from townies who have been here forever to vacationers who arrived for a month or two never to return.

Third, this is a history of a village and the entire phenomenon of New England summer resorts. Cotuit was one of the first summer destinations for wealthy Bostonians – the names of the first residents are a roll of Brahmin pedigrees: Lowells, Ropes, Cabot, Coolidge – and the Skiff played an important role as the only recreation in a village with no beach club, country club, golf course, or other typical summer diversion. The Mosquito was it and remains the icon of the village.

Mystic Seaport, the preeminent American maritime museum in Mystic, Connecticut, awarded the Cotuit Mosquito Yacht Club its William Avery Baker award for its efforts in preserving the Cotuit Skiff over more than a century. The president of the Seaport, Steven White, came to Cotuit to give the award to CMYC Commodore, Michael Dannhauser.

Update: This is a sample of what each boat’s entry looks like:

Click on the picture for a link to the original full-sized scan.

I’m not sure how or if the Odence book will be sold outside of the club. The price is $100. If interested please leave a comment and I’ll find out how to fulfill an order.

What could be better than knocking off work at 5 pm, walking half a mile down Main Street to a little ball field tucked into the pines, and watching the best college baseball players in the country play nine strong innings in the June sunshine?

Welcome to Cape Cod Baseball League baseball, arguably the best summer college baseball league on the planet. Where wooden bats reign, and little girls sing “Take Me Out To the Ball Game” during the seventh inning stretch. Where admission is free, kids run wild, and you can pick up a cup of clam chowder and a couple dogs for dinner. Cute girls in their summer clothes flirting with the boys in the dugouts. Old timers parked by the third base line fence in their lawn chairs. Families tucking into boxes of pizza on picnic tables.

This is the real deal. No lights. No rock music. No mascot running the baselines.

This is where I:

• smoked my first cigarette (in the pit in the woods behind the visitors stand)
• had my first (of several)  fights with a townie (I was and always will be just a summer kid)
• had my bike stolen something like three times

Cotuit is where major leaguers like the Met’s  Ron Darling played.  The Yankee’s GM, Joe Girardi, was a Kettleer. The team was started in 1947 and has won the Cape championship more than 12 times. The current list of Kettleer alumni in the pros is here.

Great aerial of the Cotuit park here.

“Get on the Boat Campaign”: Three Bays Preservation works to raise awareness of fragility of Barnstable’s bays.

Cape Cod Today on Three Bays’ tour of the Cotuit Bays last weekend. I saw them on the water Saturday — there was a little sun and break from the incessant rain. It’s good to see public awareness building about the water quality issues.

My neighbor Frederic Claussen passed away last week. He was 72 years old. A graduate of Nobles & Greenough, Harvard, and Boston University Law School, he was a flinty Yankee and the longest serving elected Republican in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, serving as Registrar of Deeds for Barnstable County for 39 years, only retiring from office last year.

from the Cape Cod Times.

He drove an ancient Buick, used to live in one of the oldest houses in the village, and loved animals. My daughter used to walk his collie Fancy for him while he was at work at the county complex in Barnstable Village. One day while I was working in my home office he came over with a copy of a story he had published about a lost dog he had adopted.

The grandson of US Congressman Charles Gifford (who was the author of the 20^th Amendment to the US Constitution which changed the date of the presidential inauguration), Mr. Claussen lived near his grandfather’s house in the center of the village and will be forever thanked by generations of beachwalkers, shellfishermen and fishermen for granting a right of way to water by the town dock. His profile page on the State website lists his personal interests simply as “swimming and walking the beach.”

He was one of a breed of Massachusetts Republicans that used to personify Cape Cod politics through the 1970s. He was very good at his job – at least the voters thought so — and was helpful to me in 1980 when as a cub reporter I came to interview him about the role of county government on the Cape. My family and I will miss him, it’s sad to see a great presence in the neighborhood pass away.

… I slept an hour later than usual, woke to grey skies, ate bacon and eggs instead of beneficial oatmeal, did rapid-fire errands, stopped by the herring run just as the day turned awesome (I saw a big school of herring waiting in the top pool), installed a new mower blade and mowed the lawn, bought a six-pack of Offshore Ale, strung up my rod with a new lure, and hit the prettiest beach on Cape Cod for two hours of casting practice (no fish yet) in the setting sun before rushing home and catching the last five innings of a four-hour classic of a baseball game against Yankees (who also lost a nailbiter to the Sox the night before), cooking the entire time (rillettes, duck leg confit, vegetable stock, hummous) screaming at the TV in the kitchen, and scaring the dogs.

I congratulated my esteemed neighbor for doing the right thing, and she told me about an profile of your humble narrator in the Barnstable Enterprise.  I couldn’t find a copy, but someone dropped it by the house while I was running errands. I feel conspiciously auspicious. I’d point to it, but it’s not online and I am not in the mood for personal promotion.

A good friend dropped by and we got on the topic of seagull attacks and the time I watched a seagull poop into someone’s agape mouth aboard the Hyline ferry M/V Point Gammon when I worked on there as a deckhand in college.

Tomorrow I paint the bottom of the yacht and continue my gardening. My spring peas have sprouted and my arugula is showing itself.  The tulips have opened and the alcove reeks of hyacinths.

On a day like today it does not suck to be me.

One newspaper is swimming against the ebbing tide in the news business — The Barnstable Enterprise launched this week, a weekly paper owned by the people who publish the Falmouth Enterprise. It joins the venerable Barnstable Patriot which was picked up by the News Corp. controlled Cape Cod Times a few years ago.

Neighbor and erstwhile Cape Cod Today blogger Paul Rifkin is the Cotuit correspondent. He interviewed me last week in my home office about Capt. Thos. Chatfield. I also see a good history piece in the inaugural issue by Prof. James Gould, Cotuit’s local historian, on a dance club/speakeasy that existed in Marston’s Mills during the Jazz Age.

Anyway, here’s a link to the kickoff.

Walked out to see a dead dolphin on the beach this afternoon. It had stranded on a high tide on the shore of Nantucket Sound,  probably stunned by the cold, and died a few days ago. The birds and varmints had been at it, but it was beautiful in its own sad way.

Santa came to Cotuit yesterday, arriving on the Fire Department’s boat around 4 pm under grey skies from the southeast, on the wind, rolling into the town dock where about three hundred excited kids and parents greeted him with great pleasure and enthusiam. I got off the water from my first (and perhaps only) row of December just in time to shower and change and make it down to the dock for the happy occasion.

I stood on the beach and shot some video; Daphne took the Nikon so the photos are better than usual. I met the one other Cotuit blogger I know of, Paul Rifkin, and we chatted until the great event began.

Santa walked up the hill to the village park where he sat in his throne, was blessed by Reverend Nicole, and then ignited the village Christmas tree which I can see from my reading porch.

My buddy Chris drove people around the village in his dump truck filled with hay bales then came over for a dinner of braised short ribs (from the Balthazar cookbook), roast potatoes, salad, and cranberry and apple pie.

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.

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.

Wish I was going to be in town this Wednesday so I could hear this presentation on Cotuit during WWII. The town was the site of a amphibious warfare training base, Camp Candoit, located in North Bay. The soldiers practiced their marine landings for North Africa, Sicily and D-Day here. The Cotuit Wikipedia entry blames this camp for a decline in quality of the oysters. Alas, I will be in RTP this week.