Cruise Ship Hits Railroad Bridge On Cape Cod Canal

Oops!

The Viking Star, a 900 passenger cruise ship, struck the railroad bridge on the Cape Cod Canal yesterday.

No one was injured, and the bridge seems to have just lost some paint. US Army Corps Of Engineers workers heard scraping sounds as the tall cruise ship worked through the Cape's favorite man-made river.

The railroad bridge is 135 feet over the water. I have no idea how tall the Viking Star is, and I looked, too. I'm guessing 135 feet and 6 inches. it either has 9 decks or 14 decks, depending on if you believe the Cape Cod Times or Wikipedia.

I actually watched the Viking Star as she approached the Bourne Bridge, but I was too far away and behind too many trees to see much of it. There were reports on Facebook that she also hit the Bourne Bridge, but nothing is turning up on those there Internets.

We'll keep you updated. You never know if the diagnosis will be worse once they look at it with the daylight.

It was just like that, just with a larger boat and contact.

Cape Cod Canal-Only Fog

This was Saturday's fog, but there was a slight release delay as I pondered the "terrible pics of a cool phenomena" question.

I lacked the testicular fortitude to dash across the four lanes and shoot through the bars. This is what I would imagine that prison looks like in Heaven. 

The fog was the result of some temperature contrast between "cold morning" and "warm water." I was shooting from the side where the sun had been shining on the Canal longer.... or the people on the Cape side be smokin' up a few bales of that sticky-icky-icky. 

I kind of one-two'd these shots quickly, mostly to show how the fog was creeping over Buzzards Bay.

I'll get a better camera some day, honest.

South Shore Saturday Storm Surf Shots

We had a steady East wind yesterday, so we took to the road to see how local beaches were looking. This decision was greatly influenced by me having nothing to do.

We started off in Scituate, because.. well, why not Scituate? I know people who say that you shouldn't start anywhere but Scituate. I wanted to be in Scituate before high tide, be in Marshfield for high tide, and then just move back towards Cape Cod until the wave pics started to get weak.

My girl has taken a few waves to the face, I'm sure. Having your house look like the front bow of a ship is pure New England Coastal, player. I lack the skills as a writer to tell you how cool this guy's house is.

The wind wasn't too bad, and the surf is nothing worthy of a George Clooney movie. Like I said, I had some free time.

Anyone who grew up on a beach knows that this is an incoming wave that got smacked up by a wave ahead of it that was rebounding off of the seawall. I was in Marshfield by this point, and it was high tide. I was very pleased to see that I still have the instinct where I know when a wave will throw water over the wall, and managed to get behind the car door before this wave soaked everyone who was watching it with me.

Marshfield was fun, as there was some splashover happening. It was a change, being soaked by the waves instead of the rain. I had to change clothes not once but twice getting the pics for this article, but that's how I roll, people. If you're the family who came around the corner of the Pavilion while I was changing at Duxbury Beach.... the giant nude guy says "Sorry." I also apologize to the commenter on a previous article who noted that I tend to tilt the horizon on my shots. I've been working on that, but sometimes the wind wins.

There were no lifeguards on duty at Duxbury Beach yesterday. I did hook the seagull up with some of my turkey sandwich, just in case you think that I don't compensate my models. I don't think that Green harbor was that foggy, I was having a lot of trouble getting even one shot off without the camera lens getting spotted up by the rain. I have a rotten camera, and the lifeguard chair shouldn't be looking that good when the housing behind it looks that bad.

Duxbury has to do this to the seawall boat-ramp opening because the ocean smashed through 6 inch thick hardwood planks when they used to use those. If they don't put that iron plate there, this opening births an ocean river flowing into a residential neighborhood.

I usually shoot the residential part of Duxbury Beach, but I really didn't feel like getting out of the car if I could avoid it. I was soaked. I went to the Bath House, but I ended up having to get out of the car anyhow. As you have probably guessed, I got soaked.

What happens if you assume a bad Cuban accent and yell "Hey, Pelican!!" at a heron over and over.... at least that's what happens on Duxbury 's marshes. 

Plymouth, Cedarville to be precise, was our next stop. I poached my way into the White Hills Country Club for some above-the-fray shooting. This is from around where their 18th hole is,  That rock structure is called a Groyne.

