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.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Alcohol was involved? No way!

A few weeks ago, while taking my afternoon constitutional with the dog along Ropes Beach, I witnessed the weirdest example of a massive biomass I’ve ever seen on the Cape. The fall is a particularly fecund time of year on the water, with the baitfish balling up into a tight concentrations that are assaulted over and over by blitzes of bluefish and striped bass fattening up before their southern migration for the winter. Usually the baitfish are immature menhaden, also known as “peanut bunker” but what I saw that afternoon on the shores of the cove was, in my opinion, a school of immature river herring, or alewives, also known as dropback herring because they drop back into the sea following their anadromous cycle of birth in the inland freshwater ponds and maturation in the deep sea.

The spring herring run is a classic event on the Cape, occurring in mid-April around the time the forsythias bloom.  During that run the adult alewives swim in from the deep ocean up to the very heads of the saltwater estuaries, lured in by some mystical genetic marker that leads them to seek out the same sweet waters they were born in. The fish then jump and wriggle their way up the coastal streams, over concrete fish ladders and other obstacles, dodging gulls and people with nets to finally made their way to some inland pond to drop their eggs and milt. These runs used to produce prodigious amounts of fish in colonial times, not so much any longer, and the state has imposed a ban on the taking of spawning herring for a number of years now.

What I saw, beginning at the footbridge and extending a half mile along the entire curving shoreline to Handys Point was a band of tiny black fish — minnow sized — that extended from two feet from the water’s edge out about 12 feet — a big long, moving black band of a gazillion tiny fishies all finning and pointing in the same direction, occasionally erupting when something disturbed their peace. Why do I think they were herring?

1. The week before I saw a steady stream of little black smolts swimming out of Little River.

2. Peanut bunker are distinctively shaped and these were not peanut bunker.

3. I’ve heard that herring like to circle the shorelines of the ponds in a big schools following their hatch. These fish were tucked right up on the beach, in the shallows where the sun could warm them.

Cue the video for a vague sense of what I saw. It’s not an exaggeration to say I walked past 20 solid minutes of fish during that sunny stroll.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Some of my favorite childhood literature memories were the bookcases filled with pulp novels from the first two decades of the 20th century.  These were the books my grandfather and father read in the years before television. Cheap hardcovers with coarse yellowing paper that smelled like a dusty basement.

The original Tom Swift series was a big favorite, the Thornton Burgess books, and closer to home, three novels written by a family member, Charles Pendexter Durrell, who lived across the street in the 1930s and was my cousin Peter’s great-grandfather. Those three novels were published as The Bluewater Series, by Milton Bradley, the Springfield, Massachusetts game publisher best known for The Game of Life. They featured Sam Hotchkiss, the son of a wealthy Boston businessman who is ordered to the peaceful southside village of Saquoit (a concoction of Santuit, Cotuit, and Waquoit)  by his physician to recover from overwork and bad health. Sam is irked to be exiled to the remote shores of Cape Cod and cops a sulky attitude upon arrival. He’s eventually introduced to Captain Seth Nickerson, an old salt who could be patterned on my Great-great grandfather, Thomas Chatfield, to whom the first book, The Skipper of the Cynthia B. is dedicated:

Captain Seth patiently takes the young boy under his wing and takes him sailing on his trusty catboat, the Cynthia B., named for his devoted wife, and tagged with a “B” because it is considered bad luck to have a boat’s name end with a vowel.

The book describes Sam and Captain Seth’s sailing and fishing adventures, and is interspersed with tales from the Captain’s whaling days in the Arctic and Pacific. There’s a some drama in the plot involving a catboat race, and the book has some wonderful illustrations by the Chatham, Massachusetts illustrator, Harold Brett.

Some of Brett’s painting of the book’s dust jacket covers hung in the house across the street when I was young.  They were beautiful things that are gone now, taken away by the inevitable generational divisions of property. But they were very impressive examples of the Brandywine School of illustration as Brett was a student of Howard Pyle.

The three books in the series are:

• Skipper of the Cynthia B
• Heave Short
• Lights Off Shore or Sam and the Outlaws of the Bay

They were published in the 20s and 30s, and are, to my knowledge, the only novels set in Cotuit other than Clara Nickerson Boden’s The Cut of Her Jib (another distant relation of mine).

