Year: 2012

New York Again

I write from my midtown office in New York after a forced two week sabbatical from the city brought on by Superstorm Sandy and last week’s northeaster.

There was no way I was going to attempt the drive from Cotuit in the days after the storm as Mayor Bloomberg had banned cars with fewer than three passengers from cross the bridges, the office assistants needed a place to stay with lights and heat after their places in Hoboken flooded, and in the end with the digital means to telecommute, why beat one’s head in just to make an appearance.

Walking around the Googleplex last night after a meeting with YouTube I saw very little evidence of the storm’s effects. An awning lay on the sidewalk, ripped off a store front. And lots of trash bags piling up on the cross streets awaiting the garbage trucks. Other than that — the only real evidence was on the Merritt Parkway in Connecticut where there was a lot of downed trees in the Westport-New Canaan area.

Hard to imagine the third-world conditions in the Rockaways and parts of Staten Island where things are still very deplorable according to the New York Times.  I heard the PATH trains from New Jersey may be out for a year, meaning hell for commuters. But all in all,  New York this sunny November morning is nothing like the terrible months following 9/11 when the city was so sad and wounded by the attacks.

Wild Oysters

A reader of Mark Kurlansky’s excellent history of the New York oyster fishery knows the hardshelled bivalve (Crassostrea virginica) was an important piece of  19th century cuisine and commerce during the earliest years of the nation’s history. Vast “reefs” blanketed the shores and bottoms of the bays and inlets from New Jersey through the southern New England coastline, offering a plentifully cheap protein source that was the mainstay of most American diets.

Those reefs were once so extensive and played such an important role in the health of the estuarine systems that one writer, Paul Greenberg bemoaned their absence in the New York Times as a contributing factor to the devastation wreaked by Superstorm Sandy. A frightening 85% of the world’s oyster reefs have vanished since the 1800s. Oysters’ role as a stabilizer influence, but most encouragingly as a very effective water filtration system, makes them not only a delicacy but a necessity in the rebuilding of a sick coastal embayment. Greenberg wrote:

“Just as corals protect tropical islands, these oyster beds created undulation and contour on the harbor bottom that broke up wave action before it could pound the shore with its full force. Beds closer to shore clarified the water through their assiduous filtration (a single oyster can filter as much as 50 gallons of water a day); this allowed marsh grasses to grow, which in turn held the shores together with their extensive root structure.”

Yesterday I took an old friend and his wife for a brief oystering expedition. The boat had been parked in the yard for last week’s three-day northeaster. I pulled out handfuls of maple leaves from the bilge. Returned the gas tanks, and launched her back into the bay on the morning tide.  Being sunny, a veritable Indian Summer day* with no wind, sparkling sunshine, and a light haze on the horizon covering the beaches of Popponesset and beyond, it was a good day to take a break from the raking and the housework and get on the water. My friend is working on a photojournalism project about oystering, and she has been filming the various sources for the clams: fish markets, the Cotuit Oyster Company, and the town of Barnstable’s annual oyster season where the Department of Natural Resources lays out its crop of cultivated oysters on the bottom around a couple local beaches and turns loose the wadered permit holders to perform what Cousin Peter and I deride as “shopping” and not “clamming.”

Peter and I discovered a clutch of wild oysters in a never-to-be-disclosed location about ten years ago, and have been careful not to over-harvest from there, making one or two visits during the fall and winter months to pick up a dozen or so for the table. Reluctantly I took my friend and wife out yesterday in the name of journalism, imploring them to maintain some secrecy as the oysters are very tenuous and scarce compared to the wild abundance of oysters around the flats of Wellfleet’s Lieutenant Island. Put another way, when I was a kid, and the harbor was healthy, we never collected oysters. Steamers and quahogs were it. Oysters were nowhere to be seen (or we weren’t looking in the right places) and could only be bought from Dick Nelson at the oyster company (always with a reminder not to do something stupid like cook with them, since Cotuit’s are to be savored raw, on the half-shell, with only a squeeze of lemon juice if you must.)

