Cotuit: Tuesday-Wednesay 9/7-9/8

NYC : Thursday 9/10

Philadelphia: Friday 9/11

Short week due to yesterday’s holiday. It’s like a switch has been thrown on Main Street here in the village. Even though summer seems to end in mid-August the number of cars swooshing past has dropped to crawl of contractors and tradesmen and the occasional school bus filled with sad students. Off to NYC for more job interviews, then perhaps Philly before returning late Friday night.

From the Cape Cod Times:

HYANNIS – A man forgot to wear more than his waders when he went out clamming Friday afternoon off Harbor Bluff Road.

Police arrested Savery Antone, 38, of Falmouth, for open and gross lewdness, after he was seen clamming in 2 feet of water completely in the buff around 4:30 p.m. Friday, said Sgt. Sean Sweeney.

A neighbor called the police to say Antone was offending residents and beachgoers alike.

When police arrived they saw Antone and a male friend about 35 feet offshore in the shallow water.

Antone had a bucket to collect shellfish. His genitals were above water and in full view, Sweeney said.

When police called him on shore, they noticed his slurred speech, and placed him in protective custody, and charged him with open and gross lewdness.

via Naked clammer arrested in Hyannis | CapeCodOnline.com.

Fizzled. Non-starter. Lots of rain, some puffy gusts, then off it went, falling apart to the north. We never lost power, the chainsaws aren’t singing their september song, and now to resume our regularly scheduled late summer activities.

Since alcohol and tropical depressions fit hand in glove, we sat on my cousin’s porch dressed like crab fishermen in orange Grundens, drinking dark and stormy’s (dark rum and ginger beer) watching the gusts blow bursts of rain down Main Street. An expedition to the town dock to stand on the end and face into the howling northeast breeze, and back to the porch to tell stories of storms past and grouse about how Earl was such a dud. One of the sure signs of approaching senescence is my happiness over non-storms. People too young to have lived through a week of coffee brewed on the weber grill and 19th century lifestyle options (you go to bed when it is dark, bathe in cold water, smell bad), tend to miss the big display of nature’s special effects the most.

Now to put the boat back in the water, return the big boat to its normal mooring, and figure out how to get in three Skiff races before Monday’s prize ceremony. And I have a heck of a hangover ….

Click here to view the embedded video.

Ironically recorded in 1938, the September that saw the Great Hurricane of ’38 totally trash Long Island and New England.

The yacht club dock was pulled on Friday morning — a big group effort marshaled by Conrad Geyser, the yacht club’s wharfinger. The grounds were cleared of any potential flying debris, the doors locked and the place put to bed until tomorrow when we’ll probably start returning the skiffs to the water for the final Labor Day series. The dock had  been scheduled to come out on Saturday, so the timing was right.

Click here to view the embedded video.

I made a final check on my sailboat, riding pretty on its hurricane mooring off of Cordwood Landing. 2,000 pounds and some chafing gear and winds out of the northeast and I should be copacetic.

The first winds are hitting us now at 8 pm, and should escalate up to 40 or 50 mph. No rain yet, the first bands are just crossing Nantucket. Earl is still a category 1 hurricane, but it has tracked far enough east of the outer Cape that we should see tropical storm conditions and nothing apocalyptic. I’m betting we lose lights around midnight when some limbs come down on the wires, but other than that. Shouldn’t be too terrible.

Today was a ballbuster – starting with the purchase of a new chainsaw, two gallons of gas, some files,  more flashlight batteries. But otherwise a sunny, hot day, finding me glued to the National Weather Service for the 8 am advisory, then out to the big boat for one last round of worrying and fiddling. As I was ready to leave my phone flashed a voice mail from a friend who said to call him, he had another alternative for me to ride out the maelstrom.  As his boat is in Rhode Island his 2,000 pound hurricane buoy was vacant and I was welcome to it. I jumped into the motorboat, headed up harbor to check it out, phoned his wife, went ashore to pick up a mooring bridle, and an hour later was riding on a massive mooring with a mooring float the size of half-submerged Volkswagen.

That was the morning. As soon as I got ashore I scarfed a lunch and headed back out with my son to start bringing the Cotuit Skiff fleet ashore for the planned 5 pm pulling of the boats. The Cotuit version of a barn raising only somewhat in reverse. We pulled the boats ashore with the motorboat two at a time, lining them up along the yacht club beach — back and forth for two hours until some reserves arrived and another boat was pressed into service. I turned to the yacht club’s motorboats and other equipment and at 5 the pulling began to accelerate, with four trucks and trailers in constant circulation between the boat ramp and the beach and the Ropes Field at the top of the hill, a big four acre pasture near the ballpark where the fleet has always sought refuge during big blows.

