October Surprise? East Coast Tropical Storm Late Next Week?

Now, we're more than a week away from when we'd need to be worrying about this, but we don't like to have anything sneak up on our readers.

Tropical Storm Matthew formed just east of the Windward Islands today. He's already a very powerful storm, at around 60 MPH. He should blow through the islands tonight and tomorrow, and then move between Hispaniola and South America over the weekend.

The water in this area is very warm, and Matthew should intensify. What he does after that is a bit of a mystery.

The European models drag it into either Florida or the Gulf of Mexico. Not our problem. The GFS model puts it on a run up the Eastern Seaboard. That can be a problem.

It's a problem that looks like this:

Now, we're dealing with a system that is over a week away, and there is a lot of disagreement among the geeks as to what happens to where and when.

There is also this weekend's rainstorm in Massachusetts, which could serve to drag Matthew up here as it pulls away from us.

Even if the storm takes a run up the East Coast, it could hit any Confederate coast state, the DelMarva area or even New Jersey. All of them are more likely to get it than us.

October hurricanes, while unusual, are not without precedent. The Halloween Gale, aka the Perfect Storm, hit at the end of the month.

If it does target us, the due date would be Thursday/Friday.

Here are the zillion spaghetti charts:

Tropical Storms Could Impact Massachusetts

We told you to watch those tropics!

Several tropical systems are spinning around in yonder ocean out there. We'll be getting touched by them very soon, perhaps even today on some coasts.

Don't get me wrong. The storm that gets closest to us may miss us by 500 miles, and we may not even get windy. However, even 1000 miles is close enough to have a dangerous effect on our waters.

Here's the tropical line-up, with links to the National Hurricane Center page on each storm:

Hurricane Gaston

Tropical Depression 8

Tropical Depression 9

Area Of Low Pressure Presently Moving Off Of Africa

That's a lot of tropical storming, folks.

That picture below (Tropical Depression 9, with Hurricane Gaston sort of photo-bombing in from the right) looks scarier than it should. The green area touching New England shows a 5% chance of tropical storm force winds reaching us, not the forecast chance of a tropical storm making landfall. Tropical storm winds are 35 mph minimum. We can do that standing on our head.

Gaston is way out in the ocean, aimed at the Azores, and won't get any closer to us than he already is. However, he's a whale of a storm, with winds of 85-100 mph. In a vacuum, he would maybe kinda increase waves on SE facing Massachusetts beaches.

TD 8 is off of North Carolina, while TD 9 is forming in the Gulf of Mexico.

They are more worrisome than Gaston. "Worrisome" exists in a zone where the range runs from "pay it no mind at all" through "panic, stomp on small children and elderly who get in your way as you flee." This would be much closer to the former than the latter, score it "keep an eye on the forecasts."

The best case scenario gives us sunny skies and maybe some good tummy-surfing waves as none of the storms come near us. The next level- which I think it most likely- is that one or two storms brush by us closely enough (500 miles) to give us rougher-than-usual surf and rip currents. Mind you, I'm not even expecting any/much rain out of this scenario.

A scenario beyond that involves a tropical storm offshore, but close enough (100-200 miles) to give us a good soaking to go along with rougher surf and rip currents. Depending on how things shake out, this may or may not be how we kick off Labor Day weekend.

The closer the storms get to us, the more the chances of action go up. As near as I can tell, Depression 8, 100 or so miles off of North Carolina as I write this, looks to be the better bet to get involved in a New Englander's life.

The worst case scenario at the moment seems to be two tropical storms flying by us in succession, maybe one rolling over Nantucket and bringing tropical storm conditions to Cape Cod. The South Shore might be out of the loop, or they may get some September surf out of it. The South Coast would get the rough surf for sure, but maybe not the 35 mph winds. The Cape would get it worse.

The whammy in that scenario would be surf. We'd get a week of pounding waves and beach erosion. This is a month and change before Nor'easter season, too.

The storm leaving Africa will barrel-ass across the Atlantic, and we'll worry about her later.

We'll keep you updated, and we're just giving you a heads up for now.

A Reminder To Watch The Tropics

from Accuweather

Please note that there are about 30 or so projected paths for Tropical Storm Fiona showing there. One of them has it striking Cape Cod. That's about a 2-3% chance. It's most likely not going to happen.

In fact, if it did happen, it would happen with a storm that might not be too intense. Most present models have her as a Tropical Depression as she nears Bermuda. She has most likely reached peak intensity.

Still, even a 2% chance of a tropical storm making a landfall in Chatham is enough to make me mention it to the readers. I'm not sounding an alarm, just reminding you that it's time to watch the tropics.

My money has Fiona weakening, then curving out to sea without ever getting near us.

The two storms behind Fiona look like they may be more intense. One is a few days away from the Lesser Antilles, but they're not sure if it will even be organized by then. Another more powerful wave coming off of Africa already looks like a hurricane, but it is just a tropical wave. The latter wave is rolling through an area that is favorable for development.

We have no idea where they'll end up, and we'll worry about them later.

Check the radar and graphs here.

from the National Hurricane Center

Fun Fish Facts: Bluefish

Bluefish and Striped Bass are the two favorite fish of the Bay State surfcaster. We're going to have a look at both fish over the course of this week. We're not experts, but we'll try to give you a good working knowledge of our subjects. We'll proceed in an abecedarian fashion.

Bluefish are the sole (pardon the fish pun) members of the Pomatomidae family. They are distantly related but biologically distinct from Gnomefish. They are known by various names, be it "Shad" in Africa, "Tailor" in Australia and "Elf" on the US West Coast. No, I've never heard it called "elf" either, but this column has a prominent East Coast bias.

You can find the Bluefish in almost any ocean. They do avoid a few places (they avoid much of the Pacific, and the Atlantic between Florida and northern South America) for reasons that only Bluefish know. They migrate heavily. The Blues who you eat all summer spend their winters off the Florida coast. They spawn off of North Carolina. They arrive in Massachusetts by June, and are usually gone for the most part by some time in October.

Bluefish can grow to almost 4 feet long, although 20-25 inches is more of the norm. They can get up to 40 pounds, although anything beyond 20 is exceptional. The Massachusetts state record is a 27 pounder caught by Louis Gordon in 1982 off of Graves Light... way the heck out on Boston Harbor.

The IGFA world record is a 31+ pounder caught off of Cape Hatteras, NC. Check him out right here.... he looks like he could bite off a human head.

Bluefish work in schools, and some schools are very large. One school I saw written about covered 10,000 football fields. They migrate in schools, and concentrate in schools at certain areas. Young ones are known as Snappers.

Bluefish live about 9 years or so, and they are hard-core breeders. Some studies suggest multiple breeding seasons. Stocks dwindled in the 1980s, but management raised the numbers to healthy levels by 2007 or so. 92 million pounds were harvested in 1986, while 7 million was harvested in 1999. Our most recent 5 year average was 13 million pounds. 80% of Bluefish that are caught are caught by recreational anglers. The only saltwater fish who is fished for more by recreational anglers is the Striped Bass.

The Bluefish sports a baby's momma-like disposition, and will bite anything that gets in his path. They, and some species of ant that I read about somewhere, are the only non-humans who kill for fun reasons other than predation, mating, protecting their young, and territoriality. They eat any sort of bait fish. Bluefish suppers include menhaden, sardines, shrimp, squid, mackerel, anchovies, jack, and fisherman fingers.

The gangsta style of the bluefish leaves them few willing enemies in the ocean, but things that will mess with them include seals, sharks, tuna, sea lions, billfish, dolphins and others. I'd guess that humans kill the most Bluefish, followed by seals.

Bluefish are one of the very few fish that a landlubber can watch in action without viewing a documentary. You get this benefit via the Bluefish Blitz, which is when a school of Bluefish chase a school of prey (in Massachusetts, this usually involves Mackerel) close to shore and pins them along the coast. They then close in and just maul the poor bait fish in a feeding frenzy. Bluefish, for some reason, will kill long after they've eaten their fill.

Mackerel will beach themselves rather than be devoured by the Blue Meanies. The waters literally churn like rapids, and the seas flow red with the blood of the Unfortunate.