I took along the dog (see the canine below in the dinghy and the halloween costume) as she is manic about “go-ride-boat” and beach walks. I dug out and pinned my shellfish license to my Kettleer’s cap, pessimistically brought along my leaky waders, Ribb rake and wire basket, and met my friends at the town dock on the afternoon’s low tide. It was an extraordinarily low one that exposed an extra rung of slippery ladder, but we boarded safely and put-putted across the deserted harbor, all boats gine but a few doughty fishermen’s, the field of white and blue-striped mooring balls replaced with winter sticks, giving the place the appearance of a military cemetery in Normandy. The channel cans were gone, prudently pulled by the harbormaster in advance of Sandy and the northeaster, so I was navigating by the seat of my pants, assisted by the completely clear water that revealed some of the dead, dead bottom below us.

As we motored away from the dock we talked about the recent kerfuffle raised by some of the town’s shellfish activists who donate their time and backs to relaying bushels of quahogs from “dirty” areas high in the tidal rivers to cleaner spots lower in the bays where recreational clammers get can get their limit without fear or picking up some nasty sickness. A crew of local commercial clammers have been flouting the laws and exercising their native-American aboriginal riparian rights to shellfish on any day of the week in any water of their choosing without a license. They allegedly wiped out the volunteers’ efforts to manually repopulate one or two local clean beds. I’d seen the Indian clammers in question working off of Lowell’s Point during winter beach walks this past winter. Their pickup truck had bumper stickers pledging their allegiance to the Wampanoag Nation, but I thought little of it until a family member active in the Barnstable Association of Recreational Shellfishermen ranted about their depredations over dinner a few weeks back. Now a big sign forbidding commercial shellfishing adds to the over-signification of the Cotuit waterfront (another rant for another day) but I doubt it will do much to deter the Indian clammers.

I am of a mixed mind when it comes to aboriginal fishing rights as I am solidly pro-Wampanoag to the point that I am sort of pissed off by the whole “kettle and a hoe” thing that defines Cotuit’s local waterhole, baseball team, and an ugly sign across the street in the park (yet another rant for another day). The connection between Wampanoag culture and shellfish is organically intertwined, with ancient “middens” or shell piles still to be found along the pine bluffs and beaches of the Cape’s harbors. Wampum, the woven currency of the tribes, is made from the purple part of a quahog shell; and the tribes used to move their encampments between an inland winter camp up near Hamblin’s Pond (according to local historian Jim Gould) and summer coastal camps generally picked based on proximity to shellfish. It has been often said that the bravest man in the world was the first man to dare to eat an oyster, and doubtlessly that man was some long passed Wamp who watched a gull drop one from a great height onto a boulder to crack it open and then sagely wondered what morsel lay inside that could be eaten. Anyway, more on the Indian clamming issue later, I am not that ardent a shell-fisherman to contribute my time to the relays and in fact, will use this post to make a controversial contrarian statement in favor of encouraging the comeback of our wild stock as a harbinger of healthy waters, rather than promote more aquaculture and its veneer of health and well being.

Back to the hunt for the wild oyster. We anchored, we went to the beach where they have been found in the past, and lo and behold, despite my pre-expedition pessimism that we would be lucky to get one or two, we found an abundance tucked on the verge of the beach grass along the rockweed and the horse mussels, sticking up plain as day in their  glued embrace to the allegedly inedible mussels. Pictures were taken, video videoed, and within half an hour my friend had his fill, and we had ample opportunity to marvel as the health of the wild oysters.

Our theory is these are refugees from the Oyster Company’s owner Chris Gargiulo’s cages of cultivated oysters laid on the bottom of Cotuit Bay in the company’s grants , arguably the oldest brand name in American clams, a holdover from the days when the bilious gourmand Diamond Jim Brady would tuck into three dozen Cotuits at Rector’s in belle epoque Manhattan before settling in for a full meal. I still feel a pang of homesick pride whenever I meet a friend for a bite and a drink at Grand Central’s Oyster Bar and see Cotuits on the menu. The Oyster Company represents all that is good and all that is lost from Old Cotuit, and no one is more devoted to the bay than Chris.

And, I like to think thanks to his seeding efforts, some microscopic spat** have escapes from the cages on the floor of the harbor and make their way on the currents to the mussel beds, where they glue themselves on and flourish. Oysters are unique clams in that they can live exposed to the air and do not need to be submerged all the time. Tropical oysters festoon mangrove roots, wild Cotuit oysters like the very verge between grass and water — submerged half the time and exposed the rest.

