Loading ...Shark Week Comes to Cape Cod
Last Sunday, the Discovery Channel kicked off its annual Shark Week programming with Jaws Comes Home, an hour-long documentary about the recent shark phenomenon off of Chatham. Filmed in summer 2010, the documentary follows Greg Skomal, shark expert with the Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries, and crew as they patrol the waters off of Chatham and Monomoy Island to tag white sharks and to gain an understanding of why they come here.
Cape Cod Life readers may remember Skomal from “Great White? Nope,” a feature story we ran in the early months of 2009 about the region’s fixation on great white shark sightings. With the surfeit of shark sightings that arrived off of Chatham later that year—likely a result of the boom in the grey seal population, the experts say—what was once a set of I-swear-I-saw-it anomalies is nowa bona fide phenomenon.
Skomal at Naushon Island in 2004. Image courtesy of the Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries.
- Posted in Jeff Harder's Blog
As Old as the Hills
There’s a quiet place on Martha’s Vineyard. Away from the crowded beaches, away from day-trippers clutching guidebooks on Circuit Avenue. It’s a place to find the peace and quiet that everyone who comes to visit and live on an island seeks. Thousands come to this place each year, yet it remains a secret.
On the northwestern side of the island in the town of Chilmark, the secrecy of Menemsha Hills Reservation is only matched by its serenity. Through 211 acres, the topography of the reservation traces through one of the most varied habitats on the island, an environment comprised of wetlands, heathlands, and a beach that remains all but empty even at the height of summer. The Trustees of Reservations, the New England conservation organization that oversees Menemsha Hills as well as six other properties on the island, estimates up to 25,000 visitors come here each year. But ask any one of these travelers to recall the last time they saw more than a handful of passersby on the trails, and you might not get an answer.
Read more…
- Posted in Nature
The Shape of Things to Come
Shaping a surfboard is a filthy, nocturnal, meditative undertaking. And it’s one that Shawn Vecchione has repeated more than 6,000 times.
Inside a 14-by-eight-foot room that’s part wood shop, part garage, Vecchione—clad in a T-shirt and board shorts, with bronze skin and a few grey hairs—hovers over a faceless board and flares a sand screen across its face. There’s nothing gentle about the movement—a grating whiisshhh fills the eardrums, and dust kicks up and collects in anthill-sized piles on the floor. He turns the board on its side and sculpts its rails, tapering hard edges into smooth curves. A pair of fluorescent light bulbs mounted at waist height amplifies the shadows cast by nicks and bumps, imperfections that Vecchione buffs from existence. Read more…
The Right Idea
.jpg "The Provincetown Center for Coastal Studies")
The hours pass, the sky slides from sunny to grey, and the boat rocks as southwest winds whip across Cape Cod Bay. It’s late February, and Dr. Charles “Stormy” Mayo and his six-person crew from the Provincetown Center for Coastal Studies are on their fourth right whale research cruise of the season aboard a 42-foot Jarvis Newman lobster boat. It’s been hours since they’ve seen their last split-second glimpse of a whale—a massive Y-shaped tail curling as the behemoth dives beneath the surface.
- Posted in Nature
Take Two
It’s rare to catch Woods Hole’s Mark Chester without a camera. Over the span of almost 40 years, Chester has learned that it’s often best to shoot first and ask questions later, and that the best photos often come when they’re least expected. Every once in a while, they come in pairs. Read more…
- Posted in Art, Arts & Culture
Vernon Laux
Naturalist
I was a big jock when I was in school in Wellesley. In eighth grade, right after Thanksgiving and right after football season ended, I had a great science teacher, and he put up a chart titled “The Common Winter Birds of New England.” And I didn’t look at the chart. He gave us a quiz, I called every bird a chickadee, and I flunked. Read more…
Debbie Farber
Farmer
Gordon Peabody
Nancy Ellen Craig
Artist
Rob Costa
Tour Guide
My grandparents came here somewhere around 1915. My father’s brother was born in Portugal and he came over with my grandfather. My father was the first to be born here in Provincetown. My grandparents came from the Algarve, and they were fishermen like all the other Portuguese people that came. They got a house on Washington Ave and my father grew up there. My mom was born and raised here as well. Her mom and dad were both born in Provincetown as well. Read more…