I saw a guy in the 1970s who apparently had great confidence in his hip waders walk into a blitz off Duxbury Beach, dip a friggin' laundry basket into the water and come up with a Bluefish and some Mackerel. He then put a hook in each bait fish and reeled in additional Blue with this regular-bait method. That's a real, capital-M Man, kids.

The only Bluefish attack on a non-fisherman involved a girl in Spain who may have wandered into the edge of a blitz. The shark attack on Truro in the 1990s was initially blamed on a Bluefish by some people.

If you don't want to risk a bad fish-bite wound, try using 40 pound test fishing line. The Blue is a muscle torpedo, and he puts up a ferocious fight. He can bite through weak line without any great effort. Handle a beached Bluefish with care, as he is a sore loser and is more than capable of taking a fingertip off of a sloppy or careless fisherman.

Bluefish are known as a gamy fish. As we said, it's a muscle torpedo, and that leads to what chefs call "personality." Bluefish have a time-sensitive compound that kicks in 3 days after death that makes it very, very gamy. You want to shop local for fish, and especially Bluefish.  Patronize someone who can tell you when the fish that they're selling you was caught. The larger the fish, the stronger the gamy flavor.

There are ways to cut this flavor. Bluefish meat has muddy/reddish areas that are extra oily and lead to a stronger flavor. Fishermen sometimes cut this part out before consuming or even storing the meat. Some anglers soak Bluefish meat in milk for an hour to cut the gamy flavor down. You can also make the Bluefish fight stronger-flavored herbs/spices/sauces... in a skillet!

That's all for now. Get out there and get yourself some Bluefish!

Massachusetts Sharks In Our Archives

Eddie Fairweather be havin' fish or dinner!

We've been very Nature-oriented this summer. This pattern will continue, as several ideas we're kicking around involve oysters, foxes, bluefish, owls, stripers and God knows whatever else walks/swims/flies in front of one of our cameras.

You're going to get all of that soon enough, but today we're going to issue a recap/filler article about our toothiest locals. Great White Sharks own the news around here, even though more people are hurt by schnauzers than sharks in Massachusetts.

This will be our tenth article devoted to sharks, not a bad total at all for a publication in a region with an 100 day swimming season.

Rather than make you wade through our archives for some good ol' fashioned Shark Talk, we're going to give you a list of these articles for you to peruse easily from this very location here.

If you get through all of this and still need more Shark in your life, you should probably just open a wound in your skin and jump into the waters off of Monomoy. We probably have a few Shark articles lurking on Cape Cod TODAY or perhaps even AOL, but this is everything for which we'll get paid if you read it.

Apologies in advance if you see us re-telling a few stories or even telling the same story twice with different details. We have several authors on this site, and occasional short circuits will occur.

What If? A Cape Cod Shark Attack Fatality

I'm very much in Mayor Vaughn's camp on this one, as I feel that a fatal Outer Cape shark attack caught on video would end Cape Cod's status as a vacation destination.

We were actually wrong about this, at least as far as we have been able to prove. Sharks have attacked a couple of people in Truro and also said howdy-do to a couple of kayakers in Plymouth. It seemed to have no negative effect at all on the Cape's tourist flow.

Aim high, fall far.

Historical Massachusetts Shark Attacks

If you want to know your odds, you have to get the stats.

Location is everything in this category, too. Someone who had done no research most likely would not be able to guess where our three shark attack fatalities went down in the Bay State.

We branch out to include Rhode Island, Maine, Connecticut and New York.


Great White Shark Spotted Off Duxbury Beach

This, and the Plymouth attack, brought it all home to the Irish Riviera that sharks are not solely the problem of Cape Cod. You're more likely to be killed by a shark on the bay side of Cape Cod than you are on the ocean side, and the same goes for the South Coast.

This was a brief article, written the instant I heard the news,and more of a warning to my friends and family who live on that beach. If I go to Thanksgiving and have to sit with a one-legged niece with a very personal Duxbury shark attack story, I will very much need my "Well, you should have checked my site updates" guilt-block.

Best line? "Wow, and I thought that Duxbury didn't get Cape traffic."


Ol' Toothy, The Kayak Eating Shark Of The Irish Riviera

We discuss a theory of ours, focusing on the possibility that Cape Cod Bay only had one shark. That's why we named him. We had some theory that he was a rogue, who split away from his posse off Chatham for some reason that probably makes perfectly good sense to a shark.

This theory, like many of my theories, was wildly off-base. Shark tagging and receiver buoys proved me wrong pretty much right away.

I'm pretty sure that this article at one point also included a Stacey-conducted interview with the shark who dumped those two girls out of the kayak off Manomet. We may have had to remove the interview, as the shark's frank talk on race (he prefers white meat) and age (he steals a Mark Leyner joke about brittle-boned/osteoperosis-having old people being crunchier to the shark) would have been  upsetting to a greater portion of our readership.

Best line? "I'm assuming that the shark was male. Boats are girls, Sharks are boys. That's how I roll."

How To Not Get Eaten By A Shark

This is important stuff to know if you plan to go into the water. In short, if it is at all possible to be attacked by a shark, there must exist steps which will lower those odds.

Some advice ("Don't swim where people are fishing") makes sense. Other advice ("Do nothing at all seal-like") we play off as a joke when the advice is actually sound. One ("Swim with people fatter than you") sounds like a joke but was not denied when I approached a nationally-known shark expert for his thoughts about my theory. Yet another ("Be local" ) is true factually, but true in a category with a body of evidence small enough to magnify coincidence.

"Follow these rules, and you'll have mad bread to break up. If not, 17 feet on the wake-up."


Sharks In Cape Cod Bay

Speaking of shark experts, we went to Duxbury  to attend a lecture by shark expert Dr.Gregory Skomal. He's the guy you see on te news, tagging sharks.

We got to ask him all of our stupid questions ("Have you ever met a friendly, seems-to-enjoy-hanging-with-people Great White Sharks?" and "Can you make a Great White Shark do tricks?"), and we got to hear more serous people ask more serious questions.

I'm pretty sure that I'm the only journalist on Earth to ask a shark expert, at length, to weigh in on Dr. Hooper's territoriality theory from Jaws. It turns out that true Territoriality involves one shark claiming an area and driving off other sharks, something which isn't happening around here.

Written during a blizzard, I might add.


Where Exactly Do Our Great White Sharks Hang Out?

Dr. Skomal's efforts do give us some amazingly valuable information. We know where they go in the winter, and we also know where they go when they are up here.

This article tells us where sharks were registered as having swam to. It also tells you how many (tagged) sharks are working any particular stretch of coast.

This is another wake-up call for the South Shore and even the North Shore. Sharks show up from Cape Ann to Cape Cod.

Cape Cod holds the title, no doubt. While Plymouth, Scituate and Duxbury combined for 200 shark tag signals, Chatham had over 14,000 in that same period. Granted, Dr. Skomal spends his days tagging off of Chatham and may never have set foot on the South Shore, 14,000 to 200 is a pretty wide gap.


Can Orcas Chase Our Sharks Away?

This was actually our last article. If you're reading this, you most likely read that. It involves yet another theory of mine.

I still think that a robotic Orca could be employed by Outer Cape towns to drive away the sharks. even if it didn't, there must be some cool use for a 40 foot mechanical Killer Whale.


Deep-Sea Surfcasting Methods

I think that this article, concerning inventions we're working on to allow even novice fishermen to make casts out to sea that would fly completely over small towns if they casted towards land, gets into shark-fishing at some point.

Our best idea involves hooking a shark with a chain that is attached to a Jeep. Dr. Skomal somehow was able to avoid my question about a huge shark taking on a Jeep in a tug-o-war.

Can Killer Whales Chase The Sharks Away From Cape Cod?

Old Thom, the Chatham Whale... photo from Capeshores Charters

In case you haven't heard, Cape Cod has a shark problem. It's not really a "problem," and is in fact a sign of a healthy ecosystem, but a tourist-dependent beach destination with Great White Sharks offshore is a soon-to-be non-destination. All it would take is one fatal shark attack on a human to get the ball rolling.

There's not much we can do about it that doesn't involve a wanton act of mass-production animal cruelty. A mass culling of the Cape Cod seal population would be needed, as seals are what the sharks come for. We could also kill the sharks, which are currently protected under federal law.

