Duxbury Beach Getting Some Jose Surf

Duxbury Beach got in on the Tropical Storm Warning for a while during Jose, so we rolled up last Thursday to see how angry Mother Nature was.

Seas were getting ugly on Tuesday, and they were still ominous on Saturday. That's an 8 tide storm, a very bad thing for coastlines (the No-Name Storm/Halloween Gale/Perfect Storm of 1991 was a 10 tide storm), and Duxbury was very lucky to be on Jose's fringe.

Duxbury Beach gets pummeled in storms, so the residents are rarely caught slippin'. DBC...

Jose hung around off Nantucket for a while, and her huge wind field (tropical cyclones expand in size once they reach cooler waters) made it past Duxbury.

And now, down below, some amateurish video...

There are scholarly articles which say that Duxbury Beach, in her present location on Cape Cod Bay and with the slope of her coastline, can't really generate waves higher than 5 or 6 feet. I won't disagree with scientists more than I have to, and admit that I could be wrong on a technicality, but I have seen ten foot+ waves during the Blizzard of '78 and the Halloween Gale.

Duxbury Beach was still getting heavy rain and 50 MPH gusts on Thursday, which is why a lot if these shots were taken behind houses and crouched under stairways

The cottage that was here before this house is famous for washing into Ocean Road North during the Halloween Gale. It is locally legendary because a glass of wine mitakenly left on the cottage's kitchen table during storm prep was still on the table- unspilled- after the storm.

A fence with almost no chance at all of surviving the waves coming over the wall.

Your fearless reporter was in town three hours before high tide, and had to flee before a waning new moon tide blocked off the neighborhood. 1:30 high tides in Duxbury and a 2:45 school bus rendezvous in New Bedford are incompatible.

Duxbury Beach is stormy enough that kids there used to/may still do Death Runs. Death Runs involve waiting for stormy seas to hit the seawall, dropping yourself onto the beach as a wave recedes, running as far as possible before the next wave comes and pulling yourself back onto the seawall before the next wave hits. 

The child who painted these rocks was most likely not thinking "These rocks will someday be the only bright colors in an otherwise slate-grey hurricane article from some obscure regional publication," but just look how things shook out.

The next three are from Maryellen Federici.

Jose knocked over one of the Don't Run Over My Kids fluorescent lawn jockey dudes.

January 2017 Nor'easter Pictures, Videos

A powerful nor'easter hit Massachusetts this week. We missed last night's tide, but we got all up in this morning's offerings.

We mostly worked Duxbury Beach, but we did manage to snap-shot Green Harbor. The tide, normally a 9 foot nothing, got big ups from the storm surge.

I was using a thirty dollar Wal-Mart phone camera and a badly battered laptop, while shooting in the teeth of a nor'easter. The laptop served as the video host, and you will probably be able to tell that I usually have someone else do the filming.

This wasn't a bad storm, maybe a B minus. No structural damage that I could see, although some beach erosion surely went down by the dunes.

I grew up on this beach, and watched a lot of gulls in my time. The smarter ones hunker down somewhere leeward, but sometimes one of them gets bored enough or hungry enough and works the surf. Joe Deady II on the camera for this one.

My old front yard, just after the porch there. It was great fun and easy work repairing that law every spring. We used to have a cobblestone patio, too... cobblestones that my father either bought or "acquired" from some road in Boston. They were very fun to re-arrange every time the ocean did something like this, and I'm a masochist.

The main problem residents here will have is that the ocean splashed a few million gallons of salt water over the wall and onto a great many lawns. You can see it happening between the stairs.

My 35 mph photography is improving, but it is a slow process.

The legendary public stairs of Duxbury Beach, home to much 1980s teen debauchery.

I had to get off of Ocean Road North before it lived up to the name. That took me through this puddle of seawater. I was pretty much that U-Boat Commander joke from the Tom Cruise pimp movie.

Joe Deady made it outside before I did, but I made up for it later with intensity.

Libby Carr gets into the mix with a bit of second story work over some Hummock Lane flooding. Hummock Lane is named after "Rouse's Hummock," which is what Cable Hill was called either A) before they put the trans-Atlantic cable in, B) when Rouse lived there, C) both, or D) neither.

The guy who owns the house with the flooded lawn worked at a golf course when I lived there. No matter what sort of maelstrom befell Duxbury Beach that winter, you could drop a 30 foot putt on it by summer. My yard, by contrast, looked like what grows over a shallow grave after a while if the killer is particularly good at choosing spots that the cops don't look in.

This is what Duxbury's Great Salt Marsh looks like with a spring full moon tide. Unfortunately, this was a mid-cycle 9 foot tide. Any water you can see in this picture is storm surge. I'm at the beach, shooting towards Duxbury Proper.

This is when I decided that moving my car from the driveway of the house I was shooting at would be a good idea.

As bad as this may look, A) it didn't get any, uhm, badder, and B) this is getting off very, very easily. as a full moon tide when this storm hit would have probably wrecked some homes.

You never ever let Ol' Glory get slapped around by a nor'easter. A wind sock would have made my job easier, but that's not this guy's problem.

They say that a waves don't get  more than 5 feet off this beach in all but extreme conditions, and we were in that neighborhood today. They had a rough tide the night before, and were very lucky that those waves weren't rolling into houses on a full moon tide.

You can tell that I shot this one instead of Joe... because it's blurry as heck. The surf covers up for a lot of my errors.

"I'z unda yoor howz.... shootin' at yer ocean."

I got up on the seawall for a few, but it was camera suicide until the tide eased back some.

Even the porch was a rough go.

I got in where I fit in.

Hummock Lane, with Cable Hill/Rouse's Hummock in the background. A newly located Cape Cod Bay, now a street pool, is in the foreground.

RAIN TOTALS AT NOON

North Weymouth, 3.5"
Sandwich 3.24"
East Mashpee 2.75"
Falmouth 2.52"
Duxbury 2.0"

...'been raining since, too.

Rain is actually what washes the salt water out of the lawns, if you're lucky. It's all sand once you go down far enough, and sand drains well.

You can almost see Green Harbor in the background. Green Hahbahhhh... obscured by the mists of the storm.

WIND GUSTS

Wellfleet 59 mph
Minot 40 mph
Cuttyhunk 44 mph
Plum Island 62 mph

Duxbury Beach, summer 1978, after the Blizzard. The house I was doing most of my shooting from is a much larger version of the 4th house from the right. I grew up in #2 from the right.

We made our way south for the tail end of the storm, and got some Sagamore work in.

We got to Saggy well after high tide, so don't think that we don't represent hard down this way.

Sagamore benefits greatly from the presence of Cape Cod, which keeps it from the heaviest of the storm surf.

You could still get knocked off a rock two hours after high tide. Bourne representin'...

We went to the White Cliffs in Cedarville (Plymouth), but the party was pretty much over by then.