What I know about Charles Pendexter Durrell is that he was born in Maine in the 1880s, lived in Watertown, Massachusetts, and married Chatfield’s daughter Susan granddaughter, Mildred Chatfield Fisher. They had one child, Elizabeth Durrell, who married Fred F. Field and lived across the street and was my grandmother’s best friend. They collected shells together, made beach plum jelly, and carried on like two old Cotuit ladies with a lot of memories would carry on. Elizabeth, or “Betty” as we called her, took care of me one summer because of some family medical dramas, and fed me awesome hamburgers on Wonder bread with yellow mustard. Her grandson Peter Field is my youngest son’s godfather and in some convoluted fashion due to proximity, along with his brother Tom, like a first cousin even though he is probably twice removed or however that works.

Durrell died in the 1950s. His books live on, available used or online in Google Books at the links above.

Ten years ago, on a perfectly windless day when the water of Nantucket Sound were flat and mirror smooth, I ventured a few miles offshore from Cotuit to Horseshoe Shoals — a long curving sandbar that can be a great place to catch bluefish throughout the summer months. I had my son and daughter with me and after we caught a nice 12 lb. blue for dinner, I shut off the engine and enjoyed the strange experience of floating calmly over the shoal without the usual three to four feet of surf and chaos that usually cover the two-mile long crescent of glacial sand and pebbles during a brisk southwesterly breeze and a flood tide.  The Horseshoe is a fascinating place. Remnants of an ancient forest have been discovered out there. The controversial Wind Farm is proposed for the general vicinity (which I support). And, navigationally, it’s interesting because it is the location of both the shallowest water in Nantucket Sound and the deepest — the two extremes only less than half-a-mile apart — an indication of the massive hydrodynamics of the east-west current flows and infamous shoals that have long made the Sound a bad place for shipping.

I stood on the bow of the skiff, fly fishing, casting in hopes of tempting a spanish mackerel or bonito, but nothing was biting. The current would sweep us across the shallow, the bottom rising pale green, then yellow up from the depths until the boat passed over the shoal itself, the bottom just a few feet below us.

I gave up the fly rod and just watched the bottom, at one point, as we crossed over a new section, I swore I saw a pipe or something man made sticking up from the sand. I turned on the engine, circled back and took another look. Gradually, as I opened up my field of vision, the perfect outline of a boat revealed itself… just the outline, no hull, as if someone had drawn the concept of a boat on the bottom.

It was a wreck. The first I had ever seen in the Sound.

But which wreck? What had happened out there and when? Had people died? Was it fifty years old, 100? It was both creepy and thrilling in a macabre way. It was definitely something to avoid as there were some portions of the superstructure that seemed to be close to the surface.

Once ashore I started researching the wreck lists for the area and found nothing. There had been a light ship at Cross Rip (a nearby shoal) in 1918, but that vanished during a winter blizzard, carried off station by ice and never found with all hands lost. Since that ship, the LV-6, was last seen adrift at the eastern end of Nantucket Sound, 15 miles away, I ruled it out.   I recalled old navigational charts of the Sound showing an icon for a half-submerged wreck south of the Horseshoe, yet I never saw any such boat out there as a kid.

Here’s a 1968 Coast Guard chart of the area.

And specifically, here’s a zoomed-in look at the spot where I saw the hulk that day ten years ago.

Once ashore, I started telling people about the wreck, asking if anyone knew what it was or if they had ever seen it.  ”Ask Leonard Peck,” someone said. He’d been around for a long time and was one of the saltier people in Cotuit, but Leonard passed away before I could ask. Other old timers shrugged and said they didn’t have a clue. So I gave up but talked about it with my fishing and sailing friends, looking for some information about the hulk I had glimpsed lurking out there.

Then, this morning, in the Barnstable Patriot, the local weekly newspaper, the “Early Files” section that excerpts news from past editions of the paper had this entry under 1971:

“Three hundred pounds of explosives demolished the submerged Navy patrol boat off Horseshoe Shoals last Thursday after several weeks of delay caused by weather and tides. The Ad Lib II struck the wreck last month, resulting in the deaths of Dr. James L. Chute of Osterville and Harland L. Matthews of Cotuit. The explosion removed all the wreck’s superstructure and part of the submerged hull. Coast Guard expects the wreck buoy will remain at its present location.”