The foodie fad that has gives us “locavores” would put a premium on these wild clams. The fact that Cotuit’s wild oysters are thriving — there must be ten times the abundance there was when Cousin Pete and I first discovered their existence — is good news of a sort in a time of very bad news over the bad quality of the coastal estuaries. I continue to maintain that change and action to restore the bays to their former perfection are doomed unless those who remember what we’ve lost are able to share that picture of what could be to the new wave of residents and washashores who look out at the pretty vistas and see nothing but twinkling waves and picturesque sailboats. These oysters are there, they are visible. They aren’t under a foot of sand, masked by algae blooms or turbid waters churned up by weekend propeller parades, they are right on the water’s edge, waiting to be picked up, volunteering their siphons and gills to filtering the mess we’ve managed to make over the last 50 years. And I have no idea what the place looked like before the Army trashed North Bay with Camp Candoit in World War II. I imagine the shoreline was a very very different place 100 years ago.

The clam activists are on the forefront of the outrage of what is now called our “beautiful dirty waters.” They were able to put in place a ban on private piers (with the extraordinary backing of Cotuit’s former town councilor Rick Barry). They wade the muddy waters, they tote the bushels and lobby for the equipment and budgets to keep the clams going strong. I propose they also push for wildness — and use the presence of healthy, wild shellfish as a sort of litmus test for their efforts. Want to “vista prune” your bluff so your starter castle can have a water view? Then you better be able to prove a healthy intertidal zone with oysters that test out pure and clean. Need to truck in a couple barges of boulders to build up a groin or some riprap to keep the next superstorm from eating away at your Chemlawn? How are those wild oysters doing? Need to drive some toxic “pressure-treated ” wood into the sand to form a tidy bulkhead? Not so fast.

I took water samples for the Three Bays Preservation Society during the summer months (I was Test Station #19), driving them to the County Lab in Barnstable Village. I do so happily, but something tells me that seeing an oyster peeking out of the mussels and rock weed at Ropes Beach would say more about the health of the harbor than a parts-per-million bacteria test.
 

 

 

 

*: “Indian Summer” is technically any day when the temperature reaches 70 degrees following the occurrence of a killing frost.

**: “Spat” is the oysterman’s term for oyster spawn. Oysters grow incredibly quickly and achieve maturity in one year.

Random irritations

The current use of the word “Really?” as a verbal raised-eyebrow said in an ascending, ironic, mock way to express indignation. This is obnoxiously Valley Girlish and will go the way of the ironic “Not” as so well lampooned by Borat. Hearing Soledad O’Brien chirp a “Really?” on MSNBC the other morning on her reaction that ex-Congressman Anthony Weiner was returning to Twitter was the last straw. I am not alone.

“Coozies:” Those closed cell foam sleeves used to keep canned beverages cold. The utility of these devices is fine. I like a cold beer as much as the next drinker, but the slogans generally printed on them are usually groin oriented “How About a Nice Cup of Shut The F^#K Up” or that classic “Smile If You Aren’t Wearing Panties.” What kills me is my inability to utter their name in polite company — “Coozie” — which doubtlessly is an attempt to employ the word “cozy” emanating from the British tea drinkers use of a padded cloth cover to slip over a tea pot to keep it warm, the “tea cozy” which one imagines to be an important part of the Monty Python wardrobe of silly hats. “Coozie”, to my mind, is derived from “cooze,” an archaic reference to female genitalia. Hence I now vow to refer to all closed-cell foam beverage coolant sleeves as “canginas.” I will submit that word to the Urban Dictionary now.

Ukelele music in television commercials to denote carefree blithe days. This awful trend was savaged a couple years ago when a couple Madison Avenue creative directors launched a now defunct web site to implore their fellow advertising industry colleagues to stop using the Train song “Hey Soul Sister” in television ads.  That site, “Stop Advertising from Pulling a Train” got the point across and was dead on, but it failed to purge the ukelele from other ads, where it tinkles away like some goddamn wind up jack-in-the-box tune. I own a ukelele (won it at a ukelele recital on Kauai years ago) and I can’t play it. I know George Harrison loved the little guitar. It can be a beautiful thing in the right hands. But keep it out of advertising, it gives me cavities.

