South Shore Saturday Storm Surf Shots

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sagamore gets maximum barrier beach protection from Cape Cod.

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

Naming Post-Secession Mainland Cape Cod

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

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

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

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

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

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

- Gridlock

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

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

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


- Ripton

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

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


- Capeside

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

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

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

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

- Wutham

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

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


- Sagamore

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

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

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


Shark City

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

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

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

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

Double Bay

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

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

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

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

Bowtie

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

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

Squanto

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

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

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

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

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

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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.

Hunting For Sea Glass In Massachusetts

Who doesn't love Sea Glass?

Sea Glass is made when regular glass gets into the ocean. While finding a whole bottle may be preferable, one generally works with shards of broken glass. They wash into the sea, bang around for a few decades, and gradually 1) get the edges rounded off, and 2) acquire a frosted appearance.

Voila! Sea Glass!

The hunter/gatherer of Sea Glass is someone who finds use for a Cape Cod beach in February. Other than aesthetics, beaches aren't really good for much between October and May. You can surf, but that requires the acquisition of a skill, a wetsuit and a car big enough to carry a surfboard. Even then, you have to wait for days where the waves are large, and- even more then- a shark might eat you. Funk that.

You can still saddle up a surfboard, but you can also walk along the shore for free and keep your eyes looking down. You'll eventually gather up a nice pile of colored, frosted glass, which can be used for various artistic projects.

Don't be intimidated by Artistry. I'm pretty much a complete moron with Art (when I was starting out as a teacher, the inescapable chalkboard artwork which I had to perform was of such a low level that one of my students- her name was something like Hillary Aronson, in case you know her- came up to me after a class and said "Mr. B, next time, just tell me what you want drawn on the board and I'll get up and do it for you. Art isn't your strong point."), but even I can buy a jar and put Sea Glass in it. Leave the jar on a windowsill where it can catch some sunlight... boom, Art.

The hunt can be as nice as the meal with Sea Glass, as- even if you strike out- you still get in a nice beach walk. Other than a greatly-increased risk of toe-stubbing, there's really no downside to Sea Glass Collecting.

This is stuff that you probably knew before reading this article, so what I need to do is some lengthy thinkin' on how sea glass is made, and where someone would be best sent to gather some.

As we noted before, the short answer to the How Is Sea Glass Made question is "glass falls in the ocean, et cetera." However, there are a few things that you should know beyond that.

One, there is some snobbery in the game. "Beach Glass" sounds just like sea glass, but it is not the same, and people will clown on you if you think that it is. Beach Glass is either made in rivers or- for the love of Mary- factories. This stuff is the Fat Girl/Poor Man of the artsy glass movement, and a resident of (or a resident with access to) coastal Massachusetts need not worry about it.

Two, sea glass takes 20-30 years to round into shape. You can't smash a bottle today, walk down the beach a few hundred yards tomorrow, and find a frosted version of the bottle you broke. Nope. You have to wait, for decades in some cases. Certain kinds of sea glass (I'm not sure what kinds, I'm assuming thick glass or something) take up to 50 years before they're display-worthy.

In the 1980s or so, they passed numerous Bottle Bill laws, and those empties are worth a nickel each now... nothing to sneeze at when you drink to the degree that I drink, player. People started returning bottles rather than chucking them, and poor folks would eventually gather up any leftover cold-soldiers to make a nickel per. Right around the same time, those tree-huggin' liberals forced many industries to move away from glass bottles towards the non-sea-glass-makin' plastic bottling. While the beer companies held out, even the drinkers picked up some love-thy-planet stuff from the more conscientious people, and are presently less likely to smash bottles when drinking outdoors.

All of the stuff in the previous two paragraphs means that there is less glass being dumped in the ocean, which means that the sea glass talent pool has thinned out substantially. Population growth cancels it out somewhat, but not nearly enough. The person saying "There was more and better seaglass when I was a kid," is correct, not fooled by nostalgia.