Even small waves erode the heck out of those sand cliffs. That's why they are willing to risk the goofing that comes with installing a Groyne. 

Cape Cod Canal... this is a jetty, not a groyne.

Sagamore gets maximum barrier beach protection from Cape Cod.

Sandwich looked pretty calm from where I was standing. Time to wrap it up.

Is It Possible To Jump The Cape Cod Canal In A Car?

The story of a man who drove his car into the Cape Cod Canal grabbed headlines this week. They say it was a suicide attempt, and they're probably correct. However, what if it were a little bit more than a suicide attempt?

I may be 100% wrong, but I can't shake the feeling that the man in the Ford Focus may have been trying to jump the Cape Cod Canal. I'm thinking of an effort akin to Evel Knievil's attempt to jump a rocket over Idaho's Snake River Canyon in 1974.

While suicide is a rotten option to choose, one must admire the man who tries to do it with Style. I'd bet that 100 people have jumped to their deaths into the Canal, but perhaps only one (I'm being told someone may have tried it in the 1940s) guy tried to kill himself while jumping over it.

There's an All Or Nothing, Death or Glory sort of hardcore appeal to this act. If you're going to push all of your chips onto the table and ask for the Eternal Answer, you may as well do so while crossing the most dangerous item off of your bucket list. When the one thing that you're normally afraid of losing when pondering ridiculous stunts has no worth, stunt-planning moves along much more quickly.

The Canal is incidental to this story. If this guy lived in Buffalo, I'd imagine that he'd probably have gone over Niagara Falls in a barrel. If he lived in Rwanda, he'd have slapped a silverback in the face. If he lived in Pripyat, he'd run have around nude and drank from the streams.

The plan was flawed for many reasons, some of which were apparent immediately. Other flaws reveal themselves to the expert (or the guy who spent a morning researching Stunt Jumping) upon deeper examination.

For starters.... if you try to kill yourself and live, your plan had flaws. You become the Polish kamikaze pilot from the 1970s joke book.

If you assign the man a higher motivation than suicide, you must also point out more specific flaws. His jump across the Canal ended 40 feet away- an impressive jump, but not one that you'd need to clear the 450 foot wide Cape Cod Canal.

I was undersexed as a kid, and therefore spent most of my Physics classes staring at legs... but I did stay on-task long enough to pick up some vocabulary that will come in handy here. The plan had fatal flaws (fatal flaws in a suicide attempt produce a Bizzaro-style polar opposite effect where the jumper lives) in the areas of Speed, Mass, Acceleration, Incline, Resistance and Drag.

There was also a pine tree-sized hole in his Exit Strategy plan, but we'll get to that later.

If you open Google Maps and look at the area at the end of Perry Avenue, it will help with comprehension. You'll notice that Perry Avenue is a straight drag, and you'll see an odd structure at the end of it. That's Three Mile Look, which serves as a Canal observation point 99.99999% of the time and as a ramp .000001% of the time. It is the smaller of the two numbers that concerns us today.

Three Mile Look isn't what a stunt man is looking for in a ramp. Other attempts to jump larger rivers involved an almost vertical climb. The other jumps also didn't involve the driver smashing through wooden railings before takeoff.

Three Mile Look also is about 2 stories above the Canal, maybe 3. An object falls 9.8 meters a second for every second that it is in the air. the Canal is 450 feet wide, about 1.5 football fields.

There's other math, but it confuses me. You could use Real Math, which means solving the  s=ut+½at² equation.Good luck with that.

I prefer to use Vin Diesel Math, which is where I find an article written in a science journal about a similar jump performed in one of those Fastest And Furiousest movies. I hope this math works for you, because we may also get into Burt Reynolds Math and Keannu Reeves Math if we tangent off into the Smokey And The Bandit or  Speed franchises.

Vin is in Dubai, way the hell up in the Etihad Tower Complex. The limey guy from The Transporter movie is chasing him with a rocket launcher. Even though he's on the 45th floor of a skyscraper, there happens to be a $3 million Lykan HyperSport supercar all fueled up and ready to aid in Vin's escape.

Vin gets it up to 100 mph in an apartment living room (the Lykan, of which only 7 were made, can reach that speed in 2.8 seconds)`and then jumps the car out of one building into one nearby, dropping a few stories in the process.