Or we could just let nature take her course, as people say. Nature works in many mysterious and wonderful ways, and one of these Ways may be taking place just offshore.

A charter fisherman about ten miles off of Chatham spotted an Orca yesterday. We don't mean Quint's doomed boat when we say "Orca," we mean "Killer Whale." It most likely wandered down from the Bay of Fundy, and is relatively unusual in Cape Cod waters.

Another thing that was unusual for a long time on Cape Cod was the presence of a multitude of Great White Sharks just offshore. However, this soon (and by soon, we mean "a couple of years") considered to be the new normal. Why not Orcas?

Orcas do come to New England. The Coast Guard cutter Campbell came across a pod of killer whales about 150 miles off Nantucket in 2014. Experts blame melting Arctic ice and associated whale-food-related problems.

"Don't tell Old Thom that I'm here, OK?" (photo, by our England correspondent Jodi Turck, of seals off Clacton-on-Sea, England)

I'm no marine biologist, but I read 30 minutes of whale stuff, and I'll tell you what I gained from it.

- The whale in question is almost certainly Old Thom, a whale who tends to stray from his fellow killer whales up in Labrador and Newfoundland. He has been spotted in the Bay of Fundy a few times recently.

- Old Thom is about 30 feet long and weighs 8 tons.

- Old Thom comes from a population of whales who don't hunt seals. His peeps prefer to hunt and eat dolphins and Minke Whales. His fellow whales are Specialists, which means "whales that only eat one kind of food."

- This sort of takes the steam out of "Maybe the killer whales will eat all of the seals and end our associated Great White Shark problem."

- A Dr. Hamilton at the New England Aquarium scoffed at the idea of sharks and whales doing the Batman vs Superman thing off of Monomoy. He laughed and said "Maybe in fantasy land" when the Boston Globe asked him about it.

- Scientists laughed and said "Maybe in fantasy land" fifteen years ago if you asked them about Great White Sharks making a summer home off Cape Cod.

- Cape Cod has adequate dolphin and Minke Whales (named for Meincke, a Norwegian sailor who mistook one for a Blue Whale and has been goofed on ever since over it) population to keep Old Thom very well fed.

- Minke whales are usually what you see if you go on a Cape Cod whale watch.

- I have no idea if any (or how many) Minke Whale beachings were a Minke choosing suffocation over being eaten by an Orca.

- Though not listed as an Orca food item, a Beluga Whale got itself into the Taunton River in Fall River and hung out for a few days in 2014. Killer Whales have been spotted upriver in Japan and even in the Columbia River in the US.

- A whale who specializes in seals may not even recognize a fish as a food item, and the same probably goes for whales who eat other whales.

- From what I have gathered, it would be very unusual for Old Thom to buck evolution and change his diet to seals.

- Still, Old Thom could be useful. The one thing that a Great White Shark fears is a Killer Whale.

- Orcas can and do eat anything they want. There are cases of a pod taking out a juvenile Blue Whale. Adult sperm and blue whales are the only whales that an Orca wouldn't cross. Even a large adult GWS is no match for an Orca.

- This website once jokingly suggested that we solve Cape Cod's shark problem by building robot killer whales to patrol the coast off of popular resort beaches. It looks like we could get to test that theory out.

- Several instances have been recorded where an Orca killed a Great White Shark. I have never read of a GWS beating an Orca, and I'll let you know right now that I am researching a future article (tentatively called "Massachusetts Animal Fights: Who Wins?") on which animals in our region can whip ass on which other animals. "Great White vs Orca" just went to the top of that article.

- An Orca holds several advantages on a Great White Shark in a fight. They are almost twice as long as a GW, and often weigh 4-8 times as much as one. Orcas hunt in packs, and will focus on a big fish like a shark if they wish. They are much stronger. They are also much more intelligent, using an amazing knowledge of shark biology when fighting one.

- In combat, an Orca who gets a hold of a GWS will turn it upside down. This induces a state of paralysis called "tonic immobility" in the shark, who is then torn to pieces by the Orca. A victorious Orca will eat only the liver of the shark, and let the rest of the carcass sink to the bottom.

- A tagged Great White Shark who was in a group of sharks that a pod of Orcas attacked off the San Francisco area was observed to immediately dive to 500 feet and swim non-stop to Hawaii.

- Again, Old Thom isn't from a population that A) eats sharks or B) eats seals, which would put Old Thom into competition with sharks.

- Our sharks here on Cape Cod may or may not know that.

- If Old Thom gets closer to shore and smokes a Porker, it may drive other Great Whites away.

- Old Thom poses almost no threat to humans, with one huge exception. To my knowledge, there have been three attacks on humans by an Orca.

- One involved an Orca bumping a child who was swimming. The child was uninjured.

- Another case involved a whale biting a bag of fish that a diver had tied to his arm, and he dragged the diver around for a minute.

- A surfer at Port Sur, California was bitten and released by an Orca, and this is the only case documented where a wild Orca attacked a human. The surfer required 100 stitches.

- These three incidents are all that they have documented. Killer Whales range all over the world, and only three attacks have been recorded on humans... and only one of them was a "real" attack.

- An Orca in captivity is a different story. Dozens of trainers have been attacked. Even the well-known Shamu bit a woman, giving her 200 stitches.

- I have never heard of nor have I been able to find any documentation of Killer Whales in Cape Cod Bay. Larger whales than the Killers wash upon South Shore beaches all the time.                                

- The chances that a pod of Killer Whales will colonize New England is very small, but not impossible, Killer Whales roll in pods, and it must take a bit of convincing to get them to say "Screw Newfoundland and Minke Whales... let's go to Cape Cod and start eating seals."

- If a pod of Killer Whales took up residence on Cape Cod, however, they would stand a good chance of scaring our sharks away. We would then get an Apex Predator Upgrade, with the added bonus of losing an AP that attacks humans and gaining one that will only attack you if you try to force him to bounce a ball on his nose at Sea World.

- Great White Sharks vs Orca is probably not going to be happening here, but it is something to think about if we start seeing more of Old Thom and his buddies in the waters off of Monomoy.

Something else may be targeting him soon....

Archives: Duxbury Beach Storm Photos

We've been shifting our photo storage sites around, and have been unearthing various Duxbury Beach storm photos. We'll be sharing them out now and then until we exhaust the supply.

Photographers include Sheila Spellman, Joe Deady, Deborah Deady, Sara Flynn, Pauline Flynn and Samantha Spellman. The girl who owns/used to own the Fairview may also be in the mix.

Almost all of these shot were taken from Ocean Road North on Duxbury Beach.

Almost all of them, you see... this one is on Gurnet Road, approaching Duxbury Beach Park. The Powder Point Bridge is that lack line on the horizon.

Someone who has never seen this picture just rebuilt this cottage into a $1 million house.

Tearing out the storm-damaged back wall on Ocean Road North. 

Heading down the road a bit, to the Brant Rock Esplanade.

A lot of these were published on some Cape Cod rag that we used to write for, and they had less-then-manly photo dimension specifics. When we blow them up so you can actually see them, they get a bit blurry. We apologize, and the fault is ours rather than that of the shutterbugs.

More to come...

Holiday Weekend Weather, And Early-Season Tropical Storm Information

We wish you the best on this Memorial Day weekend. Many plans, both solemn and joyous, will be influenced by the weather. We'll try to get you prepped for this.

Today should be nice. Aside for an isolated-but-powerful thunderstorm pushing ESE off of Nantucket at 8 AM, sunny skies should rule the early part of the day. Cloudiness will increase in the afternoon, and we'll have the chance for some sweet late-night thunderstorms.

High temperatures will push 80 on Cape Cod (a SW wind will help cool us off), and aim for the 90s inland. Here are some record high temperatures for the day that I stumbled across:

Boston -- 92 set in 1931
Providence -- 91 set in 1931
Hartford -- 93 set in 1977
Worcester -- 88 set in both 1911 and 1929
Milton/Blue Hill -- 90 set in 1929

HHH, friends... Hazy, Hot and Humid.

Sunday looks to be a mix of clouds and sun, and it will be a bit cooler (60s-70s). Some rain may arrive on Sunday night, which is where we get to that spaghetti chart with the tropical storm in it from at the top of the page up yonder.

