Everybody knows Punxsatawney Phil, even if they don't know how to spell it. He's the groundhog from Pennsylvania who comes out of his little hidey-hole and tells you how many weeks of winter we have left.
Not as many people know the equally important Doug the Quahog.
Doug is a Cape Cod quahog who has somehow evolved the ability to:
1) speak to a human
and
2) live eternally
and
3) live comfortably on dry land
and
4) predict beach weather.
He speaks only to Captain Johnny Quahog, who met Doug at a raw bar on Cape Cod. Doug was able to communicate with Johnny, and the effect was such that Johnny assumed a Minuteman persona and serves as Doug's mouthpiece.
Doug premiered on a summer day when the local TV weathergirl called for a rainy weekend, and Doug disagreed in public. One sunny tourist weekend later, Cape Cod had a new mascot.
Doug has ruled the Quahog Day holiday with an iron fist valve ever since, escorted by Capt. Quahog, the Quahog security team (much like a Batman villain, Doug has clam-themed sidekick names, a la "Littleneck," "Razor," "Shuck" and a guy known only as "The Santuit Steamer.") and a bevy of celebrity wommin'.
At varying times, Doug has been tied to various starlets with Cape Cod connections. They say that Taylor Swift bought the Hyannis Port house to be Doug. Lady Gaga impulsively purchased a Nantucket property after a night out with the Mighty Mollusk. Local songbird Siobhan Magnus dug Doug. Salma Hayek drove out to see Doug while filming Grown-Ups, and Jessica Biel spent a summer filming on Cape Cod concurrently serving as Doug's Summer Catch. While he never said anything about Jackie Kennedy himself, there was talk around town that he had spent some time with her intimately.
As you can see in the photo below, Doug rocked last summer in the company of teen queen Selena Gomez.
Doug's weather forecasting accuracy shames that of any Amish country rodent. It presently hovers around 103%.
The key is understanding that Doug sometimes has a different definition of "good beach day" than the one vacationers use. This adds a Monkey's Paw element to the forecast.
It isn't easy to do. For instance, one year saw Doug begin to blow forecasts. His accuracy rate plummeted. Scientists were brought in from Woods Hole. They eventually figured out that Doug enjoys tropical storms, and when tropical storms were factored in, Doug's accuracy returned to Infallible levels.
Since then, Doug has also been used to predict tropical storms that will damage Cape Cod. He again went against local forecasters in 1991, and was the only local prognosticator to call the Perfect Storm.
Doug wants the citizenry to know that Quahog Day is tomorrow. You can blow off work from any Cape Cod business without being fired if you are going to Quahog Day. You can skip school without a doctor's note to go to Quahog Day. If your wife or husband won't go to Quahog Day with you, you can take a Mistress or Bull to the event with no legal alimonial restitution owed if they are busted and subsequently divorced.
Quahog Day will be celebrated on the First Day of Summer - Monday, June 20th - at the Matakeese Wharf Restaurant overlooking Barnstable Harbor.
The highly anticipated prognostication ceremony will happen just after 2 p.m., when Doug the Quahog (our Cape Cod mascot) once again predicts how many weeks of beach weather lie ahead for the coming summer!
The ceremony will be emceed by NECN Meteorologist Pete Bouchard.
Come witness history in the making! Free and open to all! For more information, visit www.QuahogDay.com.
Quahog Day is brought to you by the Cape Cod Chamber of Commerce!
Cape Cod is all about Welcome! We rely on our tourists, and go to great lengths to draw them in to us. Without visitors, we'd be in a mess of trouble. We white people were once visitors ourselves, and we may have perished without the hospitality of the incumbent residents.
There have been times, however, where we sought to limit that access. Granted, the visitors in question had a habit of killing both livestock and perhaps the occasional Pilgrim-era child. They also were rather noisy at night, especially when the moon shone brightly. You couldn't go out safely without a gun. Things got bad enough that we once considered building a fence, right here in Bourne.
That seems sort of Donald Trumpish, but we're not talking about Muslims, Mexicans or even a Mohegan. We're speaking about wolves. Pilgrims and Sachems may have viewed the wolf differently, but both would agree that life is generally much happier when a hungry one isn't walking around the neighborhood.