The buildings are 100 yards apart, a bit more narrow of a distance than the Canal, but my Math flaws will erase those distances.

The Lykan HyperSport has a top speed of 240 mph, considerably higher than even the best Ford Focus out there. They both weigh 3000 pounds or so. The guy jumping the Canal has one advantage over Diesel (two, if you count "isn't that worried about dying") in that he has all of Perry Avenue to use to build up what isn't that difficult of a speed to obtain. Perry Avenue is about 50 feet longer than the distance he'd have to jump. He might need to be going 150 MPH, but we'll worry about that later.

If you're keeping score at home, he has a shot at going fast enough, but he doesn't have enough ramp to get the necessary height with which he could drift a bit.

That height is important, because it will take him 3 seconds to get across the Canal at 100 mph, and he'll be losing speed as he flies. Every second that he is falling, he loses about 30 feet of height. Granted, he'll be going up for part of the flight, but 30 foot drops every second of descent aren't what you're looking for when your launch ramp is 30 feet high.

Acceleration at the point of launch is also important, as it is what keeps your nose from landing first. Speaking of landings, the Canal guy would have been in for a painful one had he gotten across the Canal. The only flat surface is the bike path, which is 30 feet across or so. It is bordered on either side by boulders and forest.

Ironically, he would have landed on Perry Avenue if he made the jump. I just noticed this now, but it appears that Perry Avenue was split in half by the construction of the Canal. He'd need a stout East wind, as the Cape side of Perry Avenue is to the west of where the mainland Perry Avenue ends. Fortunately, or perhaps after years of planning and waiting, the attempt to leap the Canal was performed during a Tropical Storm where Bourne was suffering stiff east winds.

It sounds so crazy, it has to be true. Cape Cod has a FTW-style Evel Knievil. He's just not that swift. "A" for effort, though... maybe an "A+" for imagination.

How would a professional handle the same leap?

For starters, some trees would have to come down. Three Mile Look, for all of her flaws as a launching ramp, is better than the Three Hundred Trees any jumper would land into on the other side of the Canal. Three Mile Look would have to be rebuilt with greater incline. A lot of trees would have to come down on the Cape side.

He'd probably need a car that is much more modified than the Ford Focus. The speed needed to jump would be easy enough to attain with a modified vehicle. However, this is where I should point out that, for all of his broken bones, Evel Knievil was never injured during his jumps. He was injured by his landings. I don't know how they modify cars to do stunt jumps, but they'd have to find out and do that.

Evel was jumping a river three times as wide as our Canal. He was also using a steam rocket. Vin Diesel did his jump in a car that can outrun a F-16 until takeoff. Burt Reynolds and Sally Fields only had to jump a stream.

Reynolds' jump over a dismantled bridge was more in the range of what the Canal guy should have tried. That jump was made with a rocket similar to what Evel Knievil used for his Snake River jump, as a 1977 Trans-Am wasn't powerful enough for the leap. It covered about the same 40 foot distance that the Canal jumper managed, and took off from a similar height. It was driven by a stuntman.

It also destroyed the car, which tells you all that you need to know about the feasibility of jumping a regular-person car across the Cape Cod Canal.

Naming Post-Secession Mainland Cape Cod

When the traffic gets bad enough and pols start talking about making residents pay tolls to cross a theoretical third bridge, people who live in the mainland areas of Bourne and Sandwich start getting angry. When that anger boils up enough, you even hear talk of secession.

"We lost any financial benefits from Cape traffic in 1985. Start our own town, demand financial concessions from Cape Cod for the traffic, and dump both bridges into the Canal if the Cape says no" is the general tone of secession talk.

I'm not going to support the "dump the bridges" talk, as it is terrorism and might kill someone. I'm also not here to push Secession. It's a fun conversation piece, and it might get me some site visits, but I'm simply not the man with the answers you'd need if you wanted to get the movement going. I'm not sure how it would be done, nor am I sure if it is even a good idea.

I'll leave those questions for a future article, most likely one written in August when I just took 90 minutes to get through the Belmont Circle rotary. Instead, I will take on something that I am completely capable of doing... naming the post-secession town.