Don't worry about a tropical storm hitting us Monday. Our water isn't warm enough to support it, even if it raced up at us. Although the season has begun, New England's tropical storm threat runs more August-October. Tropical storms are heat engines, and the waters south of us (water temperatures are in the 50s) presently have no fuel for her.

However a tropical storm does look like she will sample a bit of South Carolina cooking. Presently known as Tropical Depression Two, she is forecast to become Tropical Storm Bonnie by tonight.

Bonnie should be no big deal, sort of a nor'easter with an attitude. After striking the Carolinas, she looks to take a run up the coastline at New England, guided by an area of high pressure offshore and with an eastern-moving frontal boundary throwing her precipitation at us. That's where we get our taste of Bonnie.

She'll be a soaking rainstorm if we get a direct or even indirect hit out of her. The worst for SE Massachusetts looks to be in the late afternoon, but the threat of rain will be on us all day. If you have some shindig planned for Monday, you should have a strong indoor backup contingency plan.

She doesn't look to do much for the surf, as she won't be that strong when she's near us. There could be some rough surf on the South Coast and the Cape once she's been churning South of us for long enough. Don't board up the house or anything.

June tropical systems are rare in New England, and May ones are pretty much unheard of. This is a pretty concise list of New England hurricanes, and you don't see much/any early season activity vis a vis the Tropics. Even July is pretty weak historically up here.

Tropical Storm Agnes, which was a hurricane south of us, came ashore near New York City in June of 1972, but the effects on New England were minimal. Remnants of tropical storms like Alison (2001), Arlene (2005), Alberto (2006) and Barry (2007) also tapped New England in June. Barry dropped 3 inches of rain on Taunton. The dominant feature with these storms for New England, and especially eastern New England, were rain. Expect more of the same with Bonnie.

Ominous Storm Notes.... I used to roll with a girl named Bonnie when I was a younger man, and with God as my witness, and she once rendered me unconscious.

Archives: 2007 Nor'easter Hits Duxbury Beach

We're transferring our photo archive from one spot to another, and we're unearthing a few pictures that we'l be sharing out over the upcoming weeks.

One theme you will see a few times is "Duxbury Beach, Nor'easter."

We have a pile of pics on this topic, so brace yourselves over the next few weeks.

Hurricane season is actually the calm time on Duxbury Beach, so these storm photos will hopefully keep the storm-lovers happy during the off-season.

My memory is notoriously spotty, but I'm pretty sure that these pictures are from a 2007 nor'easter.

My sister Sheila is on the camera, and these pictures are from Ocean Road North on Duxbury Beach

These pictures ran on Cape Cod TODAY, who used to go off-Cape now and then if a writer maybe had a sister trapped in a beach house during a coastal storm.

It is technically Cape Cod Bay, I suppose. It also is part of why the Irish Riviera is included in this article.

If you'd like a scale of reference, take note of the fence in the lower left hand corner.

Keeping a lawn is a tough business on Duxbury Beach. Every winter, the storms take big chunks of it away, and what's left has been power-soaked in Atlantic salt water.

When I lived there, I had a lawn, a garden and a high-maintenance cobblestone patio to the right of that fence. Re-did it every year. I'm one of the very few people walking around in 2016 with a permanently deformed finger relating to a "cobblestone accident."

We're looking north in this picture, down northern Duxbury Beach towards Green Harbor.

It's almost impossible to see the town line, but it's about where the really large (100-150 yards) break in the seawall is if you're ever taking a walk down there. The break exists because the residents there decided that they were highly-enough elevated, and passed on paying the fee being charged to put up the concrete seawall in the 1950s.

Green Harbor gets a bit more of a curve to their seawall. This results in some spectacular surf-to-seawall crash spraying, as the wave hits the wall and rolls down it. You get some sweet house-high spray.

Duxbury has more of a straight-line frontage to storm winds, and they get the more foundation-shaking direct hits.

It looks worse than it is. The seawall takes most of the shots, and the spray- however impressive it may look- isn't as bad as it gets when the actual waves start coming over the wall. It's why the pay so much to repair the seawalls.

A photographer shooting pictures from this vantage point in the Blizzard of '78 or the Halloween Gale of 1991 would have been killed.

This storm did some damage, though. It tore down decks, flooded the street, smashed through fences, ruined yards and scared witless everyone who had moved into the neighborhood since the last really bad storm.

A lot of people in that neighborhood buy a cottage, renovate it, and then realize a bit too late that the area is Poseidon's punching bag. There's a lot of turnover for a neighborhood that is Heaven-on-Earth for the other 364 days of the year.

Again, this is like a C+ storm. It did damage, but it wasn't ripping houses down.

Beach people have a high bar vis a vis How Scared They Get During Ocean Storms. While this is a bit heavy for it, kids in the neighborhood do risk-taking games with slightly smaller storms.

What they call a "Death Run" involves dropping onto the beach between waves ad running as far down the beach as you can before you have to desperately claw your way back up and over the seawall.

"Death Runs" may have died out with my generation. I go to a lot of beaches during storms, and I never see anyone doing them.

... on purpose, anyhow.

The area behind the house we were shooting from is a meadow. Locals call it "Bradford's," after a family that ran a beach parking lot there. It's the Low Ground of the neighborhood.

You can see the remnants of the last of WWII-era cottages below. That house in the background is no longer standing. Someone was going to build condos there before this storm. I believe that the effort has since been abandoned.

Bradford's, like the rest of the neighborhood, sits between Cape Cod Bay and a rather large marsh. The marsh fills up during really high tides, and it spills over into the neighborhood.

The whole Gurnet Road area of Duxbury Beach becomes an island during storms, and the nearest dry land is over about where Duxbury High School is used to be. At the moment this photo was taken, Duxbury Beach was an island, about a half mile offshore.

It's basically why Duxbury Beach won this contest.

Duxbury Beach, MA

South Coast-al Flooding Tonight, Snow Saturday Night?

It sure has been a wild weather week, and it will only get worse as we head through the weekend.

Remember, it snowed earlier this week. That was an April snow, and it was a top 20 event for April snow in some locales. We then ad our temperatures plunge, which also approached some records. After that, the wind kicked in.

I'm watching a tree in my neighbor's yard, and it looks 50/50 on toppling. I'm sort of East of it, and it looks like it will topple North. If this column ends suddenly on, that's probably what happened.

We have a Gale Warning for the ships at sea, and a Wind Advisory for the landlubbers. Winds will gust from the S/SW near 50 MPH today through about 9 PM or so. This wind could take down some tree limbs and cause isolated power outages. It would be worse if there was snow, but we'll get to snow in a moment.

We also have a Coastal Flood Advisory for south-facing beaches and the people who love them. High tides will be between 8:30 and 9:30 for most spots. This is the spring new moon tide, always trouble for anyone on the coast, especially if there is a big wind.

Minor to moderate coastal flooding is possible, as the winds are really making the seas angry, my friend. This flooding won't knock down your house, but it can still cause all sorts of trouble. a 2 foot storm surge is possible, thanks to Wendy Gust.

As always, we do try to remind coastal residents in our coverage area to never do yard work until (at the earliest) late April. Having to hustle to get the yard ready for Mother's Day or Memorial Day sucks, but it's harder to do the job twice when we get one of those Ides Of April storms.

After that, we get a night's rest, and then we can start worrying about the snow that may be coming Saturday night. One of those Alberta Clipper things will streak south of us, and her northern fringe may put us in the powder on April friggin' 9th.

It may start as rain, but it should turn to snow as the storm pulls away from 'Murica and the cold air piles in behind it. We could be in the 20s overnight Saturday.

Opening Day at ol' Fenway is Monday. The Boston Marathon is a week from Monday.

This won't be a snowstorm that buries you to the point where somebody has to go get a St. Bernard dog. It would most likely be a coating to an inch, and that indeterminate total will mostly fall south of Boston.

The snow, should we get it, would be notable more for her timing than her ferocity. We're taking April 9th into April 10th, folks. Wishing for a beach day, getting a snow day.... ayup.

Here's a forecast map of the Clipper going off the coast on Saturday, with most of MA already getting snow:

Admission Of Fault In Sandwich Beach Erosion Dispute

The good people of Sandwich got some welcome news recently, as a recently released US Army Corps of Engineers report determined that the Corps was at fault in a Sandwich coastal erosion matter.

