We were coming down to the last half hour where a decision had to be made, and some guy that hardly said anything during the trip said, “We’re pulling in the wrong direction.” We passed that on to the pilots, they tried something else, and the cable just came free. That was about the ability of the technical teams. But I don’t know what the decision would have been otherwise. It would have been to pull and hope for the best or to cut the line. It probably wouldn’t have been to cut the line. But I can’t imagine ripping off a chunk of the Titanic.

Titanic was about loss of life, but we were removed from that by almost 100 years. Air France was here and now.

I was the project leader, but I didn’t go out to sea . . . We had brand-new robots, the REMUS robots, and we had more than 40 years experience mapping in those mountain ranges. But the mission was tough—we were basically looking for two objects the size of shoeboxes lost in the Rocky Mountains at night. It was daunting. But we did it.

I can’t begin to tell you about the level of dedication that I saw. Just 24 hours a day, no glory, no reward, no incentive other than to do this job, to find that aircraft and give some relief to the loved ones and families and aircraft industry and the flying public.

If we hadn’t found those flight recorders, we would have never known what happened to Air France Flight 447. There were no witnesses, nothing that would have given us a clue. When I look at the sky, I’m still reminded that this team from WHOI had that little impact on the global population.

I don’t care what anyone says to the contrary, but to me, science and exploration is very personal and emotional. We wouldn’t do it if it didn’t do something to you that was very emotional.

I think most people on the Cape don’t know what WHOI is. The idea that it’s private, nonprofit—some people think it’s a secret government CIA laboratory (laughs). But it’s a place for people to dream. When our ships leave these docks, sometimes they’re gone for years at a time and they go all over the world. That spirit of exploration runs through this place.

I’m getting toward the end of my career at Woods Hole. I’ve been here a long time and it’s been an incredibly privileged 20-something years. Going on another expedition to find something new, I could do that until my last day on the planet. But I’m more interested in taking a deep breath and wondering what it’s all about. The thing that interests me most now is the human condition, that on this planet that we call the water planet, there are two billion people just clinging to life because they don’t have fresh water or sanitary water. That’s a big percentage of a population of seven billion people. Why is that? I don’t know—all of these discoveries we make, what good are they if people can’t treat each other with respect?

We can see infinity with our telescopes, the edges of the universe. We can see the infinitesimal with our microscopes, the very building blocks of nature. On a computer, we can stop a lightning bolt in mid-air and walk around it in 3D. We can speed things up and watch continents collide and watch mountains come and go. We have this incredible perspective of understanding, looking into the past and looking into the future to understand this planet. We can really take advantage of this opportunity, but instead we act like cave people. I don’t get that.

Woods Hole has a very esoteric reputation of being home to hippies and artists and writers and fishermen and scientists—this elite few—but it’s really not quite like that. It’s a diverse place. We have the Marine Biological Laboratory, WHOI, Sea Education Association, United States Geological Survey, National Marine Fisheries—those are all world-class places. It’s mind-boggling that in one tiny spot on Cape Cod, you have this center of gravity for all things ocean.

I think we’re all born with curiosity, and I think my ADD protected me through school (laughs). My teachers couldn’t knock the rough edges off of me. When you get driven by your own curiosity, it doesn’t become a job—it just becomes the way you live your life. At Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, we have 1,200 people all driven by their curiosity and focus on the ocean. It’s an awesome energy, and curiosity is a multiplier. Sometimes you can’t go to sleep because you want to dive deeper into something. No play on words intended.

As I mentioned last week, I’m going to be posting bits and pieces that, due to space constraints, didn’t make it into the 2012 Annual Guide. In this outtake, Todd Marcus, brewmaster at Cape Cod Beer, talks about how he cleaned draught lines to get his foot in the door, the brewery’s community-first ethos, and why I shouldn’t have tossed my plastic cup in the trash after a beer tasting.

I usually say I was gathering intelligence along the way (while I was working for Hyannisport Brewing Company). I even went so far as to work part-time for another local business that was involved in draught line cleaning so I could get into these bars and restaurants on the Cape, talk to the managers and bartenders, learn about their draught systems, what worked and didn’t work, what they liked in the beers that were on tap and what they didn’t like. It allowed me some nice ins later on, after Hyannisport Brewing Company closed, when I would say, “Remember when I was here to clean your draught lines and said that I was thinking about opening a brewery some day? Well, here it is, here’s my beer. What do you think?”

Cape Cod Beer started with Red and IPA. Originally, you could only get the IPA if you had the Red on tap. Having the Red and IPA together meant that if a customer tried the IPA and didn’t like it, but they were still somebody who was interested in trying a craft beer, that they’d try the Red and they’d be happy and satisfied with it. To this day, Cape Cod Red still accounts for more than half of our sales.