““Everyone is sticking the tinkling sound of ukulele under their commercial,” said Jim Beloff, who wrote “The Ukulele: A Visual History.” “It’s shorthand for lightness of tone. It says, ‘We’re good guys at heart.’ ””

“Lean Forward“: I don’t watch the usual bullshit television news and so I watchthe PBS Newshour if I must get edification from the boob tube. The storm and election season exposed me to MSNBC (see above, re: “Really?”) and my mind was blown. Putting aside the presence of the newly-skinny Rev. Al Sharpton as a quasimodo anchor man (two words: Tawana Brawley) let me focus on the new MSNBC tagline, “Lean Forward.”  This meme du jour first hit my radar during the Hurricane Sandy aftermath when it was reported that President Obama told his staff to “lean forward” and give all Federal support to the devastated communities in the northeast. Then it seemed to me MSNBC immediately seized it and made it their tag line — I guess as an implied pro-Obama election exhortation — and I found myself puzzling over what the hell “Lean Forward” means.

  • If you’ve ever stood on a beach during a hurricane and tried to stay on your feet during a gust, you lean forward. When the gust stops you stumble and fall down. This isn’t what is meant, but given the appearance during the super storm …..
  • The term has been applied to digital media to denote content that you have to lean forward and stick your face into to read. Like this blog. You don’t read stuff like this slumped on the couch wiping orange Cheeto dust off your fingers on the shag rug. This isn’t what is meant either.
  • An alternative direction to partisan tendencies to lean to the liberal left or lean to the conservative right, and an implied exhortation in these days of deadlocked politics to put aside our difference and lean in an upright, neutral moderate position in the direction of the future, not the past. I think this is what was meant.
  • Vote for Obama because MSNBC is not a news channel but a counterbalance to Fox and therefore the news source for people predisposed to want their news to actually lean left as opposed to the Murdochian right lean of Fox. This is what was meant.

Whatever it means, it pissed me off that the airheads who have inherited the broadcast airwaves from Murrow, Cronkite,  et al are wasting my brain cycles trying to puzzle out their latest memetic slogans. And I have wasted 15 minutes of my time and yours ranting about these irritations to no effect and could keep going with more things that get under my skin like Kobe Beef sliders, pumpkin-flavored anything, and Apple products but I have work to do.

In a boat

I needed to undo the indignity inflicted on the poor dog by my wife and daughter and show her in her true element as a true seadog. My friend Pieter took this as we came ashore on Tuesday afternoon after we retrieved the big boat from her storm mooring and got the motorboat ( riding at her anchor in the background). The light had just peeked out from underneath the overcast as it dropped to the west and lit up everything with a strange golden glow.

 

by Pieter Burgess

A couple cool obituaries of late

I tend to over-comment on obituaries, but two recent ones made for fascinating reading, both with deep and tangential connections to the glory days of the America’s Cup.

Most recent was John Cooper Fitch, who’s obit appeared in the New York Times on November 1, 2012.

  1. Race car driver (was on the Mercedes team that disastrously crashed into the crowd at Le Mans in 1955 and was to have relieved the driver of that horrific disaster, Pierre Levegh).
  2. Inventor of those round sand barrels one sees on abutments on offramps and high way bridges (inspired by the Le Mans tragedy.
  3. Yachtsman and socialite who met the Duke of Windsor (the one who abdicated because of his love for the American divorcee Wallis Simpson) while pissing together in a bush at some outdoors social event.
  4. Contemporary of the legendary Briggs Cunningham, another race car driver/yachtsman (helmsman on a couple winning 12-meters that defended the America’s Cup.

And second, but not inferior is Britton Chance Jr., renowned naval architect who designed several of those 12 meters. He passed away last month in Connecticut and earned his fame as the designer of the Stars & Stripes.  He worked with great names in yachting like Ray Hunt and Ted Hood.

Aftermath

I was surprised to see the full moon shining through bright skies at 10 pm last night. A few rags from the remaining storm clouds scudded over the trees and the brown seed pods from the honey locust curled and crunched underfoot. All was well. We never lost electricity save for a couple micro-flickers that shut down my desktop PC, reset the satellite TVs and made all the alarm clocks blink “12:00.”