The issue at hand is beach sand erosion at Town Neck Beach. The cause is said to be the jetty at the east end of the Canal, on Scusset Beach.

Erosion along Cape Cod Bay is generally a give and take thing. Every wave carries off a bit of your beach, but those waves also steal sand from further up the current from you and dump it on your beach. Nobody wins, but nobody loses that badly... well, for the most part, generally.

Responding to one problem (shipwrecks happening as shipping rounded the treacherous waters off of Cape Cod), the Man created another one. The US Army Corps of Engineers now manage the Canal that was cut through Bourne and Sandwich to circumvent that nastier voyage. That management responsibility includes accessories like lighthouses and jetties.

These accessories, like the jetty off of Scusset Beach, have several functions. Some, like slowing down waves before they mess up Canal shipping, were intentional. Others, like the traffic jams on the bridges spanning the Canal, were matters more of the OOOPS! variety.

"OOOPS!" isn't so bad when you stub your toe or pour too much tequila into a drink, but it becomes Very Bad Indeed when it starts washing your yard away.

The jetty off Scusset stops the flow of sand down from the South Shore beaches as Mother Nature intended it. This fills in Scusset Beach with a nice, fresh layer of sand every X amount of years. By doing so, it deprives anything east of the jetty of the sand that they normally would gain via the motion of the ocean.

For 'bout a third of a mile immediately east of the Canal, it's a fair bargain. You lose out on new sand, but you get the protection of a big, federally-funded-and-maintained rockpile against the storm surf. Every beach gets hammered if the wind hits it, but the jetty blocks the worst of the surf from the dreaded north wind that always beats up Sandwich as a storm pulls away.

Storms aside, the real killer is the Western Maine Coastal Current, which flows southeast along the South Shore before hooking east around where the Canal is. The jetty protects that first area against the current, but the beach beyond it has no such protection.

Look at it from a satellite, zoom in close (Go ahead... look), and you'll see right where that protection runs out.

Beaches like Brewster and Dennis also lack the protection of a jetty of that magnitude, but they at least get the sand that is flowing away from Sandwich and Barnstable. Sandwich, and Town Neck Beach in particular, get hit by the current, they hit by the storm waves.... but they miss out on the replenishing beach sand washing down from Scituate and Manomet. It's lose/lose.

Even things that seem logical and symbiotic, like filling in Town Neck Beach with sand dredged out of the Canal, instead become illogical and parasitic when our friend D. Next Storm comes to town and that new sand washes down to Barnstable and Beyond. "Gone, gone, like the snows of yesteryear."

Sandwich has been losing 2.5 feet of beach a year since the flow of sand was cut off, and that jumped up to over 6 feet a year during the recent rash of coastal storms.

Generally, that's between Sandwich and God. God can't be sued. However, if someone plays God with the coastline, you can take your best James Sokolove at them

.
The admission of fault in the USACOE report (an honorable result, as giving the defendant the right of determining fault often ends up like when the wolf, the coyote and the chicken vote on what to have for dinner) opens up some doors as far as How To Fix This Problem goes.

Section 111 of 1968's River And Harbor Act authorizes up to ten million smackeroos in compensation for damage resulting directly from federal navigation projects.

According to the USACOE's own report, they are directly at fault. That saves Sandwich a lot of money, never a bad thing these days.

If the repairs cost less than ten million dollars, they are Uncle Sam's treat. Anything after that, the town and the feds split it 50/50.

That could also cost Sandwich millions, but they get millions in property taxes from houses along a tourist-drawing beach that pays for itself all over the friggin' town. Even if it's a fortune, it's money well-spent.

The decision should perk up ears in any town along the coast that may, say, have a USACOE seawall or something like that. One must be vigilant. Duxbury Beach residents barely dodged a similar bullet on seawall repairs, with the town about to lay all the costs on the residents before the people spoke up.

Sandwich hasn't won the war yet, but they did just take the Dub in a major battle.

Cape Cod Folks: Book Review

One of the odd things bout the Bible is that it pretty much jumps from Jesus as a toddler to Jesus on His world tour. There's no Teen Jesus part, which would have actually been pretty cool to read about. Maybe not that much happened to Teen Jesus, hence the focus on the birth story and the ending.

Plymouth is sort of the same way. We all have a basic visual of how 1621 Plimoth looked, and we can drive into Plymouth right damned now if we wanted to know the modern version personally. However, Plimoth was a backwater fairly soon in her history, especially in what is now Southern Plymouth.

Luckily, we have a book set in postbellum Plymouth. Beyond that, you're on your own.

Before we start, a bit of geography.

"Cape Cod" today means "all of the land east of the Cape Cod Canal." If you want to get technical, Sandwich and Bourne own a bit of the mainland, with places like Sagamore Beach and Bournedale serving as a buffer zone... sort of like a salty Estonia.

Before they dug the Canal, defining the borders of the Cape was a more dodgy proposition. Your best answer was "east of the Scusset and Manomet Rivers." Some people might point to a line running from the Wareham River to Great Herring Pond in Pymouth. Others would define Cape Cod's border as the Manomet River (bungle "Manomet" as you say it, and you now know why Monument Beach in Bourne is named what it is) as it runs to Great Herring Pond in the Plymouth/Bournedale area, and from Great Herring Pond over coastal streams to just about Ellisville.

These distinctions prove two things. One, "Cape Cod" used to include the southeastern hinterlands of Plymouth. Two, ol' Sarah Pratt McLean Greene wasn't wrong when she wrote "Cape Cod Folks" about Plymouth residents.

I don't read as many books as I used to. The NFL takes up a lot of my time, as does marketing, pornography, reggae, local politics, stuff with the family.... I'm more likely to be up in a website than in a book these days. Some people might look down on that, but hey... I'm reading.

I did feel the need to blast through Cape Cod Folks, as it is set in Cedarville. Our Plymouth road office is in the White Cliffs, in Cedarville. Not much goes on there, and I was curious as to how someone would crank a book out about a post-bellum version of it.

SPOILERS!

The year was 1881, and a woman (Sarah Platt McLean Greene) of both privilege and higher education leaves New York on, as she says, "a mission." I get sort of lost when people speak Olde American, but I think she wanted to minister to some wretches. A classmate of hers was working as a schoolmarm out in the sticks, could no longer keep the job, and offered it to Sarah. It turns out to be an isolated (meaning "the train doesn't go near there") coastal village in Plymouth.

The author uses fake names. She herself is either "Miss Hungerford" or "Teacher." Cedarville is both Kedarville and (colloquially) Wallencamp. Plymouth is Wallen or West Wallen. Falmouth is Farmouth. Sandwich, Bourne, New Bedford, Braintree, Fall River and Taunton all appear as themselves.

The story is a fish out of water tale, sort of an earlier, less funny version of The Egg And I. The author takes a job in a one-room schoolhouse (a building which still stands today, right on the corner of Long Pond Road and Herring Pond Road) for $8 a week, settles into a boarding house and falls in love with the town.

Her ride in a carriage from Plymouth's train depot to Cedarville may be the foundation of the old Cape Cod "sass" story. A socialite took a carriage to Cape Cod. The driver started talking, the socialite shushed him gracelessly, and the rest of the ride went down in silence. When settling the bill, the socialite saw a $1 charge that she couldn't identify, and she asked the driver what it was for. " Sass," said the driver. "I don't take it much, ma'am, and when I do, I charge."

The residents of Cedarville are as hick as it gets. As Dennis Miller once joked, "there were people there who were their own fathers." Most of the people in town have been no further away from Cedarville than Sandwich. The author's first conversation is with a man who explains where her house is by pointing out that "there's miles,and there's Cape Cod  miles, child." It goes downhill from there.

The only visitor comes to cull the town's virgins from the schoolhouse, you don't even get near seeing a black guy, and the Beverly Hillbillies would snicker at the folksy manners of the Cedarville residents. Several of the people mentioned in the story were able to win a Libel suit against the author.

She moves into a boarding house run by a retired sea captain and his wife. There is a son at sea with the scorned-wife name of Philander Keeler. The grandparents can be called nothing but Grandma and Grandpa by anyone who interacts with them, and they live in a one-story house of many rooms known as "The Ark." Most of the business in the comes-to-charm-you village conducts itself through the Ark at some point.