Recycling is huge for us—it’s a major part of who we are. We typically put out about one big black bag of trash from the brewery every week. Just about everything else from here gets recycled—all of our plastics, all of our metals. To be perfectly honest, I’m going to go pick up that plastic cup you threw in the trash on the way in here and I’m going to put it in the recycling bin. It’s not your fault. It’s just one of the things I’m going to do.

People know that if they’re going to drink our beer, that money they spent is going to stay here on Cape Cod. I’m going to get my paycheck and I’m going to go to the local hardware store, the local jeweler, the local optician. What comes around goes around.

If you look at our brewery’s retail shop—the books, the candles, the coffee, all that stuff—75 cents of every dollar we spent on retail items last year went to someone on Cape Cod. Now, nobody on Cape Cod is combing cotton to make a T-shirt obviously, but at the very least we’re using local screenprinters, local embroiderers, and as many locally sourced items as we can. We’re a great tourist destination, and we’re trying to help these cottage industries by giving them an outlet. We want to say, “We appreciate what you’re doing, trying to live here and enjoy what Cape Cod has to offer, and that you’re trying to make a living doing what you love as well.” Hopefully, as a result, those people are drinking Cape Cod Beer.

It wasn’t uncommon for each raw interview transcript to number several thousand words–some were 3,000, some 6,000, some even more. But when it comes time to put them into the magazine, we rarely have room for more than 1,000 words of real estate. Editing is horrible subtraction.

So while the brightest moments invariably end up in the magazine, it also means a lot of wonderful stories and sentiments end up on the cutting room floor solely because of the page’s physical space. With that in mind, I’m going to be posting some of my favorite out-takes from the Annual Guide over the next little while. I’m starting with Bob Finch.

photo by Dan Cutrona

My mother, who passed away about five years, was a great reader and a strong supporter of me as a writer, but we had very different tastes–her favorite writer was Danielle Steel. She came to me one day and said, “Bob, I really love your books, but couldn’t you write a potboiler, something with a lot of sex and violence in it?” And I said, “Mom, I do, but nobody notices because it’s not humans!” (laughs)

I can’t complain too much about being called a nature writer because I was complicit in establishing it as an official genre. But I guess what I’m trying to say is I sort of fell into the whole business of nature writing. It was never my intent and never how I thought of myself. In a way, I felt something of a fraud because I was not a trained naturalist and I was not primarily an environmental writer. My books weren’t about the importance of the environment, although I did a lot of conservation work when I lived in Brewster. But I always try to keep my environmental activism separate from my writing. That’s an ongoing dilemma for a lot of nature writers—I know some who really agonize over it. What they love, like I do, is the freedom to write about what most interests us. And yet they feel this pressure, this responsibility with that’s happening to the earth—which none of us disagrees with—to try to get people to act, to try to change people’s minds.

A peaceful photo of Osterville in early February.

Have a great photo that you want to share? Submit it to our Annual Photo Contest!

Celebrity sighting at the Cape & Plymouth Business Connect 2011! Cape Cod Life Publications’ Director of Sales Steve Dewey, Web & Print Advertising Designer Jennifer Dow and capecodlife.com Sales Representative Julie Wagner with Troy Brown, part owner and spokesperson for Narragansett Beer and former New England Patriots football player.

Last weekend I walked around the old cranberry bog on Bumps River Road close to our house with my best friend and our dogs and all around us nature was giving a flamboyant goodbye to summer . . .always a bittersweet time on Cape Cod and the Islands. It is hard to let go of that glorious golden time every year. As I said in the just released 2011 winter issue of Cape Cod HOME, I am always sad when the hydrangeas—that emblem of Cape Cod—begin to turn from intense blue—just like the sky over a Cape beach in summer—to muted greens, grays, and soft purples.

We have lots of hydrangeas surrounding our old Cape house, in beds around the yard—these show-stopping beauties burst into bloom around the end of June and perform their hearts out until around mid-October. A few weeks ago when my husband, Steve, and I were doing our fall clean-up (raking, raking raking!), I decided to take a break and make a few hydrangea wreaths. These wreaths can be done with blossoms that still hold color, or even those that have faded to that lovely beige color, kind of like old lace.

We just love the 2012 Vineyard Seadogs Calendar, available here. Says calendar creator and wildlife photographer Lisa Vanderhoop:

“The cover dog this year is Ensign, an adorable little Border Terrier. He is owned by Ben and Maria Batsch who captain and run Maurice Templesman’s yacht the Relemar during the summer months here on the Vineyard. Maurice just adores Ensign and can be seen walking the little guy everyday during the summer in Menemsha.”

Buy calendars ($16) and other artwork at vineyardseadogs.com. Part of the proceeds from the calendars will go the Animal Shelter of Martha’s Vineyard!