The motorboat now sits in the front yard, her bilge choked with leaves and sticks, waiting to be relaunched later this afternoon for a quick patrol of the harbor and a return to the Bald Eagle (who was fine when I last set eyes on her at 5:30 last night, right at the predicted peak of the winds). I think the actual peak at Cotuit came around 3:30 pm, when I ventured down the lane to the landing for the obligatory Churbuckian Storm Patrol (over the objections of my wife), ducking under the police barricade at the head of Old Shore Road and hurrying down the tree-lined tunnel to the boat ramp at the bottom, convinced a tree limb would come crashing down on me at any second. The winds were flowing right up the road in huge gouts of warm tropical air mixed with salt spume blown off the wave-tops in the bay. Standing on Main Street before ducking the yellow tape I could see the wind and spray blasting up and out of the intersection like a firehose of storm.

Having made the 200 meter jog without widowing my wife under a fallen Norway Maple, I joined my neighbor Steve at the boat ramp and felt the full force of Sandy head on, leaning into it,  waves breaking overthe road and washing over my boots.  A tree went down beside me, a slow lean as its roots softened in the flooded bank. The Split Ticket, a familiar catamaran, was dragging ashore a little to the south of the ramp; I imagine she’s on the mudbank this morning. But otherwise the harbor had been stripped of the last of the summer sailboats, with only a half-dozen left on their moorings to work things out on their own. A pickup truck appeared, with an overly exuberant driver jumping out and screaming into the wind, proclaiming that only a true Cape Codder would face such a storm head-on. Whatever. I don’t like the rubberneckers who clog up Old Shore Road during storms and cause traffic jams while the boat owners are trying to get their trailers down the ramp and their dinghies off the beach. Sure it’s nice to watch the storm — it’s the ultimate primitive special effect — but when the DPW and the police cordon off the road, well, respect the cordon people and watch it on television.

The best part of the scene at Ropes Beach was the big white clouds of spray the gusts would gather from the water and blow across the water in swirling 60 mph walls. The waves were little because the wind was coming overland, from the east, and there wasn’t enough fetch for the water to kick up like it did a year ago in Irene. I’d say Sandy had higher gusts that Irene and a much longer period of sustained winds in the 40s, but Sandy was much more of a nonevent because there wasn’t a summer crowd to come gawk at it, the moorings were stripped of their boats two weeks ago, and all that was left was a couple commercial fishing boats, and a few big sloops like mine. Sandy was definitely a Townie Storm.

I wanted to get a glimpse of my boat, but she was  hidden, tucked around the corner of Handy’s Point and the beach from the yacht club out to the Little River marsh was gone under the surge. I hurried back up Old Shore under the groaning and tossing canopy of trees, was amazed to see a mother with her three kids walking downhill (they need helmets, I thought), but told myself not to be a judgmental old fart and waved hello.

I marched down Main Street in my Grunden raincoat and boots to the Town Dock. The water was way into the parking lot, so I waded out to the beginning of the pier and tried to get a glimpse of the boat around Lowell’s Point, but that wasn’t possible and I wasn’t going to risk taking a wave over the boottops by walking onto the submerged dock. Funny how 54-year old brains get all cautious when the 19-year old version of me would have been out there up to my knees hanging on for dear life while trying to chug a Budweiser in the wind.

I took some phone video, saw what there was to see, and went back to the house for the car and quick drive up Old Post Road to a bluff with a good view of the Inner Harbor and the boat riding on her 2,000 pound storm mooring. A couple limbs in the streets which were slick with blown leaves and pine needles, but no big trees were down. The lights were still on at the Coop — the local grocery — and a bunch of skateboarders were hanging out in front looking unimpressed and bored.

The boat was riding very well and was perfectly situated under the lee of the bluffs around the Narrows and Grand Island. She wasn’t hobby-horsing or looking in any danger. Other than some scudding to and fro in the gusts as she took the strain on the mooring yoke across her bow, she looked like she would live to sail another season. I took a few more videos, hopped back in the car, and decided to explore the High Grounds to the south of the village center. The lights were out south of School Street and a couple utility crews and tree-surgeon trucks were at work under their bright lights. It amazes me that Cotuit– at least my part of Cotuit — kept its power through Sandy, just as it did through Irene. Bob in ’91 plunged us into a sweaty darkness of rotting refrigerators and cold water showers for what felt like a week of medieval hardship and hell. Oceanview Avenue was blocked by a fallen tree, but I found a way to Loop Beach and paused on the hill in front of the Judge’s place to look at Sampson’s Island in the failing light. The tide was high, the beach was rimmed like a margarita glass with a verge of white salt, but there were no major beach breaches or hydrological events that I could see. Loop Beach was covered with bales of washed up codium — the rubbery seaweed also called Deadman’s Fingers or Oysterthief — and some kids were playing in the wind. The light had failed, it was evening, and time to get off the roads.