Three, the motion of the ocean is important not only for making the glass, but for moving it about. If glass stayed where you broke it, my local pharmacy would have no Noxema, and I'd have a lamp full of cool blue sea glass culled from my just-offshore stash spot. If you're serious about collecting sea glass- and your author is, at least this morning- you have to research where the currents run, where the rivers empty, where the population centers are, seabed sediment redistribution... and numerous other factors, trust me.

Fourth, know that one piece of glass is not of the same value as others. Typical colors include white, brown and green, the colors of the beer and soda bottles. Lesser-known colors include yellow and blue. Experts can look at a piece of glass and tell you what kind of bottle it came from, and from which era.

Basically, clear = beer, faint green = Coca-Cola, darker green = Sprite, and blue means that not only did someone drink Milk Of Magnesia at a beach, but that they enjoyed it so much that they smashed the bottle in celebration when they finished, like Gronk.

Fifth, you need a combination of timing and luck. Sea glass doesn't weigh much, but it weighs a lot more than sand does. Sand washes around more, and eventually will cover up sea glass. There are some tricks you can do to up your odds, but "needle in a haystack" is actually too conservative a measure for what a glass hunter is doing.

If you can go hunting after a storm, do so. Everything gets turned over, and new stuff is cast forth from the sea.

Finally, much like a mating leopard, you have to pick your spots. Location is everything. You need to identify and exploit certain natural features which are distinct to the local geography. That's where we're headed now.

I was just kidding about Gronk smashing Vap-O-Rub bottles at the beach. Most of our sea glass comes from inland flooding. Rivers rise up, find bottles, wash them downstream, smash them up a bit, and send them out of their mouth into open ocean. The lucky pieces make it back to the beach. The coastal people smash bottles too, but their numbers don't match up with everyone inland.

So, your search should start with a river mouth that empties into Cape Cod Bay or the open Atlantic. The North River, the Taunton River, the the Charles River, the Mystic River, the Green Harbor River, and even the Hudson River will spit out glass that you can eventually collect. Glass can wash a long way from where it started.

Once you have that part done, you have to look at currents. Currents wash the glass to wherever it is going to end up... well, currents and waves, of course. You need to imagine the glass washing into the sea and being directed somewhere by the local currents... currents which, thanks to this handy map, you are now familiar with.

So, you have a glass source, the general direction from the source where the glass went, and now you need to guess where it ended up. This is where I have to invent a geographical term. A "basin beach" is something that sticks out into the sea a bit and collects whatever floatsam and jetsam the sea has to offer. Think of the basin beach as being a big first baseman's mitt, working the current.

Once you're on that beach, look for the area where everything washes up. If a beach has a sandy part and a rocky part, go to the rocky part. Work the fringes of the pile, or go All In and start digging in the rockpile itself.

I actually suck at the collecting, myself. I'm a tall man, and I have terrible eyesight. That's a bad combo to call in on a job where you are looking for tiny bits of glass on a beach, and that's before you factor in the ADHD and the often copious drug usage. What I am good for is helping you skip some of those steps I listed by pointing out local beaches which fit the criteria for a sea glass hot-spot.

Horse Neck Beach, Westport

The Gulf Stream current pushes right up into the body of water known as Buzzards Bay. America's east coast most certainly coughs up a lot of sea glass. Most of it goes out to sea, some of it ends up on Lon-Guy-Land, Rhodey takes her share, but that still leaves a lot of Niceness washing into Bee Bay.

Horse Neck Beach (do not buy into rumors that it was named that because a harlot was lynched there) is well-positioned to get a cut of that action. I suppose that a lot of New York glass washes over here, which should help your numbers out some with ol' Lady Luck.

HNB is also close enough and yet far enough to/from the Taunton River to guarantee a nice flow of glass.

More glass probably goes to the Elizabeth Islands, but mining that involves you getting a boat and stuff. Remember, you're putting broken glass in a jar... let's not ring up any silly expenses.

Speaking of which, the two best spots to capitalize on the Gulf Stream current- Nantucket and Martha's Vineyard- are also eliminated for needs-a-boat reasons.



Old Silver Beach, Falmouth MA

On the other side of Buzzards Bay, we have the town of Falmouth. In the town of Falmouth, we have Old Silver Beach.