Man has only been on Cape Cod for a hot minute when compared with the overall natural history of the region, but our time here has seen us be Impact Players to the point where you can divide the whole of Cape Cod's natural history into two parts. One part would be Since Man Arrived, and the other would be Everything Else.
Wolves were chased off Cape Cod by the time of the Industrial Revolution. The chief culprit was Habitat Destruction, and they were also heavily hunted once the Europeans arrived. The native Americans lived in harmony with nature, but their English cousins cleared out the forests. The wolves were gone soon after. However, during the process, there was a period- almost two centuries- where it was not unusual to lose livestock to the Big Bad Wolf.
Massachusetts was not even remotely urban outside of some bustling villages for a while, and they were almost 100% dependent on localized farming and livestock raising. Wolves love themselves a good steak dinner if they can get it, and they don't really care if it hurts the people who are stealing their land. This set the stage for conflict.
A coyote, but a coyote that may be 25% wolf (Scituate, taken by Matthew Loveitt) In 1713, the town of Eastham decreed that they would pay out 3 pounds for a wolf, payable when you show up at the constable's place with an adult wolf head. Since our little Cape wasn't the millionaire haven it is now, you know that anything worth a bounty was at least somewhat of a serious problem.
A person could make a fairly nice 1713 living by helping to rid the Cape of this toothy difficulty, if your definition of "nice" includes "hunting multiple apex predators in a dark, uncharted Algonquin forest with a single-shot-per-minute musket."
There were even bounties issued on individual wolves, with payment going to "any individual who shall kill the wolf who has of late been prowling through the township."
In 1717, the town of Sandwich came upon a unique idea. Why not build a fence to block Cape Cod off from wolves?
There are several famous walls, all built to keep something Bad out of (or in) a town. Hadrian's Wall was built to stop barbarians. The Great Wall of China was built to repel Mongols. The Berlin Wall was built to keep the Communists from leaving. Pink Floyd's "The Wall" made for a fine movie, but is completely unrelated to the topic.
The wall would have run roughly along the same path of the present Cape Cod Canal. I presume it would have been made of wood, and maybe stone. I don't know if they planned to extend it out into the ocean a bit, as a wolf who is determined to get to Hyannis Port can always swim out past the fence.
Whether this fence would hold up if the wolf huffed and puffed, we'll never know.
As near as I can tell, it would have started at Peaked Cliff (extreme north Sagamore Beach), worked along the line of the Herring River into and though Bournedale, before finishing up at Buttermilk Bay. Remember that the western/southern end of what is now the Canal was back then a swampy area where several small rivers emptied.
The Bournedale wolf wall was met with something less than enthusiasm by the townspeople, and the idea was shelved permanently. Aside from the obvious cost and effort, there was a sentiment about town that the wall, while keeping wolves out, would also keep wolves we already had in.
It was instead decided to wage an environmental holocaust, deforest an entire region, and chase the fauna into New Hampshire. Ironically, about 200 years later, they decided to instead dig a moat and float oil tankers and container vessels through the same area. The Cape Cod Canal had pretty much the exact effect that Sammich voters were asked to consider in 1717. The Canal became a stopping point for most animal migration, and it is fairly amazing that we somehow got a bear to Truro recently.
We may never get wolves again, although they are advancing south and east from Canada. Once they get to New Hampshire, it becomes only a matter of time before one of them ponders a swim across the Canal. Lesser predators such as fishers and coyote have already made the Hop.
In fact, the wolves may already be here. They got here via the ol' "gradually mate and hybridize (not real science kids, I just made the word up) and then come back disguised as coyote" trick. The local Eastern Coyote has a lot of Grey Wolf in his DNA. A study in Maine showed 22/100 coyotes studied had wolf DNA, with one "coyote" having 89% wolf DNA.
The basic idea here is that, as wolves were chased from a region, they mated with coyote in the regions they fled to. Through kicking it as wolves and coyotes do, the hybridized DNA would spread through the coyote population. The resulting hybrid (a "coywolf") which is migrating back into Massachusetts is the basic current design of that coyote you see in your back yard. If you want to guess at how much Wolf DNA they have, look for pack behavior. Coyotes generally hunt in pairs, while wolf/coyotes work in larger groups.