We're going to work from a fictional scenario where Buzzards Bay, Bournedale, Sagamore Beach and Scusset Beach have all broken away from Bourne, Sandwich and perhaps even whatever parts of Wareham and Plymouth (why not go for everything east of Red Brook and all of the Great Herring Pond area?) we could get our hands on.

The resultant bow-tie shaped town would need many things, but the main thing it would need is a name. We've kicked around a few, and we'll share some of them with you now. There's no ranking, even if the staff have their own personal favorites.

- Gridlock

"Gridlock" would be a form of protest. It would speak of the new town's plight, while concurrently scaring away tourists who would otherwise clutter up our roads. It would be easy to remember, it would gain us amazing name-recognition value, and might invite investment.

"Gridock" was chosen from among several staff suggestions for traffic-related town names, edging out equally awesome but less serious contenders such as "Jam City, Massachusetts, " "Road Rage, Massachusetts," "Slow Lane, Massachusetts" and "Bumper-to-Bumper, Massachusetts."

"Bumper-to-Bumper" would have a sort of Stratford-upon-Avon sound to it, and would pair us with "Manchester-by-the-Sea" as the only town names in the state with hyphens in them. We'd also join them as the only town names with Prepositions in them.


- Ripton

"Ripton" was the name of a fictional Berkshires town that an awesome western Massachusetts pol (Editor's note: it was a UMass-Amherst professor) invented. He was able to apply for grants, and even got Ripton included in the state budget. He did Ripton's work so well, he was able to obtain state funds for the fictional community. He gave the money back, as he was less interested in Fraud and more interested in pointing out that the state government lacks Western Massachusetts awareness.

Anyhow, my financial adviser- who I will admit up front is in jail at the moment- tells me that he's "pretty sure" that state funds were collected and set aside for Ripton, and that if a Ripton should suddenly appear, they would be owed both the original sum of money and any interest accrued since Ripton's 1980s inclusion in the state budget.


- Capeside

Not a lot of TV shows were set on Cape Cod and the Islands (I can only think of one other one, Wings), but one of the best was Dawson's Creek. I don't think that I saw enough DC to tell you what it was actually about, but it launched the careers of Katie Holmes, James Van Der Beek, Michelle Williams and that other kid.

If you were a child of the 1990s and didn't arc a few to Katie Holmes... nice restraint, brother.

The "Capeside" town scenes in Dawson's Creek were actually filmed in Wilmington, North Carolina, and any Massachusetts scenery used in the show was filmed in Oak Bluffs. However, why not steal the name? As you can see from the entries above and below this one in the article, it's not like we have any better ideas.

"Capeside" edges out several other fictional town names that we wished to steal from TV, movies or literature, including "Amity," "Crabapple Cove," "Dunwich, "Wallencamp," "Peyton Place," "Gotham City," "Atlantis," "Jerusalem's Lot," "Dudleyville" and "Quahog."

- Wutham

Pronounced what-ham, it would be a goof on neighboring Wareham. We'd spell it "Whatham," but we wish to avoid GPS errors with Waltham.

We'd need Marion to change their name to Whoham in order to complete the trinity.


- Sagamore

"Sagamore" is probably the logical choice, although it would be complicated in that the actual village of Sagamore is on the Cape side of the Canal.

We might have to name the town "Scusset Beach," which would force us to  negotiate something with what would most likely be a very hostile Sandwich town government.

The "Scusset Beach" thing would be unfair to the Buzzards Bay part of the new town, while a "Buzzards Bay" naming would be unfair to Sagamore Beach.


Shark City

Assuming that we are unable to cut a concession for traffic from Cape Cod, and assuming that we lack the testicular fortitude to destroy the Canal bridges.... well, not all fights are physical.

If we can't take the physical means of going to Cape Cod away, why not attack them through tourism?

There would be no way of driving a car to Cape Cod without going past the NOW ENTERING SHARK CITY signs which we would dot the highway with. I'd even post the population on town signs, and cross it out every time someone died... you know, like they do in bad towns from cowboy movies.

Sure, most of those deaths would be Old Age, Cancer and so forth....  but you won't be thinking that when you drive past the Shark City sign.

Double Bay

One thing that this fictional town would have on every other town in the state would be the fact that we would be the only town to touch two (Buzzards Bay and Cape Cod Bay) bays.