I like more rocks on a beach when I hunt, but OSB is very well positioned to get washashore sea glass. If you can get up by Crow Point, do so. It's rockier there.

You may end up in someone's front yard, so be careful. I grew up on a beach and live on one now, so I tend to be a bit unaware of beach restrictions in other towns.

If you find some silver there, even better. Just don't be, like, taking it out of people's beach houses or anything, friends.


Craigville Beach, Centerville MA

Cape Cod, which is a barrier beach for Massachusetts, is also protected by a pair of barrier islands known as Martha's Vineyard and Nantucket, as well as the Elizabeth Islands. These islands, and the multitude of jetties and groynes along the coast (Dennis Port has so many groynes and jetties along the shoreline, it looks like a zipper when viewed from space) interfere with the glass gathering process.

The islands, at a sharp corner of the Gulf Stream, also have odd currents. They sink ships, which is why they dug the Cape Cod Canal. It also messes with the sea glass distribution.

Even if they don't stop the flow of sea glass entirely, the process becomes somewhat unpredictable. We'll give you a southern Cape location to check, but don't say that we didn't warn you.

Craigville sits in a gap between Martha and ACK, and is a nice base from which to operate. She is also basin-shaped, which should act like a catcher's mitt and trap seaglass.

Remember, since you aren't too far from the Kennedy Compound, you might get some high-pedigree glass. I know a guy who lives near Chappaquidick who claims to have red sea glass from Ted Kennedy's brake lights.

Friggin' sweet stopper!

Coast Guard Beach, Eastham, MA

Cape Cod is several different beasts as far as sea glass collecting goes. Buzzards Bay is well-positioned, while the south-facing Cape isn't. Once you turn the corner at Chatham, however, it's a whole new ball game.

I like east-facing Atlantic beaches. A very determined piece of European or African sea glass may have fought her way to America against the Gulf Stream. Who knows? It may have once been Queen Isabella's compact, or Napoleon's Courvoisier bottle, or John Bonham's headlights, or Idi Amin's coke mirror. You never know, stuff like that gets tossed around all the time.

Park and walk north (left) once you hit the beach, to get yourself past the sandbars.


Race Point, Provincetown, MA

RP is one of those gold mine spots. She's also the first beach on our list that isn't getting Gulf Stream in her mix. Most of her sea glass is coming from the north.

People who study currents are already saying "By George! The West Maine Coastal Current aims right at Race Point!" You can't sneak anything up on those people. RP gets stuff from Maine and New Hampshire all the time, including sea glass.Throw in whatever Boston glass washes out that far, and you have a hot spot.

Stellwagen Bank also channels stuff towards Race Point. Note that the Bank, and Cape Cod to a greater extent, slow down waves. This slows down sea glass migration.



Skaket Beach, Orleans, MA

I knew that my kung-fu was superb when my research on which beaches to hit led to a list which matched up with the Sea Glass Ninja Lady from Cape Cast. She admitted that she had no idea why one beach or another yielded better results, but our conclusions match up well.

Inner Cape Cod Bay is a tremendous place to go. It acts as a catch basin for the runoff from the Western Maine Coastal Current. This current is the engine that drives Cape Cod Bay's sea glass movement. Water is pushed along the shore from Maine, past Boston, and into Cape Cod Bay. The fish-hook shape of Cape Cod helps catch the glass as it moves down the line.

Sandy Neck Beach, Barnstable MA

Sandy Neck Beach is a rather long beach, so if you strike out here, you might want to look for easier-spotted things as your next hobby. I'd recommend Lighthouses, it's tough to miss those.

Sandy Neck Beach is a 4700 acre barrier beach, and she is what everything that washes down from Boston eventually bumps into.

You can double up on Sandy Neck Beach. It's where the sand that washes down from Sandwich ends up. Added bonus... when they dredge the Canal, they dump the fill on a beach just west of SNB, and it washes East during storms. Go to Sandy Neck after a full-moon storm, you'll get a lot of Sandwich's sea glass as well.