I came home, declared to Daphne that the boat would live again and settled down in front of the Weather Channel to watch poor NYC get pounded. My partner Ben on the West Side texted me through the evening with updates as the Battery and West Side highway flooded, electricity began to fail, transformers exploded, and highways were closed. I am writing off any idea of returning to the office in midtown this week and will spend this morning rescheduling my appointments.

The big winner in this storm, if storm’s can said to have “winners” is the scientific models and digital information systems that identified Sandy when it was still well south of Jamaica last week. I started following the storm six days ago — on Tuesday, October 23rd thanks to an email alert from the National Hurricane Center — reviewed the various predictive models with their Monte Carlo simulations and various algorithmic preferences, historical data sets, and unique assumptions only a person familiar with things like isobars, dropsondes, shearing winds, eyewalls and thermoclines could care about.  I eavesdropped on the chatter of those professional and academic meteorologists on storm2k.org, and by Wednesday I was blogging that I had a bad feeling about this storm. For four days prior to Sandy coming ashore the professionals were predicting — with very good accuracy in turns out in day-after-highsight — the time of the landfall, the location, the intensity, the size of the surge, the estimate of the damages …. all with the usual disclaimers and qualifiers, but all right on the money down to the prediction that Sandy would break records as the largest storm in history as well as the lowest in terms of barometric pressure. The news reported by the New York Times last week that we face a gap in this kind of coverage and detection as our polar weather satellites are retired and replaced came is worrisome given that weather technology seems to have finally come into its own.

What is interesting is the concept of hype and media in storms. I think it’s human nature to get excited by the prospect of a major weather event. (It must be a genetically coded fight-or-flee kind of response that tells animals when to seek cover or cavemen to flee the surge and hide from the wind. I know the extremely low barometric pressure had a physical impact on me yesterday. I had a throbbing headache and even felt a little nauseated.) The Weather Channel — which my friend in the Keys jokes is a conspiracy owned by Home Depot — is probably the top source of information, and other than their weather studs in their silly L.L. Bean windbreakers (L.L. Bean is last place I would shop for foul weather gear) being morons on the beaches and piers, there isn’t a lot to be learned except for when some true weather scientist from the NHC is interviewed and slips into the science. NOAA and the National Weather Service did a disservice by following a semantic process and issuing confusing statements that declared Sandy was going “extra-tropical” which the mainstream media morons initially took to be a downgrade, when it fact the storm was getting stronger, just no longer meeting the technical requirements of a tropical cyclone. That’s when people around me started the usual macho bravado of proclaiming, “Ah, it’s not going to do anything. Just more hype.  I’m salty and I don’t care.”

I thought the officials in the mid-Atlantic and New York were slow to react. It appeared that Governor Cuomo stepped into the political vacuum left open by Mayor Bloomberg’s seeming insouciance (recalling his infamous advice during a blizzard that New Yorker’s relax and take in a Broadway Show) when he started making moves on Sunday with the transportation system. New Jersey is going to be pointing a lot of fingers at one another I imagine. But the existential reality of storms is this:

  1. Forecasts are imprecise and a lot of storm warnings are “chicken-little” misses.
  2. People won’t evacuate. Shelters must suck.
  3. The media loves drama. It’s all about the boat on the rocks, the waves over the breakwater, the big tree down on the car. Don’t expect your local paper to teach you about storm cones, the difference between the eastern and western quadrants, steering currents, etc. Their job is to tell you where the shelter is, what to do with injured wildlife, fill your bathtub, use flashlights and not candles, etc.
  4. All storms are different and in the end, other than the drama of nature’s fury, the real reality comes the morning after when the coffee maker is dead, the Internet is down, and you face a $5,000 wind damage deductible because your insurance company really doesn’t care about you.