The field filled up over the span of two hours, and just as the sun set and the boat ramp was clogged with panicked boat owners trying to get their boasts out before darkness, I made one last run for a friend, got his catboat into the field, then locked things up and waited for another friend to return from a hurricane hole in Popponesset Bay where he was stashing his antique catboat for the duration.

The Cape and Islands are operating under a hurricane warning. The current track has it passing sixty miles east of Chatham — that’s eighty miles from me, but it seems pretty certain that we’re going to be under hurricane conditions from 8 pm Friday until dawn Saturday, with three to six inches of rain, sustained winds of 50 knots, and gusts into the 70s.

I’ll make one last run out to the big boat in the morning, check the chafing gear, then help pull the yacht club pier out of the water.  My motorboat will get hauled, then a late trip for a ton of ice since we’re certain to lose power and the refrigerators will fail, then settle in for an increasingly wild afternoon, culminating with a full hit at nightfall.

Seventy years ago I’d be oblivious to what was coming. Now I know too much and what I know sucks. Starting Sunday I started keeping an eye on Hurricane Earl, a category 4 storm that is now forecasted to pass extremely close offshore of Cape Cod. Very close.

The last forecast from the National Weather Service put Cape Cod on a hurricane watch – meteorological speak that it’s time to consider the options and possibilities. With a 33′ sloop sitting on a 500 pound mooring less than half a mile away, I am definitely considering the options and none of them, with 48 hours to go, are great. So this morning I went to the firehouse and asked the chief for some old firehose, grateful when he cut me off a couple sections of 2″ hose so I could split them and wrap them around the mooring pennants where they rub in the boat’s chocks. My son and I brought the boat into the town down and took down the sails and the bimini awning, anything to reduce the windage and prevent the wind from picking open the sails and causing definite mayhem. I’ll return tomorrow to lash things down and fret some more.

My options now are:

1. Stay on the mooring, hope the forecast holds, go to bed and pray the mooring holds for eight hours of 50 knot winds and some gusts over 60 miles per hour.  The tackle is only two years old, I’m on the outside edge of the mooring field, and right now the wind direction is out of the north, over land, so I will get some protection in the lee, but not a lot. The worst direction, if we were in the northeastern quadrant of the cyclone, would be south or southeast, then the entire length or fetch of the harbor would kick up some very big waves.  The other fear is the storm surge, but thankfully low tide is at 2 am, so the peak of the winds will come as the water is falling, not rising.
2. Stay on the mooring but also stay on the boat. This means actually sitting out the storm with a lifeline wrapped around me, tied to the helm, with a pair of swim goggles to keep the driving rain from blinding me, and then using the diesel and the throttle to keep the boat into the wind and the pressure off of the mooring. This is the crazy man option.
3. Try to get it pulled tomorrow morning, but that is not a sure thing — the hauler has to be in the mood and he is sure to have an extremely hectic day. That entails a trip to the dock, a visit by the crane truck to pull the mast, then a trip up into Prince’s Cove to be hauled and then parked in the back yard by the trees on four jackstands. Hurricane Bob in 1991 did some massive tree damage and who knows if the jackstands would keep the boat upright anyway. Hauling means no fall sailing – once out, then the boat is out and the season is over.
4. If it comes ashore — well, it comes ashore and the damage will be bad. Nothing to do but shrug and hope it doesn’t.

I’ve got a 18′ motorboat to pull — that will come out right at the last minute on Friday afternoon. A friend needs to borrow it to get his catboat tucked away into a hurricane hole inside of Shoestring Bay on the west side of town in the next series of bays. To make things more interesting I just became president of the association of the Cotuit Mosquito Yacht Club, and tomorrow is going to be spent making sure the yacht club’s launches are taken care, of the dock is pulled, the kid’s boats are stowed, and then 50 Cotuit skiffs hauled and stored in the Ropes Field to ride things out.  Hurricane boat pulls are the Cotuit version of an old fashioned barn raising. Several cars with trailers, a couple crews on the beach to de-rig and pull masts, another team on the water in motorboats hauling in the boats, then another crew with 4″ x 4″s to lift the boats on the trailers and another in the field to lift them off. Tomorrow ought to be busy, especially if this heavy heat persists.