Scusset Beach, Sandwich MA

The South Shore ends with a THUD as you hit the Scusset Beach jetty. They made the jetty to protect the Canal, but they may as well have made it to catch sea glass.

If Sandwich is being robbed of sea glass, that means someone else is getting extra! Ironically as Hell, I think that this was Mr. Glass' motivation in Unbreakable.

If you want to throw some sand over the jetty towards Sandwich, they'd appreciate it.

Manomet Point, Plymouth MA

P-Diddy is somewhat sheltered by Duxbury Beach, and Manomet Point is the part of Plymouth that sticks out the most into the sea. If you follow the current down the South Shore, MP is what you'll eventually run into.

You're not too far downstream from an oceanfront nuclear reactor here, which in theory would make it possible to look for glowing, irradiated sea glass at night.

If you want to be up the river from the plutonium, try the perfect-for-the-job Long Beach part of town.


Duxbury Beach, Duxbury MA

Duxbury Beach is pretty much the exact shape of the Western Maine Coastal Current, and the current repays the favor by giving Duxbury 5 miles of sea glass hunting territory. Nothing on the South Shore sticks further out into the current than Duxbury Beach does.

You get another 5 miles on the bayside, but the big scores are on the oceanside.

Once you commit, you may as well walk down to the uninhabited part. Less people have worked the territory, upping your chances of scoring big.

If you feel really ambitious, dig into one of the huge rockpiles around the crossovers The good stuff is under the rockpile.

Since I am a former Mayor of Duxbury Beach, you have to give me 10% of your haul, or half of any blue glass.

Egypt Beach, Scituate MA

You'll feel like King Tut after you pillage Egypt Beach, wocka wocka wocka...

Scituate has several beach styles, including rocky, sandy, and marshy. Egypt Beach is what Goldilocks would settle on after dissing the other beaches in town for one sea glass-huntin' reason or another.

You can dig in the rockpiles, or you can walk along the perimeter and pick off the strays. It's Scituariffic!



Nantasket Beach, Hull MA

We saved the best for last!

Nantasket represents two things here. She is the end of the South Shore gold mine, and she is where the WMCC loses her power. That's the bad news. Everything else is good news.

Nanny may hold the title for the region, as she is perfectly positioned to get Boston's glass. She also gets the inland glass, when the Charles and Mystic Rivers spit their bounty out into the sea.

Point Allerton is probably a better spot, but Nantasket is more accessible. The area around the high school is productive, as well.

Much love to Julie Nightingale for the sea glass pics. Sara Flynn gave us the Duxbury Beach shot with the stairs. Jessica Allen was nice enough to shoot Hull for us.

The Cape Cod Canal Foliage Project

Quint wasn't talking about Cape Cod when he laid down the facts in Jaws, but he may as well have been. We are a summer community, and we need summer dollars, or we'll be on the welfare all winter... something to that effect.

However, money grows green in all seasons. Why not make some Autumn money? Does money really grow on trees?

Autumn money is sort of up our alley. We're the Thanksgiving ground zero for America. We have quaint little cranberry bogs scattered all about. As long as you don't go swimming, those beaches are fine on a warm autumn day, even in November.

We also have foliage. Now, when you think of foliage, you think of New Hampshire, Maine, Vermont and even the Berkshires. You don't really think Cape Cod.

Middleboro certainly doesn't think so, and they planted this tree to prove it to you.

That's a shame, because we're the last region of New England to experience peak foliage. Maine trees are bare when we're just getting to the height of our season. Cape Cod, if you look at a foliage map, peaks right around when a Kentucky-Alabama swath is peaking, and those states don't do foliage like New England does.

We should be better known for it. Everyone who saw the beautiful foliage shots from New Hampshire on the news, and who then said "We should drive out in the country and see some foliage," but who then procrastinated... those people should be looking at Cape Cod as a Last Resort.

People aren't stupid, so there must be good reasons as to why we don't get Vermont's autumnal swagger. For starters, we lack the forest cover that northern New England has. We also have the wrong sort of trees.

That second problem can be fixed.

