Powerful Nor'easter Hits Today, Coastal Concerns

A powerful nor'easter is sizing up New England, bringing the potential for heavy rain, high winds, power outages and very dangerous seas.

We'll let the National Weather Service tell you:

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Monday Morning Briefing:

The coastal storm that we've been talking about for the past few days is set to arrive today. There is a lot to talk about, so here's a rundown of the potential hazards. Check out the images below for more information.

If you have any questions, feel free to post them here. We'll do our best to answer them as soon as we can.

Winter Weather: Today into Tuesday

- Mix of snow, sleet, and some freezing rain expected across much of western and central MA and northern CT.

- Higher accumulations (2-4") expected across higher terrain near Berkshires and northern Worcester County. There could be as much as 1" of sleet in some areas.

- Less icing is expected than was previously forecast (now under 1/4 inch).

Wind: Strongest Later This Afternoon and Tonight

- East winds gust as high as 60-70 mph along the immediate eastern Massachusetts coast including Cape Ann, coastal Plymouth County, Cape Cod, Martha's Vineyard, Nantucket, and Block Island.

- Gusts of 40-50 mph expected elsewhere, except 30-40 mph in Franklin and Hampshire Counties.

- Strongest winds expected from late this afternoon into tonight, before winds subside quickly Tuesday morning.

Heavy Rain: This Evening into Tuesday Morning

- 1 to 3 inches of rain is expected, with the higher amounts in RI and eastern MA where locally higher amounts possible.

- Potential for significant urban flooding in RI and eastern MA, possibly flooding of small streams as well.

Coastal Flooding: This Evening and Tuesday Morning

- Pockets of minor coastal flooding expected along the eastern MA coast during this evening's high tide. A storm surge of around 2 ft is expected.

- More widespread minor coastal flooding is expected in the same areas with Tuesday morning's high tide, when there could also be pockets of moderate flooding. A storm surge of 3 to perhaps even 4 ft is expected.

- Most favored areas for moderate flooding include Newburyport, Scituate, and possibly Gloucester and Nantucket Harbor.

- Minor coastal flooding is also possible Tuesday morning along parts of the South Coast including Newport, Westerly, and Block Island. Coastal Flood Advisories may be issued for these locations later today.
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Snow isn't expected anywhere in our reading area. This is good, because 3 inches of precipitation can crank out 2+ feet of snow very easily. Throw in several hours of tropical storm force winds, and we'd be using that B Word which rhymes with lizard.

Instead, we'll get soaking rains, howling winds and pounding surf. The storm should produce 2 fierce tides before the winds shift. Prior to what we previously thought, winds are now forecast to be from the NE at high tide on Tuesday morning, which is bad news for anyone owning a beach house.

Tides are astronomically low, but that will be cancelled out by the 2-4 foot surge. The end result is equal to the worst full moon high tide of any month. After that, it's just a question of how big the waves are when they hit the shore. You can use the math from the chart up at the top to see how the tides will be altered by the surge.

The winds may also take down some power lines, especially when you get closer to the coast. You can check the wind forecast for your area in the picture at the bottom of this article.

Some more NWS stuff. We're doing watches and warnings pertaining to Duxbury, just because...

High Wind Warning

Areal Flood Watch

Coastal Flood Advisory (Monday)

Coastal Flood Watch (Tuesday)

As for us, we plan to take to the road for this storm. The surf will be better on the Cape at the height of the storm, but it might be more practical for us to work the Irish Riviera, maybe Scituate to Plymouth to Sandwich. I may not see my own house for two days.

We'll post our pictures as we get them. Anyone who wishes to contribute can reach us through our Facebook page. We love reader submissions. You're probably a better photographer than ol' Steve here, so you'd have a good chance of taking the best picture used in the article.

We'll be back with an update.

A Few Notes On Coach Silva

I'll start off by saying that I'm a Duxbury kid, and it's odd for me to argue for a Marshfield icon. My natural instinct is to encourage things that harm Marshfield's football team and help Duxbury's team. For the most part, their pain is my joy. Schadenfreude, as they say in Germany.

Forgive the German allusion, I'm having brain lock thinking of a prominent fired general who was perfectly competent... but this is very much how people in the American military must have felt when Hitler sacked Rommel. "Oh, Adolph made a big mistake there... that's his best general."