If you count Buttermilk Bay, we could even be Triple Bay.

This one is here mostly because it would make a great Casino name. If we stole enough of Wareham's eastern and Plymouth's southern forests, we could build a mega-casino right off the highway.

Shoot, I'd leave the bridges up at that point. Who wants to go to Taunton or friggin' Everett when you can instead gamble all night in Double Bay, and then dip over to Cape Cod for some daylight beach time?

Bowtie

"Bowtie" would be a play on the shape of the new town. Yes, it sucks.

Keeping the theme, but changing the shape.... this (and the Casino) would be a big motivator for the Wareham and Pymouth land grabs. If we seize the Ponds sections of Wareham and Plymouth, we'd be shaped like a mini-Connecticut.

Squanto

"Squanto" beats out "Samoset," "Metacomet," and "Massasoit" for Algonquin tribute purposes.

Squanto has the best Q Rating, and would be the best tourist-drawing name.

I don't know how we could do it, but maybe Johnny Depp or the Farrelly Brothers could be convinced to re-invent Squanto as an action hero. Maybe he goes all Seagal on invading Mi'kmaq, or perhaps he even kills a Sasquatch that was menacing Priscilla Alden. Squanto's story is an amazing one, but it needs more kung-fu and dinosaurs if he's getting his own town

Have Any Better Ideas? Let us know in the Comments...

Bourne, Fishing And Stan Gibbs

Bourne is a nautical town. We are where the state decided to put her Maritime Academy. We're the first clam shacks and fish huts you see when entering Cape Cod. We're named after a guy who was named after a harbor... in fact, the harbor may actually be named for him, I've got to Google that some time.

Not only are we surrounded by water, we're divided by water. You can't go from Sagamore to Pocasset without dealing with that Canal. However, Bourne residents love their little man-made ocean river, even if it sort of curses us with gridlock every weekend.

One of the reasons we love our Canal is that it has some superb fishing. It is essentially a river between Buzzards Bay and Cape Cod Bay, and all sorts of beasts (fish, whales, squids, sharks, tunas, dolphins, seals, and even, as far as we can tell, at least one bear) swim through it. You can make a case that, once accessibility is factored in, the Cape Cod Canal is the best surfcasting spot in Massachusetts.

If you had the right tools and the necessary will, you could fish a LNG tanker out of that Canal. It would require Herculean strength and Napoleonesque game-planning... but if it could be done, the Cape Cod Canal is where you could be doing it it. It is also the only place that a particularly deft surfcaster could snatch the cap off of a millionaire from 100 yards away as he piloted his Sea Limo through the Canal. You actually get a bench along the Canal named after you if you do that, it's in the small print of the Town Charter.

And if anybody could have pulled that off, it would have been Stan Gibbs, but we'll get to him in a second.

Those fish have filled many a tummy over the years, as the locals soon figured out that the Canal was essentially a Fish Funnel that could be tapped again and again and again. Her reputation grew, and it is now a Grade A surfcasting spot. 

A celebration of that Canal would be very problematic without Fishing placed up in the front row. After that, Natural Beauty and Ease Of Transporting Goods, the Canal sort of becomes a Catastrophic Traffic Issue... and, in an emergency of the right sort, a veritable Line Of Death.

But enough of that talk. We're talking about fishing today, and we're celebrating the Sea Dog, the surfcaster, the angler, the old salt... The Fisherman. 

A state stands in Buzzards Bay.. It honors the fisherman, and it has a very clever Rembrandt/Hemingway sort of title... The Fisherman.

The statue was funded via donations from private citizens (mainly the Stan Gibbs Fisherman’s Classic Fishing Tournament people), and it stands 10 feet tall. It was made by Hyannis sculptor David Lewis, and was bronzed in Arizona. It is placed near Buzzards Bay Park, by the railroad bridge. It will be surrounded by roses, fountain grass, and will even have a compass rose. As near as I can tell, the statue will be "aimed" at Sagamore.

The text reads:“The Fisherman. A tribute to past, present and future striped bass fishermen of the great Cape Cod Canal, inspired by local fishing legend Stan Gibbs." It cost $80K.

The statue depicts Stan Gibbs, and a famous photograph of Gibbs served as the model for it. I'm not the one to make the call on whether Gibbs was the best fisherman ever on Cape Cod and the Islands (I'm pretty sure we are where Quint and Captain Ahab are from, at least Movie Quint), but he certainly owned the Canal.