Trees drop acorns and so forth, and those can be harvested. Plant them in the ground, and they'll grow a version of the tree that they fell from. Come autumn, those trees will put off the same color that their parents did.

It's so simple, it pretty much takes care of itself.

I called a few tree farms, and the big difference a tree would see in Massachusetts as opposed to New Hampshire is that they would go into seasonal color changes later. Trees that turn in early October in Falmouth, Maine would have to wait until November in Falmouth, Massachusetts.

Let that fact roll around in your head a bit as we figure out how to make money off of this.

Cape Cod is a series of tourist towns, and the weakest link in the chain is Bourne.

Bourne is very nice when compared to Fitchburg or Holyoke, but it's in last place as far as Cape Cod tourism goes. Bourne has nice people living there and has a lot to offer, but we have Bay where everyone else has Ocean, so we sort of lag behind the other Cape towns when it comes to tourism.

There's not much we can do about the Bay, but the Cape Cod Canal is another animal entirely.

The Cape Cod Canal is an ocean river, The canal is 7 miles long, and it is framed on each side by a wonderful bike path. These paths are framed by a thick row of trees.

These trees tend to be pine, Pine is lovely, but it doesn't do much during Autumn beyond dropping pine needles into that gap between your windshield and the car hood. There's nothing wrong with pine, but no one is driving out from New York City to look at it.

So, we have several problems: a weak sister of a Cape Cod town, a poor foliage reputation, a short tourist season and a boring pine Canal.

If we could somehow wipe that slate clean, even if it takes a few generations, we could maybe get this town back on a payin' basis.

That's why we should do whatever it takes to plant ten thousand acorns along the Cape Cod Canal. Not just any acorns, either. We should take acorns from trees that produce spectacular foliage.

I won't make it to the mountain top with you, but once those acorns become trees, we'll have the premier foliage display in Massachusetts and perhaps New England.

It's all there for the taking.

New Hampshire and Vermont have it easy. They didn't plant those trees, and they only still have those trees because not enough people want to move to Vermont to warrant clearing space. They don't deserve that foliage.

Bourne, on the other hand, would aggressively select their trees. We'd be Mother Nature on steroids, ruthlessly saying which tree will grow where. With the tree huggers appeased by the planting of ten thousand trees. we'd be free to play God yet again with the Cape Cod Canal area.

If the right people (and I'm not one of them, I become useless as anything other than a laborer after the Idea Stage) are running this, we could have a ridiculous run of foliage down each side of an underutilized Canal.

Planned by experts, planted in rows fronting the Canal and dropping acorns of their own each year, the Canal Forest would both own and pwn the rest of New England as a foliage destination.

Bourne would then have some nice assets to work with.

We'd have a sweet location, maybe 25% of the drive someone might have to take to get to the Maine foliage. We'd have foliage that would kick in during the run-up to Thanksgiving, which also draws tourists into the region. We'd have hotels, gas stations and all that other stuff that leeches money out of tourists.

Most importantly, we'd have our ridiculous multi-colored Canal. The canal has plenty of parking, would feature easy access, boasts of long-but-not-too-long walks and would look like New Hampshire would look if it were planned.

You could probably sell boat tours of this new foliage run, with the added bonus of three bridges and one power plant. I think they already have Canal foliage boat tours, but this would become a larger venture if our Canal looks like the Mohawk Trail wishes it looked.

 This would merge nicely with our present Tourist Season.

The majority of the tourists leave after Labor Day.

The old people are smart enough to do Cape tourism after Labor Day, and they help push the season into October.

A foliage explosion in the Canal would push that season into maybe mid-November (you can still see foliage driving around Cape Cod today)...

... where it would merge with the Pilgrim/Wampanoag/Thanksgiving connection, which we should also figure out an angle from which we could extract profit from exploiting it.

We just need the ten thousand acorns.

How to get those ten thousand acorns is the question we need to solve. I have no intention of standing up at a town meeting with this idea, as I'm not tree-savvy enough to answer the questions that citizens would rightfully ask if something that smells like Tax is spoken of.