She meets the kids, all of whom- ages 3 through 20- are taught in the same class. If you squint sideways at the class descriptions in To Kill A Mockingbird, you'd have about the right idea of what her lot looks like. There's one kid who goes to class barefoot ("In January. On Cape Cod."), another who has to be dragged in by his father, a third who eventually gets scarlet fever and pretty much dies at her desk, and a rough-but-charming 19 year old named Becky.

Becky gets involved later, although not in a HLA manner. Not that kind of book, player. Becky and the teacher get hung up on the same guy, a lady-killing yacht owner. The author has other shadowy student issues, as she later promises her hand in marriage to a student who is taking to sea.

Cedarville food takes some getting used to. They eat whatever food (beans, pumpkins) is up for harvest for weeks at a time. At one point, every kid in her class raised their hand when asked "Who had split herring for breakfast today?" Popcorn is the big party food, coated with milk and sugar. If you get sick, Grandma boils up some onions and molasses. I don't recall seeing them get any sort of meat other than fish.

It goes without saying that the arrival of the fetching young schoolmarm tunes up every bachelor in town. They visit her constantly, both alone and en masse, hoping to go five-hole on the blue-blood babe. They all want her as a wife, and she eventually narrows it down to the fisherman with money and one of her students. The winner gets killed, of course.

It's a charming little book, and makes a great guide for anyone who wondered how things were around here 135 years ago. Pretty much all of the book is conducted in an isolated area running from about Manomet through Sagamore.

I'll save you some Qs by telling you that there are no car chases, sex scenes, dinosaurs, snipers, rappers-turned-actors, karate fights, CGI, elves, aliens and so forth... so it's already down one star.

I was able to read this book for Nathan, thanks to the good people at Project Gutenberg.

Added Bonus: Quotes!

"The Wallencampers were quick to note the estrangement between us, and affirmed that "Beck was mad, and wouldn't speak to teacher, along o' teacher's goin' with Beck's beau.'"

"Investigating the place where she had been sitting, I found a wild confusion of claws and shells, as carefully denuded of meat as though they had been turned inside out for that purpose.

What was my surprise and mortification to find a like collection at nearly every seat in the school-room, and all the while my flock had seemed unusually silent and attentive; such proficiency had those children acquired in the art of dissecting lobsters.

I saw how many they devoured day by day, and how much water they drank, and I fancied that they themselves grew to partake more and more of the form and character of marine animals. I believed that they could have existed equally well crawling at the bottom of the deep or swimming on its surface."


"And yet, notwithstanding this, they had grown used to a wild ruggedness of nature and condition, a terrible, sublime uncertainty about life and things in general when the wind blew, missing which, in this earthly state, they would have pined most sadly. And I do not believe that they would have exchanged their rugged, storm-swept, wind-beleaguered little section of Cape Cod for a realm in sunny Italy itself; no."

"I knew what it meant—mild winter on the Cape! There's the devil in the old Cape weather, teacher, and he never skipped four seasons yit! If it ain't one time, it must be another. Yis, yis! mild winter on the Cape, and no March to speak on, and a hurricane in summer! "


"A little more than a year after I left Wallencamp, I heard of Grandma and Grandpa Keeler's death. "Very quiet and peaceful," they said concerning Grandma, but I had known what sort of a death-bed hers would be. Scarcely a week after she had passed away, Grandpa Keeler followed her. I had it from good authority that he kept about the house till the last. There was a "rainy spell," and he stood often gazing out of the window "with a lost look on his face," and once he said with a wistful, broken utterance and a pathetic longing in his eyes that did away forever with any opprobrium there might have been in connection with the term, that "it was gittin' to be very lonely about the house without ma pesterin' on him."


"Since then, I have not heard from Wallencamp. It is doubtful whether I ever get another letter from that source. Though singularly gifted in the epistolary art, it is but a dull and faint means of expression to the souls of the Wallencampers—and they will not forget. From the storms that shake their earthly habitations, they pass to their sweet, wild rest beside the sea; and by and by, when I meet them, I shall hear them sing."

Marsh Madness: The South Shore Coastal Flooding Championship

Our aim today is to rank the beaches of Southeastern Massachusetts for Coastal Flooding Vulnerability.

There are several things that you should know before you dive into this pool. For starters, this is the second time that I have written this article. The first time I wrote it, just explaining the rubric I'll be using took about 15000 words, and that was before I even started ranking the towns. Jessica had the fine idea of working the rubric into the town descriptions as I rank them, and that seems like a pretty good space-saver.

Secondlyish, remember that our major flood risk on the South Shore comes from nor'easters. If you add hurricanes to the list, it suddenly becomes Cape Cod and South Coast-dominated.

Also, know that there is no clear winner for this. Duxbury, Scituate and Marshfield can all make a legitimate claim on the top spot. Duxbury Beach, parts of which are severed from the rest of Massachusetts now and then, has the worst conditions (we'll explain in a minute), but the other two towns have heavily populated shorelines.

Because of that, we're going to sort of group towns of varying threat levels. More on that in a sec...

We're not claiming the title for the state. The North Shore is also a stormy place. We're just gonna leave those beaches for some North Shore blogger. While we plan to annex Bourne and Sandwich for this discussion, they'll go back to the Cape for the Barnstable County version of this article.

Finally, know that we are using town-by-town rankings. There are many good reasons to break things up neighborhood-by-neighborhood. Great and potentially dangerous differences exist between how Duxbury Beach suffers in a storm and how Duxbury's Powder Point neighborhood fares.

However, going by neighborhood would give us a boring Top 10 of Duxbury Beach, 4 Marshfield neighborhoods and 5 Scituate ones. Also, if you think this article is long, imagine one where I have to differentiate between maybe 35 different beaches in a dozen towns.

Ranking-by-town takes the onus off of your author, who grew up on one beach and is an expert on that one beach, and instead will let residents of various neighborhoods fight it out in the comments section about whether Peggotty Beach gets it worse than Minot does.

RANKINGS

Again, the rubric I use would take all day to explain.

Highlights include beach length/width, population, past damage, loss of life, barrier beaches, behind-the-beach wetlands, orientation, development, wind direction, storm strength, latitude, longitude, offshore rock formations, jetties, groynes, currents, dual frontage, property values, media coverage, breaching, erosion, sand dunes... you know, the whole nine.

I've put as much thought into this as anyone has, and it seems like you can break the beaches up along three threat levels. Major, Moderate and Minor.

They go a little something like this:

- If your waterfront house doesn't need a seawall, you're Minor.

- If your waterfront house has some flooding issues, you're Moderate.

- If you stand a chance of being killed in your waterfront house (during a storm, of course)... Major.

I'm resisting the urge to try some Foxworthian "If a live fish has ever washed into your house, you might be in a Major coastal flooding community" jokes. You're welcome.

We realize that Minor, Moderate and Major are boring, so feel free to use some other more amusing trinity if it pleases you. Parish/Bird/McHale, Original/Extra Crispy/Grilled, Stink/Stank/Stunk... whatever you're into, people.

MINOR

KINGSTON

Kingston enjoys a cushy spot on the South Shore, tucked into a cove and sheltered by three barrier beaches. Two of these barrier beaches- Duxbury Beach and Long Beach- are small. The other one- Cape Cod- is not.

Kingston can suffer storm damage, but it will always be exponentially smaller than damage suffered by her barrier beaches.

Kingston is by far the southernmost town on the Mild list. Almost all of the other Mild towns are sheltered by Hull. Kingston stands alone here.

To be fair to Kingston, part of the decision to have her be last in the rankings is that she is the Mild town for which I have the coolest picture.


WEYMOUTH

Weymouth has an itty-bitty shoreline, hidden behind the blind side protector that is Hull.

She may even hold the very bottom ranking, except that she has the Fore River,and that can amplify flooding a bit.

One wonders if the Fore River was named by a golfer. If the Blues Brothers movie was set in Massachusetts, Elwood would have almost certainly jumped the Fore River drawbridge while Jake was throwing the cigarette lighter out the window.

Via the Fore River, she exemplifies the vibe you'll see several times on the Mild list... she doesn't have much trouble, but when she has trouble, it's Big trouble.