Gibbs was born in Easton, but the sea drew him to Sagamore. He was a giant man, but also a creative man. He became world-famous for the fishing lures he created, many of which (Polaris Popper, Casting Swimmer, Pencil Popper, Needlefish, and Darter) are still being copied and mass-produced by whatever companies make fishing stuff. His family (I think) still runs the business he created out of his love of fishing, Gibbs' Lures.

Check the Salt Water Fishing Lures Collection Club convention, at the Canal Room of the Trowbridge Tavern in Bourne.... just off the Bourne Rotary. It's going on today.

He also pioneered the use of numbered poles to mark his fishing spot. To this day, Canal anglers will say "254 was on last night" and so forth. I was completely unaware of this before I went out the other day and started bothering local fisherman.

Bothering the local anglers also provided the meat of this Story Sandwich... his legendary accomplishments. All legends need mythology, and Stan Gibbs has some amazing stories floating around about his skills. The possibility that locals were teasing a girl with ridiculous fishing stories can't be disregarded. I welcomed that, to be honest. Stan's dead, by the way, so he wasn't feeding me this stuff himself to sell lures. Primary sources are excellent and essential for real history, but they only get in the way of Legend Building. 

Here is what I've heard about Stan Gibbs, and mind you that I wasn't out collecting stories that long:

- The state catch limit on stripers is known as the Stan Gibbs Rule.

- Stan's record for Speediest Catch was 17 seconds, and that included beaching it.

- At least 20 people told me that Stan could cast completely across the Canal if someone put a C Note down on him not being able to do so.

- Stan knew the Canal's bottom well enough that he had names for certain troublesome spots.

- Stan not only fished during Hurricane Bob, he executed a 120 yard cast into the teeth of the wind. When he was casting with the wind at his back, he was somehow catching deep-sea fish.

- On a dare, Stan could snap-cast and hook a fish like an arrow shot if he had a clear visual and it wasn't windy. It required a special spear-lure that Stan refused to produce commercially.

- Stan could fish holding poles in each hand, and often did so just before Good Fridays during the Depression if the Salvation Army was planning a big supper. See "catch limits," above.

- Not only did Stan never tangle his line when fishing near others, but he could disentangle crossed lines with what I will describe as the same hand motion you use when winding up to shoot some dice.

- Stan didn't catch and release every fish in the Canal once just to intimidate them, but he liked to propagate that rumor once he started selling lures. He did it skillfully, of course. "Customers are just another fish, dear...."

- Stan was fishing for bait, caught some, and started reeling it in. A schooly striper than struck the hooked herring, in the process impaling itself on the hook. Most fisherman would have reeled that score in, but Stan- who had done it 20 or 30 times before- waited and waited... and a bluefish attacked the striper. Stan then reeled them all in, and had them for supper.

- The hat-off-a-millionaire story was actually told to me about Gibbs, but more in a "he casted so well that he could have..." manner than as something he actually did. They do say that he had a collection of Mister Howell-style hats in his shed that was completely out of context in comparison to his other trophies, but that he never ever ever answered questions about them.

- The shark you see in the New England Aquarium was caught by Stan, on shore, with a holiday ham as bait. He had a friendly boat haul his bait out a half mile, and Stan handled the rest.

- When Stan tired of eating fish, he would sneak up near The Seafood Shanty or wherever and surfcast a cheeseburger off of the plate of a tourist. He did it enough that the various clam shacks would comp meals if this was claimed by a customer, no questions asked.

- A guy accidentally dropped his keys into the Canal while swimming in from a boat. He had only a rough estimate of where they fell into the water, and the current was strong. Local kids immediately fetched Stan Gibbs. He weighted down a treble hook, asked the unfortunate soul about 3 where/what/how far questions, and then fished his keys out of the Canal on anywhere (I heard this story a few times) between 1 and 20 casts.

- Stan once hooked a Mako Shark in the Canal, fought it for 9 hours, brought it to the rocks, slapped it in the face, and let it go."Tell the others my name..." he was rumored to have whispered to it. This act- done the summer after a fatal shark attack in Buzzards Bay- is credited by some with the lack of shark attacks on humans in this area since. I think the shark who bit the guy off of Truro a few years ago was European, and he fled town the instant he heard that this was Gibbs Country.