Mother Nature, who is inexorable, tends to get the last laugh. She no doubt had a solid session watching us ponder and build fences and canals which in the end failed to keep the wild dogs away.
Either way, it may make normally boring Bournedale a little more exciting if you know that it was almost a Checkpoint Charlie for Cape Cod wildlife.
Eastern Massachusetts has a substantial coyote presence. Every town and even every city has them. If you drive at night enough, you'll see them around.
Coyote are not native to Massachusetts, at least as recently as when White People started coming. The canid feared by Myles Standish was the Wolf. You could kill a wolf for a bounty in Plymouth by 1630, and Cape Cod actually considered putting up a wall to keep wolves away.
Trapping, poisoning and habitat destruction drove the Wolf out of Massachusetts and even New England. The wolf was extinct in New England by 1840. We then had a Pax Lycan of wolf-free living. Meanwhile, east-to-west settlement of America drove the wolves west, where they began to breed with the smaller and more adaptable western coyote.
This newly-created hybrid- the coywolf- then began to push east as former farmland reverted back into forest. Before long, they started making appearances in in northern New York and northern New England in the 1930s-1940s. From there, they began to bleed into southern and then southeastern New England. They were all over SE Massachusetts and even Cape Cod by the time the century turned over.
As of 2016, anyone living in any town who might be reading this most likely has a coyote in their neighborhood. What does that mean for them?
Again, the "coyote" we have are actually coywolves. To be fair, "coyote" sampled around here (specimens were taken from Barnstable and closer to Boston) turned up an odd mix... they were about 25% wolf and 10% domestic dog. A four-way mix, a menage a quatre, exists, and differing levels of Coyote, Eastern Wolf, Western Wolf and Domestic Dog is what is walking around in our neighborhoods.
A coywolf is larger and more suited to suburban/urban life, perhaps because or perhaps not because of the dog DNA. It may weigh 50 pounds more than a classic coyote.
A coywolf is bad enough to kill a human if enough of them get in on it. A gang of them killed a Canadian folk singer a few years ago. It most likely won't go down that way if you see coyote around, but that's the worst-case scenario.
What you can do to lower your chances of a coyote fight is to follow a few guidelines. These guidelines are from the Massachusetts Divison of Fisheries and Wildlife, just in case you thought that the guy making the MILF jokes last month in this column has now decided to offer his own untested thoughts on protecting yourself from a predator.
To Avoid A Coyote...
- Secure your garbage.
A coyote is a fine hunter, able to bring down a deer with the right numbers. However, like most everything, they'll take an easy meal if they can get at it. If you have your leftovers from the week in a thin Hefty bag on the side of our house, that's like a Golden Corral to a coyote.
While a coyote can eventually knock over a trash can and force off the lid, animals are cunning, and a great part of cunning involves choosing the path of least resistance for your task accomplishment. Once the coyote moves along from your house to the point where the house is out of his range, he's an SEP... Someone Else's Problem.
- Don't feed a coyote.
Take this as 1A with "secure your garbage," or take the garbage one as "don't indirectly feed the coyote."
Feeding a coyote does triple damage. It keeps him coming back to Freemealistan, it takes away his fear of humans, who he will then associate with food.
I knew a guy in Duxbury who lived on a meadow. He began to see a fox around his house. He soon was able to throw hot dogs to it and have the fox eat them. One night, he made a trail of hot dogs that led right onto his porch, where he was watching the Red Sox. About around inning 7, the fox came up on the porch and ate the stash he had left there. He stuck around for a few innings, not quite begging but still with a 100% food-focus. We were able to pull this stunt at will for a whole summer, enough that, if you added up the innings, the fox probably watched two or three full Red Sox games.
We named him "Redd," and he really wasn't a problem until he got a credit card and started ordering out of the ACME catalog. We were fools to do as we did, but it does go to show you how food association works.
- Be smart with those pets!
A coyote will view a small dog or cat as prey. It will view a large dog as competition. They have unfortunately aggressive reactions to both stimuli.
Your pet is far more likely to be killed by a car than by a wild animal. The threat all across the board is raised, however, if your pet is free-roaming. That's a free-range chicken to a coyote.