Mystery solved. Sort of.  A little knowledge makes one thirsty for more.

First I went looking for any information about the tragedy that occurred in the fall of 1971 when the Ad Lib II struck the wreck. I found this lawsuit filed by descendants of  the two dead local men against the Federal Government. Made sense since Horseshoe Shoe is outside of the state’s three mile territorial limit and officially in federal waters. Second, it was a US Navy ship. But why was it there? How had it come to be wrecked? What kind of ship was it?

The lawsuit, Chute v. The United State of America, dated February 17, 1979 has the details:

“…plaintiffs have brought this action to recover for the deaths of their respective fathers as a result of the sinking of the boat AD LIB II on September 30, 1971 in Nantucket Sound. Both decedents had been guests on the AD LIB II, which was owned and operated by Dr. Robert L. Baxter, a friend. Plaintiffs allege the AD LIB II sunk when it struck a submerged wreck on Horseshoe Shoals in Nantucket Sound, approximately seven to eight miles south-southwest of Hyannis Port, Massachusetts. The plaintiffs contend that the wreck was improperly marked by the defendant, the United States. The wreck consists of a Navy ship, PC1203, which had been deliberately grounded on Horseshoe Shoals in 1949 for use as a bombing target.”

The law suit tells the story of how the Ad Lib II sank:

“Between 7:00 a. m. and 8:00 a. m. on September 30, 1971, Dr. Robert L. Baxter (aged 69); his wife; John Ohrn (aged 34); and the decedents, Dr. James L. Chute (aged 75) and Harlan L. Matthews (aged 77), departed from Lewis Bay on the AD LIB II and proceeded to Nantucket Sound to fish. The AD LIB II had a length of 24 feet, a width of approximately 10 feet, a mean draft of 3 feet, and a fiberglass hull. Dr. Baxter was an experienced mariner in the Nantucket Sound area, having fished in the area for some 40 years. He had also taught local courses in navigation and therefore knew that a wreck buoy is not placed on top of a wreck.

According to the lawsuit, a few days immediately following the Ad Lib II tragedy, Chester Crosby, chairman of the Town of Barnstable Waterways Commission (and owner of the Crosby Boat Yard in Osterville) asked the Coast Guard to mark the wreck.

“The plaintiffs had sought to introduce two letters of correspondence between Chester Crosby and Lieutenant Commander Ransom K. Boyce, then the Assistant Chief, Aids to Navigation Branch of the U. S. First Coast Guard District. Crosby was Chairman of the Waterways Committee, an advisory committee to the Board of Selectmen of the Town of Barnstable, Massachusetts, with regard to problems around the harbors and waterways. Writing to the Coast Guard in his capacity as Chairman, under date of October 4, 1971, Crosby expressed concern as to the adequacy of the marking of the wreck of the PC1203. As will be discussed in this court’s Findings of Fact, the buoy set up to mark the PC1203 was not placed directly on the wreck, but at some distance from it. The letter from Crosby, Plaintiffs’ Exhibit 15, refers to a previous request to have the Coast Guard attach a day beacon to the wreck and the fact that that request had been refused. It further acknowledges the problem of placing buoys close to submerged wrecks, but suggests that “since the United States Navy placed the wreck on the shoal, couldn’t an eventual solution be to have them dynamite the remains [of the wreck] during the late fall after the fishing season and remove the debris.” Boyce’s response, dated October 13, 1971, Plaintiffs’ Exhibit 16, states that the Coast Guard had decided “to blow up the remains of the wreck and wire drag the area to the depth of five feet below the reference plane,” and concludes that “[i]t is felt that this is a satisfactory solution to the problem.”"

There are no online archives of the Cape Cod Standard Times or the Barnstable Patriot available for 1971 — so I need to get in the car and drive to the Sturgis Libraryif I want to read the contemporary accounts of the wreck of the Ad Lib II.