- "Stan" is translatable to "Satan" in Striperese.

- The first thing you actually learn as a fish when you join one of those schools is to Not F*** With Stan Gibbs. The second thing you learn is "Swimming."

- I won't say with any certainty that touching the Fisherman statue before you go fishing brings you good luck when you're fishing, but I will say that it certainly can't hurt your chances. I was raised by Catholics, and thus have a very keen understanding of superstition and so forth. I want dibs on that if people start doing it.

Wings Neck

Wings Neck doesn't have an apostrophe, and I checked more than once. It's a peninsula, which is actually a typo away from being a dirty term describing "a piece of land that is bordered by water on three sides but connected to mainland."

As near as I can tell from the Wikipedia, the big difference between a Peninsula and a Cape is that a Cape manifests itself as a marked change in the trend of the coastline. Essentially, Bourne to Provincetown is a Cape via her right angle hook, while the more Mexico-aligned Baja is a peninsula.

I think that Cape Cod is technically two Capes, with one running from the mainland to Chatham, and the Outer Cape sort of caping off of the Cape.

Keep in mind that I majored in Accounting when I am telling you all this stuff about Geography. I actually confuse Geography with Geology and even Geometry now and then, which is why I am rarely obtuse with people.

Wings Neck is a notable point where Buzzards Bay begins to narrow into the Cape Cod Canal. It is across the Buzz from Stony Point in Wareham. It's not as narrow as the Mashnee Neck/Codman Point bottleneck, but it's pretty narrow. If you've sailed north into the Cape Cod Canal, you passed Wings Neck on your starboard side.

It sort of sticks out from the mainland like a wing, hence the name. I'm guessing, and there could be some guy named Wing who may have a legitimate grievance with me.

The area was of regional importance before the Cape Cod Canal was dug out. The swampy area was rich in Iron, and the Pocasset Iron Company was powerful enough to greatly increase shipping traffic. Shipping into Wareham and Bourne/Sandwich had also increased heavily. Wings Neck merited a lighthouse by 1849. The original light was 50 feet above the water, and it cost a look-at-how-they-spend $3,251.

The first keeper, Edward Doty Lawrence, ran it almost uninterrupted through 1877. He was briefly removed in 1854 for belonging to the wrong political party. His daughter married the Keeper who followed him. John Maxim, who both replaced and preceded EDL as Keeper, was killed at Gettysburg.

Other notable Keepers were George and William Howard. The Howard brothers were noted lifesavers, and they saved 37 lives in their time running Wings Neck. One of the reasons that a U-Boat never attacked Bourne is that the Germans feared retribution from the badass Howard brothers.

It has a very lengthy history of lightkeeper's wives being the assistant keepers, doing the shift while hubby slept. At least one keeper's wife is famous for saying a prayer over her husband's newly-dead corpse, and then going up to run the light and clang the bell before the town doctor had pronounced him dead.

There was an 1878 fire that led to the 1889 construction of a new light, which had all that fancy stuff like a 1000 pound fog bell. They even floated an assistant keeper's house across the Buzz from Mattapoisett in 1923. It went from a fixed to a flashing light in 1928, and converted to electricity in 1934. This light was 44 feet above the water, and was visible for 12 miles at sea.

Wings Neck was once docked at by the US presidential yacht,Mayflower. The keeper, Wallace Eldredge, did a 21 gun salute with the fog bell for President Warren Harding. 

As a private residence, it once played host to the Von Trapp family of The Sound Of Music fame. Since former President Grover Cleveland vacationed in Bourne for many years and was an avid fisherman, he was most likely very familiar with Wings Neck. This is a ridiculous amount of clout for a literal backwater area where maybe 500 families live now.

Maps from vintage times show Wings Neck as a hazard to navigation, and it only got worse when the Canal traffic started floating by.

The lighthouse ran from 1889-1945, when it was deemed unnecessary following the construction of the Cleveland Ledge light. They then put up this Cape Cod Canal monitoring station in the picture above.