Feeding pets indoors is also important, as something which eats carrion and roadkill like a coyote does is going to view a big bowl of Gravy Train on your porch (or even a pile of spilled bird seed in your yard) as you or I might view an ice cream sundae giveaway.
I did find a stat that said "the most common food items were small rodents (42%), fruit (23%), deer (22%), and rabbit (18%)." Only about 2 percent of the (coyote) scats had human garbage and just 1.3 percent showed evidence of cats. "
I my be wrong, but the totals they listed (42+23+22+18) add up to 105%. Either way, cats and rubbish are a minor part of the coyote diet. - Close off potential dens or areas that provide cover.
If you have an open crawl space under your house, you also have a coyote Holiday Inn. There's shelter, ambient heat, nearby food, and a perfect place to issue forth and nurse a litter of the furry fuc*ers.
If you have a bunch of thick brush in your yard, you also are providing a perfect place for the coyote to hide in and strike from. His main targets will be your pets and your trash.
You want to sort of seal your property off from a coyote, rather than make him want to hang around.
- Avoid going into areas that a coyote might favor.
This is especially true during spring and summer, when they are bearing and raising pups.
Of course a coyote can be anywhere. However, you can avoid areas where sightings are frequent, and you can use social media to pick up on sightings.
Ooops, there's a coyote! Now what?
- Remember who runs the f*cking planet.
You, as a human, are more dangerous than a coyote is. Both of you know it. That's why he hasn't attacked yet. He's alive because we have not yet decided to exterminate him.
If you remember that, it will add to your confidence. That will show in your body language, and that could deter an attack.
Like the author said, “Walk tall, kick ass.... and never forget that you come from a long line of truth seekers, lovers and warriors.” - Try a domestic dog command on it.
Who knows? It may work.
If it does, you have a circus act. Try to teach him hockey next, I saw some gypsies in eastern Europe do that with bears once
OK... it probably won't work, but if you do it with some authority, the tone of your voice may deter the beast.
- Try to scare it off.
None of us are Hitchcock, but you can make an attempt to scare off an approaching coyote.
Maintain eye contact, don't show it your back, and don't run. Running will activate the chase instinct.
Screaming, performing mock charges, spreading out your coat to make yourself look 7 feet tall or 4 feet wide, throwing rocks, playing some NWA aloud... make sure ol' Wild E. knows that he'll be in for a squabble if he goes down Messing With You Boulevard.
- Bear arms and fight like Iron Mike.
If you live in an open-carry state, congratz! Shooting an aggressive coyote is one of those good reasons for having a gun.
If you can't or don't walk the b-lock with the G-lock c-ocked, there are other means by which to drive off or even kill a coyote. A good walking stick can deter a nosy coyote. Pepper spray or some sort of bear repellent spray will make them think twice about having themselves some people food. An air horn will both scare them away and summon attention from people who can help you. If the coyote gets in close on you, a good knife will go a long way.
Either way, fight to the death. It probably won't come to that, and the coyote will probably run off before sustaining crippling injuries, but don't let your own Lack Of Intensity be the reason for that.
You may feel badly about beating down a coyote with a lead pipe, but you're actually doing him a favor. A coyote who doesn't fear humans is a coyote who will eventually have to be euthanized.
Be The Dominant Primordial Beast.
If a pack of them come up on you and if you can't avoid it, fu*k up the meanest looking one first.
Dogs of any sort live by a dominance hierarchy, and it's easier to have one brutal fight with the top dog than it is to have a half dozen fights where the opponent keeps getting better.
Look at it this way... if a pack of celebrity dogs rushes you and you smack Cujo in the face hard enough to make him run away, you're probably not going to get much of an argument from Lassie afterwards.
Notify Authorities When A Coyote Becomes Aggressive.
An aggressive coyote is just the reason to have an Animal Control Officer on the payroll.