As for the PC1203 — she was a 175-foot patrol boat with a crew of 59 men, of the PC463 class, built in 1943 by the Consolidated Shipbuilding Corporation of Morris Heights, New York. I have no information where she was assigned or if she ever saw action. Apparently the 1203 was decommissioned, towed out to the middle of the Sound, and scuttled on a sandbar to serve as a target for pilots flying out of Otis Air Force base. The Cape and Island were very active with military training activities during and after World War II, with landing craft operations practiced out of Cape Candoit in Cotuit’s North Bay and Mashpee’s Popponnesset and Waquoit Bays.  Another famous target practice ship, the Longstreet, was a Cape Cod Bay landmark for years off of Wellfleet off of the shore of the Cape’s northside, and Noman’s Land, the island south of Martha’s Vineyard, was pummeled for years by strafing fighters and practicing bombers.

According to the lawsuit:

“…little, if any, of the remains of the PC1203 wreck was above the water’s surface except at low tide when small portions of the vessel broke the water’s surface. The depth of the water in the vicinity of the wreck varies according to the tides from approximately 2 feet to 4.8 feet. From 1949 to 1961, the area where the PC1203 was grounded was designated as a danger area. In 1961, the danger designation of the area was removed. During this period, the PC1203′s location was unmarked except for a pipe affixed to it by persons unknown. This pipe, however, was destroyed during a hurricane in the mid-1950′s.

Obviously for Mr. Chute and Mr. Matthews, that wasn’t enough to prevent their deaths by drowning after the Ad Lib II succumbed to the gash in her hull and sank.

I can only imagine the chaos out there that foggy afternoon as the water gushed through the rip in the Fiberglas hull. Despite an experienced skipper, life jackets, and relatively warm water. Two men died.

From the law suit:

“After the AD LIB II struck the wreck, the decision was made to “try to make it” back to shore. However, the boat was taking on a lot of water and subsequently Dr. Baxter turned the AD LIB II toward the shoal, hoping to be in shallow waters. While in the turn, however, the boat sank and the parties were forced into the water.

In the end, the court ruled for the plaintiff, and found the government liable for not adequately marking the wreck with a buoy, light, rip-rap or structure directly on the wreck itself.

I can’t find much about Harlan Matthews, the Cotuit man who drowned. His daughter Helen Dottridge,  one of the plaintiffs in the 1978 lawsuit, passed away in 2007 at 86,and was a well known figure in the village historical society and Federated Church: the Dottridges being one of Cotuit’s oldest families. The owner and skipper of the Ad Lib II, Dr. Robert L. Baxter, was a former commodore of the Hyannis Yacht Club and navigation instructor.

If you pick the right day and tide and have a good pair of polarized sunglasses, the remnants of the wreck of the PC1203 are still out there, perfectly outlined in the rocky sands of Horseshoe Shoal.  The modern edition of the chart may not show the half-exposed icon any longer, but some versions do show the simple word “pipe.”

The orange harbormaster stickers are out at Ropes Beach. The remaining kayaks, skiffs, shells and even paddleboats are all festooned with one of these. As of tomorrow they’re at risk of being collected and hauled away to places unknown. (I hid mine on the yacht club property as I intend to keep motorboating for another month.)

This is a good thing the harbormaster started a couple years ago. Getting the boats off the beach gives the beach grass a chance to grow back and winnows out the hulks and derelict pieces of Fiberglas that have littered the place for years. Some of these boats — like the weird yellow paddle boat below — seem to arrive and then never, ever go any where.

The town needs to address the public beach. Phragmites are invading, the cement sea wall is spalling, and the place is getting rattier every year, a far cry from the pristine little beach I knew as a kid, complete with lifeguards, water fountain and bath house. Swimming ended twenty years because of some strange skin mite caused by bird droppings interacting with periwinkles. Little kids would get covered with itchy bites. Now it’s a dog park and a sand box of sorts where people sunbathe on nice days amongst the dinghys and sunfishes.

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.

Regular readers of this blog (hello Mother) are probably a little tired of the old photograph that runs along the skyline of the homepage. It’s a scan of a wide panoramic black and white photo I found in a family collection of daguerreotypes and assorted old scenes of Cotuit. The scene is the upper end of Cotuit Bay, facing east towards Osterville’s Grand Island, over Old Shore Road, near what is known today as Ropes Beach. I think it was taken around 1910. Old Shore Road is unpaved, probably just two bright white tracks of crushed oyster shells, and the pier at the far right of the scene, with a small shack on the end, is where an ice cream parlor once operated. The stubs of the ice cream dock’s wooden pilings  still stick out of the mud today at low tide, the ends worn down to nubs.