The monitoring station is the tallest thing around until you get to the Bourne Bridge. It has radar and CCTV monitoring. If you were doing some Love Boat as you were sailing up the Canal, they probably saw you. They may even have film of the act, which is why I never intend to run for President.

The station is essential to the flow of traffic through the Canal, and helps to prevent such nightmare scenarios as "LNG tanker collides with munitions ship as orphans and puppies watch from within the blast radius." Who needs to see that, right?

The hexagonal (you are either impressed that I know that word, or you know i just made it up) lighthouse still stands, and it is connected to a lovely 3 bedroom cottage by a charming breezeway.

It went up for sale, and is now a private residence. Those private residents (the Flanagan family bought it for $13K and change in 1947) use the place as a rental. You can stay there for the following rates.

Winter: January 4 – May 3 $2,500 per week

Spring: May 3 – June 14 $3,300 per week

Summer: June 14 – September 6 $4,500 per week

Fall: September 6 – December 31 $3,500 per week

Now, that's some good scratch, but it's worth it to live in a lighthouse for a week. You always say that you want to live in a lighthouse, and that's what it costs. It's a bargain, trust me. Go stay at that other lighthouse if you don't believe me.

There are few better places to watch a good storm from. If you loved ship-watching as a kid, you owe this place to yourself. It's also a top-notch Buddha Spot. If some people I know lived there, it would have so much smoke coming out of the top, Catholics would think there was a new Pope.

I don't know if they still have the bell, or if they let you ring it if they do. I was basically trespassing for these shots.

Death Row? Dividing The Scenic Highway...

The Scenic Highway in Bourne may be undergoing some major changes, according to Wicked Local Sandwich.

The Scenic Highway, as you know, is the 4.5 mile section of Route 6 that runs along the Cape Cod Canal between the Bourne Bridge and the Sagamore Bridge in mainland Bourne. It eventually becomes the Cranberry Highway, but that's Wareham's problem.

The Scenic Highway's problem is that it is undivided. The only things stopping you from using all four lanes to weave through summer traffic are Law and Imagination. The potential for head-on collisions is staggering. The downhill/northbound part just before the Herring Run rest area traffic lights might be the worst section of road on Cape Cod in a snowstorm.

Why, just yesterday, I saw a northbound fuel truck with 55000 gallons of gasoline pass within one nanometre of a southbound 18 wheeler truck entirely devoted to delivering Bic lighters to various liquor and convenience stores in the area. The potential explosion would have flattened Buzzards Bay and took down the Bourne Bridge. A nanometre is a unit of measurement equivalent to one billionth of a metre.

It's only a matter of time before we have some terrible accident like that, or one like the rejected-by-staff example where an unfortunate collision causes a truck full of liquid nitrogen to disgorge into a bus full of of church-picnic nuns and orphans. When the accident does happen, people are going to look back and ask "What could have been done to prevent this?"

One thing that we could do involves Jersey Barriers. Now, you should already know that a Jersey Barrier is not when a corpulent Governor puts a bunch of DPW trucks on the one bridge leading in to your town. No, these are modular concrete or plastic barriers used to divide traffic lanes.

Laying a line of these things down the Scenic Highway would vastly lower the chance of head-on crashes, the big killer of the Oops industry. The police, who have to clean these messes up, agree. When asked about the environmental impact of the Jersey Barriers, one Bourne cop told WLS to "paint it green."

Speaking of green, those barriers don't just sprout up on their own. Funding would be needed, not an easy thing to get these days. They're already talking about a permatax (in the form of a toll) on any third bridge project.

Patrick Ellis, a Sandwich selectman who has run a business in the area for years, also sits as the Upper Cape representative on the Metropolitan Planning Organization. He thinks that getting the project on the Transportation Improvement Program will open up the possibility of federal funding.

Granted, we still have to pay for federal funding stuff via taxes, but it's a much larger pool of "we" when we go national instead of local.

I'm not sure if we could get the fancy, HOV lane style of movable Jersey barriers. I'm not sure if they'd help at all, to be honest. Our worst traffic jams seem to be when the traffic is coming fro all directions, anyhow.

There would be a learning curve. People may also get a bit gun-shy when driving near barriers. Many people think that the prominent sidewalk is what slows down traffic on the bridges.

 Either way, you'll be hearing about the Jersey barrier idea again, and it may become a fact of life in the upcoming years.