Coach Lou Silva isn't Rommel and Marshfield High School isn't the Wehrmacht (Ed: and Hitler never fired Rommel, instead demanding and getting his suicide) but the comparison works. From where I'm sitting, it looks like Marsh Vegas just sacked their best general.

What's worse, they did so without a better man in place. Or, since I saw Goldie Hawn coach football in a movie once, a better woman.

Marsh Vegas was always tough under Coach Silva. He went  236-144-7 as a head coach, and he brought 5 Super Bowls home to Marshfield. Winning five Super Bowls in the NFL guarantees you a first ballot, undisputed entrance into the NFL Hall Of Fame... and the NFL only has 32 teams. Coach Silva waded through a state with hundreds of high schools, and he brought multiple titles home.

Is there someone who can do that out there? They have one chance of getting a better coach than Pretty Lou Silva.... and that is the longshot bet that a second celebrity inexplicably becomes enamored with operating a small business in Marshfield, a la Steve Carell, or however he spells that. This celebrity would have to be a retired NFL or Div. 1 college coach, and he'd have to be in place by the spring practices.

Other than that, Marshfield just cut off their nose to spite their face. The next coach will be someone who teaches there, his teaching experience will make little/no difference in the player's lives through his coaching, and the team will be less well-run.

Silva retired as Athletic Director in 2014, so the bump-him-upstairs option isn't there.

I would say something along the lines of "I hope they go 0-10," but that just seems mean to the kids. I could say something like "Any Marshfield kids who can really, really play are welcome to transfer over to Duxbury High School," but that may be illegal... especially where I have run several Gambling columns in my life. DHS is an Ivy league factory, however... just sayin'.

I should add that Duxbury- another Grade A program with multiple Super Bowls- has been through at least five or six coaches since Marsh Vegas brought Coach Silva into the mix. Many a Thanksgiving saw Deluxebury serve as Lou Silva's punching bag, and he won his last squabble with us by 50+ points.

It would be fitting if the whole MHS team quit en masse, and instead showed up at Coach Silva's house on the date of MHS's first practice like "Hey coach, split us up, let's scrimmage."

Or Marshfield could do the right thing, admit that they made a mistake, and hire Coach Silva back.

While speculating on a man's demise is never nice, I don't feel badly at all saying that Silva should get the Bear Bryant treatment, i.e. "he is allowed to coach until he is a week from death."

Marshfield shouldn't need a Duxbury guy to tell them this... and yet it seems that they do.

Blizzard Warning For South Shore, Cape Cod And The Islands

We apologize for being all over your Facebook feed, but we did promise to be back with an update if things changed... and, by God, change hath come. Someone at the NWS dropped the B Word.

The National Weather Service has issued a Blizzard Warning for Cape Cod, East Coastal Plymouth County (roughly anyone with a shoreline from Quincy to Plymouth) and both Martha's Vineyard and Nantucket.

The South Coast, which will not get the ocean-effect/enhanced snow from the NE winds, only gets a Winter Storm Warning.

This storm isn't messing around. It also seems to gain 4 inches in the forecasts every time I take a pause from my Journalism to get high, stalk ex-girlfriends and/or peruse internet pornography. I could use a large Funky Fanabla from Marylou's right now, seeing as I'm at the tail end of a Werewolf Shift, but I'm afraid that we'll be due for 3 feet of snow by the time I get back... if I get back.

We're looking at 18-24" in a stretch running from Chatham west to Onset, then north (about 10-15 miles in from the coast) up to Duxbury Beach. You get 12-18" from Duxbury to Boston, and running south (and to the west of the coast) down to the Rhode Island border. The whole South Coast is in the 12-18" window, as is the entire interior of Plymouth County.

This is also falling on a good 5" or so left over from yesterday's entertainment with Storm #1 for much of SE Massachusetts.

This is a dangerous storm. Thank the gods that it isn't hitting during a weekday commute. Wish that this was happening when the Patriots host some sunny-weather team like Miami or Houston in the AFC playoffs. While we wouldn't anticipate you being snowbound for a week, it may not hurt to buy necessary things like beer and tobacco in bulk.

We aren't anticipating a driving ban, but you never know. Only fools and emergency personnel will be on the roads Saturday. You could get a thousand kinds of messed up if you had a car accident in this weather, and only about half of those will be injuries sustained in the accident.