Finally (enough bloviating, I have to work) the big winner was the “Euro” model — the predictive analysis model run by the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts. This is one of a few dozen models run by various organizations such as the National Hurricane Center to the US Navy, and according to the weather nuts, was right all along in calling the unique circumstances that make Sandy a Frankenstorm. A great resource for seeing all the “spaghetti” of the various models can be found at, of all places, the South Florida Water Management District.

I know today will reveal a lot of hurt to the west and the south. Best of luck to all in the mid-Atlantic and Tri-state areas. You probably won’t read this for another few days until the lights come back.

Some quick Sandy video

I ventured out on a storm patrol at 3 pm just as the wind really began to build.

Commentary to come later.Things are wild here now.

Utter indignity

The wife and daughter have conspired to further anthropomorphically torment the poor dog by dressing it for the Halloween holiday.  She cowers, she winces, she endures. This makes my fillings ache. So much for being a manly man with a manly dog.

Sandy – two days to go

I stripped the sails and dodger off of the Bald Eagle Too yesterday, taking her into the town dock so I could back the car onto the pier and load it up with sails, canvas, cushions, pillows and bedding left over from the summer. The boom came off easily and I cut off the rigging tape from the turnbuckles, pulled some cotter pins, but left the clevises in as it looks like I am not going to get hauled and the boat will have to ride things out on a hurricane buoy in the inner harbor.

I’m not too freaked out by this one. The assistant harbormaster was on the town dock and predicted three inches of rain but prolonged conditions worst than Irene a year ago. He’s ex-Coast Guard and said his buddies at the Cape May station are staring a big one in the eye as Sandy is predicted to make a perpendicular landfall somewhere between Delaware Bay and Sandy Hook on Monday.

The discussion between the professional meteorologists on storm2k.org is generally too technical for me to follow, but a few of them are making some pretty dramatic statements about the one-of-a-kind confluence of circumstances that gives this storm the potential to really disrupt life for a lot of people in the mid-Atlantic states. When some of the professional voices in that forum start to make grave pronouncements that this is going to be a monster, I start to pay attention.

 

As of today (Saturday morning), they are in general agreement that Sandy is pulling a rope-a-dope by declining in power from a hurricane (sustained winds over 70 mph, tropical temperatures throughout) to an “extra-tropical storm” or “northeaster” as it gets sucked in a question-mark shaped course out of the usual cyclone pattern of moving from the southwest to the northeast along the Gulf Stream. A weather system coming east from the mid-west is causing the button-hook maneuver and will bring it abruptly west along the shipping lanes into New York City and the Chesapeake right into New Jersey. The professionals say it will intensify as it meets the low pressure system over Ohio and Pennsylvania, with its barometric pressure dropping potentially to a low level below that of the infamous 1938 Long Island hurricane. Low pressure means intense winds, the collision with the mid-west weather means Sandy will get held in place and start to dump a lot of rain on the Delmarva Peninsula up to NYC.

The effects on Cape Cod will be mostly wind from an extraordinarily large wind field — it looks like those winds will be hitting us from the southwest and west on Monday night through Tuesday. The reasons the forecasters sound more freaked out that usual are:

  1. The “perfect-storm” scenario of a tropical storm meeting a big low pressure system over the most heavily populated section of the US
  2. This would be one of the few storms to strike, as opposed to glance off, the shore.
  3. It is hitting on a full moon.
  4. The barometric profile in the models suggest it will come ashore with exceptionally low pressure, pushing a considerable surge in front of it as high as ten feet.
  5. The confluence means it will stall over the tri-state area and “grind” away before slipping off to the north. This means a long prolonged period of soaking rains and high winds.
  6. The trees in the mid-Atlantic are still heavy with leaves, so knock-downs are inevitable, causing power outages.
  7. The mid-west system could cause winter-like conditions later next week, a bad scenario if lots of people are without power.
  8. Some professionals are saying this could be a “4.2” out of a scale of 6.0 in terms of damages. The most hysterical are saying it will be the biggest weather event since 1938, most agree it will cause damages in the “billions” and could exceed Irene in terms of impact.

It’s gorgeous here today, so I’m off to the beach to make the most of it and to fiddle around on the boat and essentially do what I needed to do anyway later next week when the boatyard comes to haul me for the winter. I’m supposed to be at a meeting in NYC on Tuesday and other outside of Philly on Wednesday — doubting either is going to happen.