The phone has been ringing all day, and everywhere you go the question is the same: “Do you think it will hit?” Smart money says it goes east off of Chatham, putting us in the northwest quadrant where the counter-clockwise spin means the winds will come in from the landside.  Forecast has it 30 miles southeast of Nantucket . That’s 50 miles from where I sit. Way too close. Way, way too close. Let’s hope it stays out there. A short jog to the west and complete devasation is a sure thing if it comes ashore. Bob was barely a hurricane and we were without lights for nearly a week, the tree damage was incredible, every pissed off homeless yellow jacket on the Cape was out for revenge …. and nearly every boat in the harbor was trashed and thrown onto the beach. If Earl does the same it will not be a very good September. All the food will spoil. People will snarl at each other in the gas lines at the gas station. I guess i need to go buy a chainsaw and a new power washer. The first lesson learned from Bob is wash the house as soon as possible given that every green leaf in the neighborhood gets shredded to confetti and pasted to the paint with salt spray. Lawn furniture to stow away … badminton nets, hummingbird feeders ….. tomorrow is going to be a long, long day.

Here’s the wind profile: The little flags point in the direction the wind will come from and the small bars indicate the wind velocity. Sustained winds over 70 mph make for a hurricane. The forecast has us gusting with peaks around 65 mph. Sunset to 3 am … it’s going to be a long nasty night. And if the power goes — well, no blogging for a long time to say the least.

Think I’m over-reacting? Napatree Point – 1938

The integration of telephony into Google Gmail this week is realization of a long standing desire on my part to be able to easily initiate a phone call from my contact list. For phone intensive users, like reporters, the ability to search for a contact, hit a call button, and be connected in seconds can’t be underestimated.

While Google’s move was judged a Skype-killer by some, the war is not on who’s platform initiates the call, but what contact list dominates the user’s attention.  Contact management is a massive pain in the ass — the history of Personal Information Management starting with flat file databases like AskSam in the 1980s, up through Lotus Organizer, ACT! then Microsoft Outlook, Lotus Notes — all seemed to divide a user’s world between the enterprise directory and their own personal method of organizing friends, phone numbers, email address, birthdays, etc.. Migrating a contact list from one system to another was an evil process of CSV export files and the usual comma-delimited b.s. designed to lock one’s world into a single system. Throw a cell phone into the mix, and things became uglier and uglier to sync.

Skype’s contact management is meager — essentially no more than a list of names on a par with any standard IM client. It doesn’t integrate with one’s other lists and stands alone, as a window within a window, with few hooks out to other contact management services.

Google has underplayed its contact management capabilities in Gmail, but it is obvious that of its suite of applications, Gmail is become the keystone and as such, some overdue attention is being paid to contact management. Adding the capability to call from that list is a wonderful feature, and Skype and others need to quickly build hooks into those lists and make it possible to extend their client or risk being stranded on their own desert island.

The deterioration of the estuaries, bays and harbors of Cape Cod has come to the point where action is demanded. The death of the region’s eelgrass beds, the rafts of vile slimy algae and “sea lettuce”, the closing of beaches and the general decline is probably only visible to someone my age who can recall the gin-clear waters of the early 60s which were destroyed by the subdivision sprawl that raped the Cape in the 1970s and 80s. The solution? Tax the heck out of the residents and build a massive sewer/wastewater treatment system. Even so, the waters will likely take decades to clear, and the likely impact of the sewers will be to encourage yet more development as they have on Long Island.

There’s no turning back now, but leave it to the Conservation Law Foundation (of which I am a dues paying member) to force the EPA and local towns to wake up and deal with the mess caused by ignorant selectmen and planning boards who let the locals cash in their land for quarter-acre zoning and acres of cesspool leeching subdivisions.

“Joined by the Coalition for Buzzards Bay, the Conservation Law Foundation has sued the federal Environmental Protection Agency for failing to “adequately permit and regulate the discharge of nitrogen into the Cape’s water.”

“CLF and the Coalition also sent EPA, the Cape Cod Commission and the Barnstable County Commission (board of county commissioners) a 60-day notice that it intends to sue them for failing “to implement an areawide Water Quality Management Plan, also in violation of the Clean Water Act.”

via The Barnstable Patriot – UPDATE: CLF sues EPA over Cape wastewater cleanup.

Vern Graebel, the founder of my ISP, Cape.com, was walking down the hill to Ropes Beach after a Cotuit Kettleer’s baseball game a few weeks ago. I caught up to him and we started talking about sailing and a particularly great spot to spend the night, Tarpaulin Cove on Naushon Island, the largest of the Elizabeths. I shared my fear of anchoring there and dragging during the night and how anchor-dragging-paranoia made it tough for me to get a good night’s sleep aboard the sloop.