Frozen in place like Jack Torrance? Could happen. Hit by a plow, left in the street, then hit by another plow? Signs say Possible. You think you're walking down Shore Road somewhere, but you instead are walking off a pier into the stormy Atlantic, where a late-staying Great White Shark devours you? OK, that's not too likely, but if it was going to happen, today would be a prime candidate.

You want to read this article quickly, because blizzards have a funny way of knocking out power to the area. It will take Eversource a long time to get you back on if that happens. Today is a day to settle whatever grudges you may have with the neighbor who has the fireplace and the huge wood pile.

We're pretty much done with forecasting, and our next articles will involve me heading out (on foot, I don't trust my beater car in this weather) to get pictures. We'll publish them as long as we are able to. Feel free to hit up our Facebook Page with any pictures that you wouldn't mind seeing up on these pages.

Hunker down and stay safe, folks. As Fred G. Sanford once said, "This is the big one, Elizabeth."

MIAA State Championship Football Schedule

Saturday is when we settle the Who Is The Best Football Team questions for like 8 different arguments. We get some cross-state fights.... I can almost guarantee that no one from Shrewsbury or Wachonah has ever spent much time worrying about how life is in Duxbury or Mashpee, and vice versa. Their views will change after they have beaten or been beaten by the other in front of their townmates, parents and cheerleaders.

Our predictions run as follows:

Everett 21, Xaverian 18
King Phillip 24, Reading 23
Duxbury 56, Shrewsbury 0
Falmouth 28, Marblehead 27
Hanover 18, Grafton 10
East Bridgewater 20, St. Mary's 7
Mashpee 34, Wahconah 0
Maynard 7, Mills-Hopedale 6

The Trillion Cran March

You know that a publication named Cranberry County Magazine is going to bombard you with burgundy as Thanksgiving nears. Our photographers were all over eastern Massachusetts, seeing who had the goods. 

We focused heavily on Plymouth, Carver and Wareham. You could also draw a triangle running from Duxbury to Freetown to Yarmouth Port, and assume that we stumbled through every bog in it.

Cranberry County University mathematicians estimate that our photographers captured 1,000,000,000,000 cranberries on film. That's a trillion, babe....

Even a rotten photographer like Stephen can do OK if he works with acres of berries directly in front of him where he can't miss them.

The urge to push him in from behind while he was taking this shot was almost overwhelming.

I totally want to wade two strippers into that and have them wrestle for three rounds while drunks throw money at them.

Let's roll through the cranberry harvest process. First, you get a cranberry bog.

Then you flood it, and hire this dude to roll through it with his cranberry-loosening tractor which probably has some technical name that I'm unaware of.

Once he's done, you have acres of floating berries.

Enter the workers...

Cool man, rotten shot...

Sorry for the blurry, but this is the tube which sucks up all the berries that the Cape Verdean guys pulled into a pile.

I think this is where the water goes after the berries are sorted out of it, or it's where they're getting the water. I don't know this farm stuff that well, I was raised in f*cking Dorchester until it was too late to make a farm boy out of me.

The cranberries then get pumped up into a big truck, where they get sent off to Ocean Spray.

The big truck in question.... you would need a corresponding truck full of sugar to create a 15000 sq foot serving of cranberry sauce.

Sometimes, the truck spills some cranberries, people run over them, and you get roads that look like this. This is in Carver... and, no, it's not the Cranberry Highway. That's in the 'Ham.

Cranberry Jones got his nickname at Yale, where he spent his freshman year eating nothing but cranberry products in an attempt to turn his skin burgundy. It didn't work, he had the runs for 7 months and he's now our organized crime contact.

We've got the boys working hard, and we'll be back over the weekend with some more shots.

Duxbury Beach, November King Tide

Stephen and Jessica got stuck at work yesterday, but have no fear... Duggan was here! By sheer fate, he happened to be just where I was supposed to be for the high tide. Or, since I was working for a church, maybe it wasn't fate....

Yesterday was a Supermoon King Tide, as you can see on this here chart. That's Boston, but same diff, player. The moon was as close to the Earth as it has been since the 1940s, and that made for huge tides.

Why I hire photographers.... here's me shooting the Supermoon.

Fortunately for coastal residents, the wind hadn't kicked in by the time (11 AM) that the tide was high. This meant "no surf," and took the specter of serious coastal flood damage off of the table. When the wind did perk up, it was between tides.