This is a very familiar view to me. Probably the most Proustian view in my life. I took swimming lessons on the beach at the far left, sailing lessons a little further down at the Cotuit Mosquito Yacht Club. A video transcription of an old 16 mm home movie exists of a two-year old version of me, in a sagging cloth diaper, toddling in the mud. The family has always moored its boats in this part of the harbor. At the top left corner, where the beach and bluff ends is Handy’s Point — where my oldest Cotuit ancestors, the Handys, once lived and built ships in the 18th and 19th century.  I drive past this view four times a day on average. In the winter I can see a blue heron wading on the boat ramp in my headlights. This is my cove.

Every afternoon, around 3, when I was working from home, the dogs would annoy me to take them for a quick walk down the hill and out to Handy’s Point.   The three of us would do this nearly every day that we could from October through April, even in blowing snow storms (especially in blowing snow storms), me impatient with them pissing on every phone pole and tree alongside Old Shore Road, tugging at their leashes and reminding them that the sooner we got the beach, the sooner the leashes would get unclipped and they could run free and collect some new ticks in the beach grass.

The highpoint of the walk, the one point of dramatic tension, was the crossing of Mister Rickel’s Marsh Bridge. Mister Rickel is David Rickel, a good friend, a great carpenter/electrician/plumber and fellow lover of Gator Hammock hot sauce from Felda, Florida. Some ten or fifteen years ago David decided to build a trim little planked arched bridge over the natural spring that flows out from underneath Old Shore Road into the harbor.  He then fenced off the marsh with posts and ropes, erecting a little sign that says “Fresh Water Spring.” By doing so he cleared the area of dinghy’s and Sunfishes and other grass-killing boats and the result has been a nice rebirth of the spring.

The bridge has a graceful arch, is founded on some stout posts that rest atop the sand, and gains its strength and arc from a stack of laminated stringers crossed with unpainted planks. The dramatic part was getting two leashed dogs and myself over the bridge without knocking one or both or all of us into the sluggish stream below. The late terrier Ned was fond of taking a very large, very public roadside dump before venturing across — the reason I always stuffed a blue New York Times delivery bag in my pocket before departing the house — I guess he was probably jettisoning ballast before making the traverse, but the foot of the Rickel Marsh Bridge was his preferred toilet and where I got to get all disgusting with a blue bag over my hand.

During the recent almost-Hurricane Irene the bridge washed away and was in danger of being crushed beneath an errant Grady-White sports fishing boat that wound up on the tarmac of Old Shore Road. The bridge floated away and became wedged beneath the chine of the wreck where I couldn’t tug it free. The bystanders seemed surprised I would expend so much vigor on a long weathered piece of wood instead of trying to push off 10,000 pounds of run-away Fiberglas — but the bridge was the Mostar Bridge of Cotuit and had to be saved at all costs.

Eventually Old Shore Road recovered from the storm. Huge cranes lifted big boats off the  beach and the bridge destroying Grady-White was returned to the harbor. But the bridge lay a bit tattered next to a driveway, waiting for reconstruction.

As Ned took ill and began to decline, I resolved to give him one last beach walk, but alas, he was too weak to make that trek and we had to content ourselves with one final stroll around the Town Dock (his second favorite place) where he took one last embarrassing poop in front of everyone and then rolled in a puddle of seagull shit for old times sake. Three days later he passed away, and every time I drove down Old Shore Road past the missing bridge I felt a twinge of nostalgic regret that he didn’t get to trundle over the bridge one last time.

Then, last weekend, there was Mister Rickel, proudly standing next to the restored bridge. I rolled down the car window and hailed him with a “It’s back!” and he replied with “I keep reading that Internet thing and there hasn’t been anything new to read for while” — a subtle reminder that I’ve been slacking off in blog matters.

On Monday of this week, the last Monday of the summer, under turbulent skies with a scudding northeast wind that presaged the Fall, I went for a walk with Ned’s partner in beach walks, the diminutive tyrant known as Esme. She took her time sniffing and peeing all the way down the hill and I thought for a second she might find one last whiff of her couch partner. We turned the curve at the foot of the hill and there was the bridge.