HINGHAM

Weymouth stands behind Hull. Hingham, on the other hand, is literally hiding in Hull's skirt. Aliens viewing Massachusetts from space would think that Hull was built to protect Hingham.

Hingham is on a bay, so there is some flood risk, but it is minor when compared to what would happen to a Brant Rock or Town Neck Beach during the same storm. She's far enough north that some storms miss her entirely.

Hingham looks very much like a t-shirt when viewed on a roughly-drawn political map. I just wanted that on the Internet somewhere.

Hingham's flood risk is low enough that, as you can tell, I shot my Hingham photograph while zipping through Hingham at 45 MPH on my way to Nantasket or somethin'.

QUINCY

Not Quincy (it's Green Harbor), but Quincy has shoreline, trust me)

Quincy is a unique fish, in that if you draw straight line X from Weymouth's coastal border with Quincy to Boston's coastal border with Quincy, you'd use about one third of the ink that you'd need to use to draw the actual X-times-three twisted shoreline that Quincy claims between Boston and Weymouth

Quincy has a pincer-shaped coastline that funnels water towards the middle, a much milder version of Bangladesh. The pincers are made of heavily-populated areas.

Why aren't they in the Moderate group?

Quincy is a sheltered bay town. She has Hull and, to a lesser extent, Winthrop blocking for her. She also has Boston Harbor islands which break up the surf somewhat. She's the northernmost town on this list, which means that storms which clip the South Shore with their northern fringe may not touch Quincy.

Quincy also came up on the losing end of the "Should densely-populated Quincy be scored more for moderate storm damage than southern Duxbury Beach (population: zero) is for worse damage?" argument that the authors had while constructing our rubric.


COHASSET

Cohasset is the least likely town to be on the Mild list when you're looking at a map. She has plenty of shoreline, has no barrier beach in front of it, and claims coastal-flooding heavyweight Scituate as her next-door neighbor.

Cohasset "loses" on intangibles. She has a rocky shoreline ("Cohasset" is bad Algonquian for "long rocky place"), Ledges and rocks/rockpiles lay offshore, breaking up waves. Although she's considered South Shore, her northern border lays about on the same longitude as Boston. That keeps her off the fringes of a lot of storms.

Cohasset even sits higher than her neighbors do, usually on a bunch of rocks. She has a more Northerly bearing than Scituate does, which means that she is most vulnerable to the lesser storm winds.

Cohasset comes up with the short straw when arguing about "Should a town where some 5th generation slacker who is barely holding on to his damaged Humarock cottage be scored worse than a wealthier town where homeowners who suffer damage just go to one of their other houses?"

MODERATE

BOURNE

Bourne and Sandwich are being borrowed from Cape Cod for this article, because they each have unique coastal flooding characteristics that will come in handy when describing Massachusetts coastal flooding scenarios.

For starters, Bourne is the only town which has Canal Flooding as a factor in her own personal rubric. Canal flooding seems silly, until you talk to people who were alive in 1938 and recall houses washing down the Cape Cod Canal with families inside trying to claw their way out of the attic ceiling.

Bourne, which doesn't suffer major nor'easter damage when compared to a place like Duxbury Beach, does have the unique distinction of being the only town in Massachusetts which touches both Cape Cod Bay and (the body of water) Buzzards Bay. That exposes them to both nor'easter damage and hurricane damage.

Remember, a two-front war is what did Hitler in. Bourne has been Poseidon's punching bag many times before. Heavyweights on this list like Duxbury and Scituate were barely touched by Hurricane Bob, while Bourne was torn to shreds.

When we start mixing hurricane damage vulnerability into the rubric, Bourne jumps up from Moderate to Major and shoves aside Duxbury and Scituate to claim the top ranking. In that regard, they may even be in a class by themselves.

However, the mojo of these rankings is more Nor'easter, and this drops Bourne down a weight class.

SANDWICH

Sammich also has a problem with coastal flooding that could, eventually, push her into the top part of the rankings.

The Cape Cod Canal, which helps everyone out, requires a huge jetty at the Cape Cod Bay end to keep sand from washing into the Canal and beaching ships. The idea works so well that Sandwich beaches are suffering Sand Depletion. This occurs when sand that would normally wash down the South Shore and replenish Sandwich beaches instead fails to get around the jetty and subsequently makes Scusset Beach very nice.

The problem is compounded when ol' Mr. Storm comes along and washes the Sand out of Sandwich. I don't even know where it ends up, but it's never good when your Sandwich gets smaller every high tide.

The process works in such a manner that even simple logic- use the sand that you dig out of the Canal when you dredge it to replenish Sandwich beaches- is foiled when the storms wash all of the new (to them, anyhow) sand away.

The Scusset jetty also takes away the ability to build jetties in Sandwich... you can't trap sand that isn't coming, even if you have Sand in your name. I'm told that this is why the Sandman lives inland.

This is a Major list sort of problem, but Sandwich is also has Cape Cod blocking her NE wind waves. She does get pounded by nor'easters, but generally it is the latter, north-wind sections of them. Much like Bourne, this knocks them down a letter grade.

To be fair to Sammich, note that they fit my listed condition (no seawall) for Minor status, but their unique problem with shifting sands moves them up a tax bracket. It is tough to keep them out of Major, but Moderate is where they stand.


HULL

H-U-Double-Hockeysticks has it all on paper. They are the barrier beach for Hingham, Weymouth, Quincy and even Boston. They are thrust out into the sea like some strange and sandy phallus. They take big hits from the ocean, and are close enough to Boston to possibly enjoy a bigger storm reputation.

I give them extra points for having one road out of town, and even more points for the ability of that road out to be flooded over in spots.

Hull appears very much like God wanted this section of the Massachusetts coast to have bookends, as Hull looks sort of like an inverted version of coastal flooding heavyweight Duxbury Beach.

Hull has three factors keeping them in Moderate status.

First, they are very rocky.

Second, they enjoy relatively high elevation above sea level in some of the more vulnerable spots.

Third, they are far enough north that they miss some of the fringe coastal storm action.

They do have, to my knowledge, the best football field in Massachusetts (and, therefore, probably the world) to watch a game at during a nor'easter.


PLYMOUTH

America's Hometown is huge, and has a shipload of coastline. It was large enough in 1620 that the Pilgrims managed to hit it sailing from Europe.

They have Cape Cod blocking for it, and that saves them a lot of storm damage. That's why they're in the Moderate category, player. If you want to know how much wind and wave damage you gain or lose by having Cape Cod between you and an ocean storm, the difference is about Scituate vs. Plymouth.

A good section of town (and a major business district) is protected by a lengthy barrier beach and an intricately designed jetty. The rest of the town is guarded by more jetties, groynes and so forth.

They do have some problems.  I spent most of my Physics class in high school looking at legs, but I did face the chalkboard enough to pick up that Potential vs Kinetic energy stuff. Cedarville has a few dozen houses perched on sand cliffs 100 feet above the ocean. The ocean, even with a Hawaii 5-0-style tsunami wave that would kill 100000 Indonesians, can't touch these houses... yet.

Storms only damage sand and beach grass right now on Cedarville, but I would be very, very remiss if I failed to gauge the "sand cliffs slowly erode, and houses set on them will some day plunge 100 feet straight down into the ocean" factor into my judgement.

Plymouth is also the only town in the region with a "I wonder if the coastal flooding will reach our oceanfront nuclear reactor?" problem.

Note that Gurnet Point/Saquish are part of Plymouth politically, but they are geographically part of Duxbury Beach. This classification by the editor (Hi!) lowers Plymouth's rating while not raising Duxbury's.

MAJOR

MARSHFIELD

Marsh Vegas, Deluxbury and Skitchate are sort of 1A 1B and 1C in our rankings. You can make an argument about top rank for any of them, and against any of them. If you demand a numerical ranking, I'd give Marshfield #3. The gap between #3 and #4 is substantial, however. The gap between #3 and #1? Not so huge.

You may have seen Marshfield in action on the TV set during last year's blizzard(s), which tore through the seawall and wrecked a few houses. That's the kind of action that breaks apart the Moderates and the Majors.

Marshfield has 5 miles of coastline, some of which (Rexhame) serves as a barrier beach for other parts of the town. Sexy Rexy is also one of two Moraines (glacial deposits of sand and stone laid out in a straight line or something) on the East Coast that serve as a barrier beach. Marshfield, which deserves it, has the most Jetty action on the South Shore, to my knowledge... although I think that Plymouth has the biggest individual jetty down by Issac's.