It never hurts to check the Bluefish River during King Tides. It's a shame that the kids were in school (and that it's November), because this was a prime Jumping Off The Bluefish River Bridge tide. I bet that somebody blew off school in 1943 to jump off that bridge during the last King Tide. A kid wouldn't waste a sick day on a bridge jump these days, what with the Internet and Drugs and Girls and Netflix and all.

I'm not joking when I say that I'd trade my Bourne cottage for this boathouse like thisquick.

If they never invented golf courses and peope just golfed through town (which is how I taught a generation of my students to play bocce in Charlestown, much to the amusement of the old guys who hung around the Navy Yard on sunny days), this would make a tremendous 18th hole..... OK, it would make a tremendous 18th hole if a tavern was within walking distance.

No weathered wood was spared in this shot. That's a mighty long dock, most likely a relic of Duxburys shipbuilding era. There is about 10% of me that imagines that it was built by a fisherman to be just 10-20 feet out of his wife's shouting-out-the-window range. 

It's unusual for the tide to get this close to the road in Duxbury. That's why they put the road there.

Thanks to Debbie D, we get this 3 shot panorama of Bradford Lake in Duxbury. Oh wait, that's not Bradford Lake, it's Bradford's Parking Lot. It;s normally a meadow, until the tide water in the marsh rises above the level of the road between it and Bradford's. If you're considering the purchase of that large house on the left, know that this is what the meadow fills up like without a storm

South Shore Leaf Peeping

As fall foliage season peaks, we hit the South Shore again to see what was what....

There are disadvantages to working this turf. In a county where the tallest place is Manomet, we're not going to get those panoramic mountain valley shots where you can see 10,000 trees. Sorry 'bout that. I tend to aim at one tree, often- as you can see above- one that is in someone's yard. If you're upset about the lack of sweeping ROY G BIV vistas, take some comfort at the fact that A) many of these pictures are taken while the person inside the house is loading a shotgun nd saying, perhaps to no one but themselves, "I'll find out why thaat stony looking dude is parked in front of my house," and B) my number is going to come up at the deli some day, perhaps even some day soon. I worry not about stuff like that... "The bullet that will kill me is not yet cast."

Whoever owns this house can do a fall foliage drive just by idling their car in the driveway. Added bonus: basketball hoop. Nothing says "suburban white kid" like one of those not-planted-in-concrete basketball hoops. Ally McBeal could tear down that backboard if she dunked on it. Imagine if Shaq threw down on that? He might snatch it up by the pole after and beat you with it, just for not having the planted-in-concrete type of basketball hoop. Your author here is a tall man, and he sometimes wastes a tangent on stuff that only 6'5"+ people care about.

Orange is the essential fall foliage color. Red and yellow can be found in spring or summer, in the form of roses, glads, marigolds, what have you... but you're not getting orange until Autumn. With the prominent place in Autumn/Halloween ascribed to the pumpkin, orange sort of wins in a rout.  

Since you asked, our road trip this time went 1) Bourne, 2) Plymouth, 3) Kingston, 4) Duxbury, 5) Marshfield, 6) Pembroke, 7) Norwell, 8) Hanover, 9) Rockland, 10) Hingham, back to 11) Bourne.

The good Lord works in many a strange and wondrous way, and even a non-drinker knows better than to cross the Great Spirit when He pretty much smacks you in the face with a suggestion. A pre-noon Mudslide or two never hurt anyone.

Not a lot of people know this.... but when you're drinking and driving, the way to keep safe is to introduce a second negative integer into the equation. Shooting a camera while driving counts as a negative. Two negatives will, uhm, negate the negative charge of each other into a positive. The mathematics work

You know that the green trees are all jealous...

"Foliage and fenced-in meadows" go together like "F5 Tornado and trailer park."

This tree, normally yellow, wore pink in October to raise awareness for breast cancer.

This tree cares not for the affairs of wood-burning humans.

I got the house level in this shot, but the street was, like, on  hill or something.

Lake shots are as close as n EMass shutterbug can get to Vermont-style views. My camera and skills hold me back personally, but I didn't see any overly colorful horizon foliage.

Ignore the times and dates on the shots, my camera changes the time/date every time I turn it on and off. I took these last Friday or so. I did the South Coast on Saturday. The Cape is coming soon.

Not many places have less foliage than sand/scrub/pine-dominated  Duxbury Beach. I had to jump a fence and stomp on some beach grass to get this color.

The one below came easier:

Check back for South Coast and Cape Cod!