I have no idea how much ten thousand trees would cost. I'll try to find out before we publish, as I tend to work during the Witching Hour. Hopefully, this section between the pictures will be bigger tomorrow.

UPDATE: I bothered a few people, including Stephen Davis and Chuck Teravainen.

Maple saplings go $20-30 or so, live 100 years, grow 6-12 inches a year, and need about 20-25 yards of space. Wisteria is $20, and Dogwood goes $15. Aspen is $18-29. Water and fertilizer would be needed for the first few years.

These prices are awesome if you have a big yard and plan to hold onto the house. If you have a 7 mile Canal to fill 2 sides of at $15-30 every 20 yards, that adds up to... like...uhm... carry the two..... a lot of money.

It's not too hard to grow trees from acorns. It's much cheaper. We can get the kids to do the labor for nada.

One reason that I'm not worried about town meetings and how much trees or acorns cost is that I have no intention of buying acorns.

I was never in the Cub Scouts or Boy Scouts myself, but I always thought of Scouting as an admirable pursuit. I assume that they spend a lot of their time in the woods, doing woodsy things.

I'd challenge the little SOBs. Give the world an eco-friendly, cash-grabbing project that shows off the beauty of nature, and help along a struggling resort town in the process.

I don't know how many Scouts there are on Cape Cod, but if a hundred of them could be trained to identify acorns from the proper foliage trees, would it merit a few bus trips worth of cash to send them up into the Enemy States to each steal one hundred of their acorns?

One trip to New Hampshire for supplies, another to Bourne for planting. Train the DPW people well enough that they don't cut down saplings. I'm not above using specially-trained prison labor, but residents may disagree.

If the Scouts won't do it, each Cape Cod high school should be coerced into sending their kids up to gather acorns.

Yes, every school or Scout troop on Cape Cod. I sit through a lot of traffic so that Orleans and Yarmouth Port can get their tourists, and we want some payback in the form of acorns. Before those brats get their diplomas, they pay the Gatekeeper fifty acorns.

Some of that cash will bleed into their towns too, as people who walk the Foliage Canal might decide to trek down 6A, or maybe watch the sharks kill the seals in Chatham. Its win/win, unless you're a seal.

Someone should be coordinating this effort. It's a tough sell, because we won't see the payoff in our lifetimes, but the kids will. When those trees sprout, we'll be in business.

For the bother of gathering and planting a few acorns, we'll be the most easily accessible foliage spot for what I'd gather is a large % of the leaf-peeping population.

Would you rather drive 6 hours into the Vermont wilderness and amble down endless East Bufu roads looking for bursts of foliage, or would you rather blast down to Bourne in an hour and take a leisurely stroll through what would essentially be a bursting-with-color foliage theme park set by an ocean river?

Bourne, who lost their end o' summer cash cow when the Scallop Festival skipped town, would slowly evolve into the Autumn anchorman of Cape Cod.

New Hampshire won't know what hit them.

Surf Check, Round 2

For the second straight day, we set out to give you some surf reports. This is from Duxbury Beach.

Media Savvy Sky Rat

You just knew we were gonna hit 'Murica's Hometown, folks.

If I lived there, I'd have the Lobster Pound just zip-line me my supper every day.

Rough-but-ultimately-unimpressive surf, Duxbury Beach

Lobster Pound, Manomet Point, Plymouth MA

White Horse Beach, Flag Rock

Care to venture a guess which pictures in this article were shot on Jessica's phone, and which were shot on my $27 Wal-Mart cheapo camera?

Under the boardwalk, there's lots of water..... Sandwich, MA

Rotten camera ruins a nice shot from Scusset Beach, MA

The author, cavorting...

Plymouth's lobsetermen were taking no chances.

This guy was psyching himself up to jump the Sandwich boardwalk, but he didn't get it done while I was watching.

You'll get various opinions on fishing during storms, but this guy was at least putting his theories to practice in the Cape Cod Canal

Strong winds in effect for a few days, which means that we'll be out there tomorrow, as well.

CCM knows not fear, and runs only for the exercise.

Rotten shot, but this was as far East as I went... Sandwich, MA