Marshfield has it all, a perfect town with which to lead off the Major part of the rankings. Direct northeast frontage? Check. Far enough north that Cape Cod doesn't block for it, but far enough south that storms hit it? Check. Heavily populated immediate shoreline? Marsh Vegas is jammed along the coast.

Every beach in town (Rexhame, Fieldston, Sunrise, Ocean Bluff, Brant Rock, Blackman's Point, Blue Fish Cove, Burke's and Green Harbor... if Wikipedia missed one, let me know in the comments) has been smashed by surf. They are even drawing TV news crews away from Scituate, which is important because Media Swagger matters to me when I do the rankings.

What keeps them from owning the top spot outright? For one, the worst flooding you see in Vegas (the Esplanade area, home to the former Arthur & Pat's) is splashover. Up until last winter, I had 40+ years of living in that area where seeing a house get wrecked was a rare event.

The shifting of the sands (Marshfield beaches are fed by the erosion of Scituate's sand cliffs, and replenishment has been blocked somewhat by the storm-breaking jetty system Marsh Vegas employs) has left Marshfield with higher-than-average seawalls. This helps, in that it takes larger waves to get over it, and hurts, in that the base of the seawall can be exposed. This leads to- as we saw last winter- catastrophic seawall failure.

Still, Vegas is nothing but Major. Don't you worry... anyone who says otherwise has to fight me first. Unfortunately, the "don't you worry" part also is intended for whoever has to fight me. I'm a big softy.


SCITUATE

"Scituate" would be almost everyone's immediate answer for the "Who gets the worst coastal flooding conditions?" question.

Scituate owns the news coverage for nor'easters. I bet that Shelby Scott still has nightmares based in Scituate. The sea screams out of every picture you take along the coastline. The town name even looks nautical, dog. To the seasoned observer, however, this coverage is why the Scitty By The Sea doesn't have the top spot... the news crews can get to Scituate in a storm.

More than one person (or maybe it was just me doing it more than once) has noted that only the Irish and Italians have the Catholic tendency for self-punishment necessary to build their Irish Riviera right smack in the middle of Nor'easter Alley. I'm as Mick as a Sinn Fein holiday party, and I actually look forward to these storms.

Scituate (and Marshfield to a lesser extent) was never even considered for anything but Major status. People have- allow me the use of the double adverb relatively recently- died in Scituate during coastal storms. If you buy a house in Scituate, and if a storm wrecks it, people will look at you like you're a damned fool if you complain about it. "Seriously, guy... what did you think was gonna happen?"

I actually went to Scituate's Facebook page to try to get the residents fighting each other over which beach in town gets beaten up the worst in storms, but I posted at a bad news time and got little action on the matter.

Scituate has a lot of coastline, and much of it precarious. Humarock, which  lot of people think is part of Marshfield, is actually a part of Scituate that was split off from Scin Scity by the Portland Gale of 1898, a storm which actually shifted the mouth of the North River.

Other parts of town (Minot, Peggotty Beach, etc...) may ring a bell with you, mostly from local news nor'easter coverage. They all get punished during even minor nor'easters like they were kids from an Adrian Peterson/Joan Crawford tryst.

Either way, if you make your own list and have Scituate at the top, I really wouldn't argue that much with you. She has earned every one of her stripes.


DUXBURY

Photo from the girl who used to own The Fairview, I forget her name...

Duxbury owns the #1 spot. The short answer as to "Why?" would be "Look at it on Google Maps."

However, if a Scituate or even Marshfield supporter came to me and said "I think that the rankings should be more biased towards towns with heavily populated shorelines," I'd tell them that "You would then need to put Scituate or Marshfield at #1 and maybe drop Duxbury down to Moderate."

Duxbury has several factors that otherwise make her the worst spot in Massachusetts for coastal flooding.

- Duxbury Beach gets torn from the mainland a lot. She is presently attached to the mainland only because a convoy of about 100 trucks a day for 6 months dumped sand to fill in the beach breach that went down during the Halloween Gale.

- Duxbury has a 6 mile barrier beach which suffers ridiculous damage, but much of the remainder of the town is also exposed to coastal flooding... albeit of a far lesser ferocity. Duxbury's coastline after/inside of the barrier beach suffers Hingham-style storm damage. Shes the only town on the South Shore to get interior coastal flooding a mile or more back from the barrier beach.

- There is about one (1) patch of trees on Duxbury Beach with which to moderate storm winds.

- Duxbury has a very short seawall when compared to Marshfield. Duxbury gets all the sand that washes out from under Green Harbor's seawall. You can step off of Duxbury's seawall without breaking stride now and then, and even the highest height that the seawall gets from the beach is about half of the lowest height that you'll see in Marsh Vegas.

- Duxbury Beach has a giant marsh behind it. Since many storms hit during a full or new moon tide, this means that Duxbury Beach lays between a mile of flooded marsh and the fury of the angry Atlantic. Duxbury Beach neighborhoods often flood during full moon tides even without storms.

- Because of that marsh, Duxbury Beach becomes an island with a height of about 3-5 feet above sea level before the storms hit it during full moon tides. Water pushes in on the narrow beach from both front and back. This island, again because of the marsh flooding, is about a mile out to sea.

- The roads in and out of Duxbury Beach wash over from the marsh well before high tide, with or without storms. If you're not out of Duxbury Beach by an hour before high tide, you're pretty much there for the day.

- Waves break on houses during storms, something you don't see (those shots of Scituate on the news are spray) a lot in non-hurricane communities.

- Duxbury is the first town on the South Shore (as well as the first town of the Big Three) to not enjoy protection from Cape Cod as a barrier beach. The wind seems to both sense and resent this status, and it hits Duxbury with monster truck force. This status is such that, if the wind is more southeast than east, the title shifts to Marshfield.

- Duxbury Beach has 6 miles of shoreline (plus, since she's a peninsula, 6 more of almost open-ocean bayside coast). About a third of a mile of that oceanfront has any sort of seawall in front of it. As we said, that seawall is about as low as they get on the South Shore, at least of the Army Corps Of Engineers variety. Even the section of the beach with the seawall gets catastrophic damage during storms. When you go beyond the seawall, it gets worse.

- Because of this tendency towards damage, they stopped trying to build any sort of cottages out there a long time ago. Duxbury Beach is prone to Galveston-style overwash in strong storms. Only a fool would build beyond the seawall.

- Because of that, Duxbury Beach has a limbo-under-a-schnauzer low population. I was one of four (4) kids in a 5 mile stretch of land when I was growing up there.

- That Peggotty Beach cottage (the one on stilts) picture I used for the Scituate section of this article? That house wouldn't be standing on Duxbury Beach. Duxbury lost their last no-seawall-in-front-of-them cottages in the Blizzard of '78, and they were already husks for decades by that point. Scituate, if you drive through it, is full of that 1950s cottage style that has long since been destroyed and rebuilt differently in Duxbury.

- This author puts Gurnet Point and Saquish into the Duxbury category, even though they are part of Plymouth. If you ever get a chance to view Gurnet Point, know that this terribly exposed area is actually the high ground on Duxbury Beach... and by a large margin. Saquish was most likely an island when the Pilgrims arrived.

- The reason you don't see Duxbury on the news during storms is because it is impossible to get a news van in and out of Duxbury Beach for a half dozen hours or so during a storm events. You almost have to wait for low tide to leave in some instances. A morning news crew sent to Duxbury Beach for a storm wouldn't get back to Boston until the evening news broadcast was happening.

- My brother used to manage Avalon, and we had a piece of Avalon's old dance floor in my Ocean Road North cellar prior to the Halloween Gale. It actually washed out of the house during the Gale, and we later found it 5 miles across Duxbury Bay, by Sweetser's.

- No one less than the National Guard will prevent you from entering Duxbury Beach during bad storms. They will also intercept, buy and eat any pizzas you try to get delivered into Duxbury Beach during a storm, as we found out during the Halloween Gale.

Anyhow, those are the rankings. Questions? Appreciation? Hate? Differing opinions? That's what the Comments feature is for. Use it.