"Coyotes are naturally afraid of people and their presence alone is not a cause for concern, though depending on human-related sources of food, coyotes can become habituated. A habituated coyote may exhibit an escalation in bold behavior around people. The coyote has lost its fear of people when it exhibits one or more of the following behaviors. The coyote: * Does not run off when harassed or chased * Approaches pets on a leash * Approaches and follows people When wildlife exhibit these behaviors, corrective measures can be taken. If an immediate threat exists to human life and limb, public safety officials including ACOs, police departments, and the Massachusetts Environmental Police, have the authority to respond to and dispatch the animal as stipulated in the Code of Massachusetts Regulations (CMR) 2.14 that pertain to handling problem animals . This includes animals exhibiting clear signs of rabies. If possible, MassWildlife should first be contacted to authorize the lethal taking of a coyote. Coyotes taking pets are not considered an immediate threat to human safety, therefore ACO's and municipal police departments are not authorized to remove these wild animals."
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.
National Flag Exhibit
Sunday, June 12, 2016 at 4:00 PM to 6:00 PM
Corner of Routes 106 and 58
There will be a showing of the 90 foot American Flag which was recently raised at Mount Rushmore on Sunday, June 12 from 4 PM to 6 PM at the intersection of Routes 106 and 58.
You won't have trouble finding it... as I recall, the flag needs to be lifted with a crane. It should be easy to spot. Music provided by Delyte DJ Services. There is also an antique car show going on at the same time.
You can't get much more 'Merica than checking out a 90 foot Old Glory, player. No one will ever be able to question your patriotism.
The flag will be considerably better than the ones pictured here. I'm just emptying the Photobucket.
Before we start the discussion, we want you understand a few facts about the likelihood of suffering a shark attack.
You're significantly more likely to win the Powerball than you are to suffer a shark attack.... shoot, like 30-45 people win the Powerball every year, which is about 50 years worth of American shark attack deaths. More people have put Lindsay Lohan on the D Train to Pound Town than have been killed by a shark this century.
If you're worrying about a shark attack, stop. You need to instead prepare for the lightning bolt strike which- however unlikely as it may be- is much more likely to kill you than a shark is.
This "Top Ten Places" list goes to 10 even though we have had less than 10 shark attacks in Massachusetts white-guy history.
If you ignore reputations and just crunch the actual numbers, I would not be at all surprised to find that the shark which has killed the most Americans is the Loan Shark.
That said, being devoured out of nowhere by a station wagon-sized monster with 250 teeth is nothing that you want to experience. If it can happen, and even if the odds are as slight as can be, there must be steps you can take which will lower those odds in your favor.
One step we can give you, beyond obvious ones like "Never swim if you have just been stabbed," "Do nothing at all seal-like" and "Get out of the water if you hear alternating tuba notes start playing" are simple ones that you probably already know. If you don't know those rules already, there isn't much that we can do for you.
What we can do for you is tell you which beaches to avoid, and why.
1) Monomoy Island, Chatham
If you need the Why for this one, just do a Google Map of the area and zoom in. You'll soon see little black marks all along the shoreline, thousands of them. Those are seals.
Seals are shark food, and everywhere the seal went, the shark was shore sure to go.
This is the gold mine if you like Great White Sharks. It's also a rotten place to swim, especially if you have even one seal-like trait.
Chatham in general is very lucky that sharks don't like People Food. It remains the only viable location on Cape Cod for a sharknado to happen.
2) Ballston Beach, Truro
In spite of her fearsome reputation, the only recent shark attack on Cape Cod was a 2012 attack on a boogie boarder off of this Truro sandspot.
The victim was 400 yards offshore, near where the seals hang out, and paddling around in a manner that he had no way of knowing would register as "injured seal" to the monster shark swimming under him.
He managed to kick it away before it killed him. He described kicking it as akin to kicking "an underwater refrigerator, with skin." It maimed his leg.
3) South Beach, Edgarton
One of... no, scratch that... THE most famous shark attack of all time went down here. The victim was Chrissy Watkins. She was torn to pieces by Bruce, who is the world's most famous shark.
The fact that the attack which I'm referencing is the opening scene from Jaws will in no way prevent us from ranking this beach right near the top.
Joseph Sylvia State Beach in Oak Bluffs is where the Alex Kintner attack went down, but that one didn't have a nude 1970's chick.
4) Nauset Light Beach, Eastham
The whole run of the Outer Cape is a high risk area, as the sharks who get bored of Chatham can head up the coast for a little variety.
This is one of those beaches that you see mentioned on the news with "was closed after a 15 foot shark was spotted offshore" following it.