“There’s an app for that,” Vern said, drawing his Motorola Droid out of his pocket. And indeed there was, “Anchor Alert” — an cool little $15 app that uses the GPS receiver in the smartphone to determine one’s position. You anchor, pay out so many feet of chain and line, determine the length of scope of that, and tell Anchor Alert which then draws a series of concentric circles with your “anchor” in the middle and an icon of your boat out the specified length from the mooring point. Using the GPS’s  accuracy rating, the program waits until you move N feet away from the radius of the circle formed by your anchor and boat. Slip 30 feet and you receive an alarm (or a SMS if you aren’t aboard).

I use my HTC EVO for a few other nautical tasks. I may need to invest in a decent waterproof case (I use a kayak bag to keep it dry now), and the battery life with the GPS enabled is pretty sucky. But …. it is amazingly useful for some essential tasks.

• Tides: I use “TideApp” to give me the times for high and lower water at any of the dozen locations I sail to. It also gives me essential data about the ebb and flow times of the current, an essential aid in navigation for determining the offset of one’s course caused by the lateral forces of the moving water.
• Chart Plotter: Okay, so it isn’t a $3000 binnacle mounted Garmin chart plotter with integrated radar — that has to wait for more flush financial times, but the Navionics USAEast chart pack is awesome for giving me an accurate and detailed fix on a valid NOAA nautical chart. This is a little expensive at around $15, but it is great to have a precise fix when I need it on the water. I use it sporadically because of the battery draw down, but suppose I could rig some 12v car adapter sort of rig to keep it going 100% of the time. Again — smartphones and the cockpit of a sloop in Nantucket Sound are not a felicitous combination, keeping the thing dry is a constant worry.
• Google Sky: “Give me a tall ship and star to steer her by …” It’s been years since I’ve taken a noon shot with a sextant (something I might brush back up on this winter), but knowing the stars while at sea is always good fun and Google’s star map is awesome to play with.

Any sailors out there have other apps to recommend?

Memoirs are generally untrustworthy affairs, especially when penned or ghost-penned by retired politicians or athletes seeking to cash in on their glories with a fat advance and a chance to put onto the record their version of the past with no arguments or contradictions. But rare is the memoir of a man of letters, a literary autobiography as it were. Some writers, like Steven King, have written strong reflections on the craft of the writer, weaving in their own life’s plot as a framework, but for the most, the autobiography is at best an opportunity for we readers to be taken into the conspiratorial confidences of the tale-teller and given a version of events that at best is written with the same verbal grace as their non-Onastic work, and at worse whitewashes controversy and settles past feuds with the awesome singularity of the printed page.

Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Melville, Hemingway … few literary lions have written about themselves, indeed some like Pynchon are impressive in keeping their biographies off of the page, and limited to but a few cryptic paragraphs on the edge of the dust-jacket and end papers.  Literature resists critical psychoanalysis and the text is supposed to speak for itself, but yet the reader wants more insights into the dark influences behind the fiction: hence the cottage industry a few years back into tell-all biographies of John Cheever, the tortured alcoholic chronicler of Mad Men-era suburban New York and Westchester. The result was a bit embarrassing in the end.

I have not been a close fan of the political journalist Christopher Hitchens over the years. His work in Vanity Fair has occasionally come into view, but I haven’t been a fan in the sense of buying his books and seeking out his work in the Nation and television talking head-fests. For some reason I bought his memoir Hitch-22 and have been picking away at it this summer, slowly immersing myself into the life of what could be one of the last true British men-of-letters. That he has esophageal cancer didn’t come to my attention until I was half-way through the book, a relief as I am glad I didn’t come to the book with some morbid rubber-necking as a motivation. I had first become aware of him when he assailed my former employer, The Lawrence Eagle-Tribune, and my late colleague, Susie Forrest, for their first Pulitzer Prize for reporting the Willie Horton scandal during Michael Dukakis’ failed run for the presidency in 1988.   Then came this astonishing video of Hitchens undergoing waterboarding so he could report on the experience first hand.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The book is remarkable and opens with the type of astonishing development that any novelist would crave. Hitchen’s mother, a relentlessly self-improving English woman hiding her Jewish roots from the strictures of post-WW II English society, abandons her career naval officer husband and ends her life in a lonely Athens hotel room with her new lover. The effect, the development puts into place a foundation for the rest of the tale that never relents.

Hitchens intelligence and ambitions are unwavering. His mind is obviously astonishing. But it is is dogged refusal to back down from a life-long hatred of totalitarianism, to proudly wear the jingoistic labels of “Trotskyist,” to reject religion and faith and willingly face his attackers that makes this work a true profile in courage. His early calls for the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, his proud embrace of American citizenship despite an upbringing as the consummate Englishman, his love of the language and the fun of word play …. in the end it combines into what I have to declare is my favorite literary autobiography ever.