I took a picture for old time’s sake and over we went, the arch slightly flexing under my weight.

It was a sad walk out to Handy’s Point.  It was the first of the beachwalk season (dogs aren’t permitted on the beaches between May 15 and Sept. 15)  and our first without Ned snuffling in the grass and looking for dead fish and spider crabs to roll in. A murder of crows sat portentiously in a silver locust tree at the base of the bluff. The Lowell’s dock, conveniently dismantled by Irene, was neatly stacked for the winter above the high tide line, the stink of the barnacles on the pilings attracting yellow jackets.

I plodded along in the sand, nervous that the little dog would get picked off by a coyote, stepping over the little rivulets of freshwater that scrawled over the sand from the springs under the bluffs, grateful to be barefoot.

At  Handy’s Point — the turnaround point — I stopped to watch a blue crab swim sideways in Little River. Across the four-foot span of the stream was the former home of my great-great-grandmother, Florentine Handy Chatfield. Now rebuilt and remodeled to the point that it looks like a wooden wedding cake, the house sits on a slight rise above the harbor. It became the summer home of Mark DeWolfe Howe, a Boston Brahmin man of letters, and was, in its time, a literary retreat of sorts for the likes of William and Henry James. My family may curse the decision of Florentine to abandon Handy’s Point and the waterfront, but evidently she felt very abandoned and stranded there in the Little River district of Cotuit during the hard winters when her husband, Captain Thomas Chatfield, was off chasing whales with her brother Bethuel in the Okhost Sea off the coast of Siberia.

While Little River is indeed little, a woman with young children couldn’t be expected to ford it in the winter to make it into the village of Cotuitport for provisions. The only other way is to walk the long way around on the Old Post Road past Mosswood Cemetery and then up Putnam Avenue. So Florentine moved the family right to the center of the village, across from the village green to the house where I live today.

My great-great-grandfather was perturbed to return from his last whaling voyage to find the family had moved.

“When I left home, and the last time I heard from home, the family lived at Little River, and when we reached the road leading to that part of the village William Jones drove past. It was the first time I ever saw him. I called his attention to that fact, but he only laughed and said he knew what he was about, that my family did not live at Little River. When he stopped at the gate (right here) [854 Main St., ed.] it was the first time I knew that we had abandoned the old home for all time. I was not any too well pleased with the change. I liked Little River, and I felt strange up here. I had made up mind that after twelve years steadily in the same ship I would spend one year at home before I sought employment again: but everything had changed before the year was out. The election in the fall of 1860 resulted in the choice of Mr Lincoln as President, and brought the Republican party pledged to oppose the extension of slavery, into power.”

Little River was once bridged, there are stubs of old pilings on either bank. I must ask the local historian Jim Gould who lives on the Cotuit side of the stream if he knows when the bridge existed and where the path would have gone.

I stood and admired the marsh and vacant bay for a while, all too conscious that this was the usual point in the walk when I would yell at Ned to get the f%&k out of the water in the middle of February. He liked to wade — never swim — like a water buffalo, his coarse salt-and-pepper coat floating up around him and then climb out to throw himself, face first, in the sand and roll and roll and roll, wriggling on his back, collecting as much sand, seaweed, and stink that he could for the walk back home, into the eye-watering wind, and then back over his bridge and finally home for an afternoon in front of the fire, the little dog lying like a parasite on his back for warmth.

Someone called in the big guns this afternoon to get the Tartan 4100 off of the beach by the boat ramp. A big Krupp crane crept down Old Shore Road, extended big legs, latched on with slings, and lifted the beneaped boat up from the sand and out a dozen or so feet into the clam mud. A BoatUS towboat huffed and puffed and for a second it looked like the big boat was free …. but they shut down with a couple of hours to go before dead low tide, probably to return on tomorrow’s high tide around 2 pm.

Very cool seeing the crane’s boom bend, and issue all sorts of interesting creaks and popping sounds. Soundtrack courtesy of the crowd and my VHF radio in channel 18 eaves dropping on the crane operator at the tow boat crew.

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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.

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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.

Click here to view the embedded video.