5) Manomet Point, Plymouth
This is where the (current) most recent shark attack went down. A porker rose up out of the water and chomped on a kayak, dumping the two pretty kayakers into the water. Concluding that humans taste like a kayak, the shark swam away and left the girls unharmed.
That's a pretty impressive resume line, which is why beaches in Chatham and Wellfleet are looking up at America's Hometown.
6) South Beach, Chatham
When you get attacked by a shark here, he's usually not pleased. When he got his rooming assignment, he was like "Yeah! South Beach! Miami, here I come!" Some older shark then has to take him aside and tell him "You're thinking of South Beach, Miami. You're actually going to South Beach, Massachusetts."
When he arrives, he's pissed. "Hangry," as the kids say.
7) Marconi Beach, Wellfleet
When a shark gets a taste for People Food, you have to start worrying about extenuating circumstances.
In this case, the two areas of concern are 1) "Marconi" looks like "Macaroni." Sharks are unique in that they can make American Chop Suey with actual Americans if they have access to lots of macaroni.
Also, 2) is that "Marconi" implies Italian food. It is safe to imply that he is a picky eater, as he travels up the entire East Coast via tail propulsion to sup on a particular sort of Seal. Developing a taste for Italian food isn't really much of a stretch compared to that.
8) Hollywood Beach, Mattapoisett
Holly Wood (aka Hollywood) Beach is where the last fatal shark attack in Massachusetts went down, in 1936. A boy swimming out to meet a boat had most of his leg bitten off by a juvenile Great White Shark.
Holly Wood should be #2 or #3, maybe even #1A.... but we're going on 80 years there, and you can't live on your past in my magazine, folks.
No, sharks aren't afraid of New Bedford and Fall River. You can just shush....
9) Duxbury Beach, Duxbury
Duxbury seems to have a very lively and burgeoning shark population. She has an impressive stretch of uninhabited beach for seals to crash out on, and the bleedover of seals (and, following the seals, sharks) from Cape Cod looks to up their numbers.
If you're a shark hanging around at Race Point and you decide to see how the seal action is if you swim west for a while, the first beach you'll come to will be Duxbury Beach.
Added bonus: Duxbury Bay is a breeding ground for Sand Tiger Sharks. They're just the friendliest 8 foot flesh-eating shark (with a look which belies the fact that they are not physically equipped to hunt or eat humans) that you'll ever see.
10) Egypt Beach, Scituate
Scituate had the second most recent fatal shark attack in Massachusetts history. It was about 5 miles offshore, I chose Egypt Beach at random. The attack went down in the 1800s, which is why they are ranked #10 instead of #1.
In a story that really should be a movie, a shark swamped a smaller boat and devoured the occupant. The victim's brother returned the next day and caught what is believed to be the same shark. He then put it on display in Boston, and charged people a dime to see it.
Honorable Mention:
- Boston Harbor (home of the first shark attack in colonized New England history)
- Rockport (a fisherman was bitten by a shark here, but he survived)
- West Island, Fairhaven (beaches were closed after a fisherman spotted a shark 50 yards away from swimmers)
- Fall River (one of the two fatal Rhode Island attacks went down in Bristol Harbor, about a mile from her nearest Massachusetts neighbor)
- Nahant (a fisherman was bitten in 1922)
- Cold Storage Beach, Truro (James Orlowski had his leg mauled by a shark in 1996. No one believed him at the time, saying "Shark attacks don't happen on Cape Cod," and intimating that he might have crossed a really ornery bluefish. He got the last word when his attacker was listed as a shark in the Shark Attack Database.
- Dartmouth (another guy who says a shark bit him, but everyone was telling him it was a seal... notable in that the victim didn't go to the hospital until infection set in... which is why St. Elizabeth's Hospital in Brighton, who treated this victim, has had more shark attack experience than more likelier places like Falmouth Hospital or Jordan Hospital)
- Gloucester (sharks follow fishing boats)
- New Bedford (see above, plus they have had shark sightings/beach closings)
- Horse Neck Beach (Westport (has been closed after shark sightings)
- Brant Rock, Marshfield (seal-friendly rockpile offshore)
- Buttermilk/Little Buttermilk Bay, Bourne (a 9 foot shark entered this bay and hung out a while in the 1990s)
