Last Lunch Of The Season At Moby Dick's

We had to dine here before Shoulder Season ended.

Many places on the Cape close after Labor Day, but some hang on until Columbus Day.

Moby Dick's Restaurant in Wellfleet was closing on Monday until next summer, so we had to shake a Clam Roll out of them.

Our boss went for The Moby Burger.

See you next summer!

Patriot Hermit Crabs

I'm not 100% sure that this isn't animal abuse, but it is otherwise pretty cool.

Hermit crabs are softer than other crustaceans. They don't grow their own shells, instead acquiring discarded shells from other crustaceans. The shell allows them to retract into it for defense.

Hermit crabs will fight, steal and kill to get a good shell. If need be, they will happily adopt good man-made items as their home. It doesn't get much gooder than a Patriots helmet.

The crab pictured actually has his own shell, which has somehow been wedged into the Pats helmet. A football helmet is not the preferred shape for a crab, even an enormous one. It leaves room for attack, a poor trait for a defense mechanism.

The Patriots crab, forced to drag around a massive second shell, will either die or gain great strength. It's pure Nietzsche... what doesn't kill it will make it stronger. And if it does kill it, they're only $6.99, so you can go get another.

Many species of animal use colorful shells/feathers/fur to attract mates, so the Littlest Patriot may be letting his freak flag fly frequently, a possibility to consider if you are buying more than one. Sh*t, look at the level of females that Tom Brady gets in the same helmet.

I would like to get 11-22 Patriot crabs, then find a similar number of crabs wearing some other team's helmet. Put them in the same tank, let them go to war, kinda like that electric football game they sold in the 1970s before video games were invented.

I'm guessing that you'd put them in formation and use possession of food to motivate them. Eventually, one of them will cross the goal line, making it more like Rugby than the NFL. Who cares? It's crab football.

Animal cruelty is one thing, but remaking the Ice Bowl or the Tuck Rule game with crabs is as good a reason as you'll get for some moral contortions.

If you decide to adopt the Patriot Way, you can get Patriot Crabs at the Seaberry Surf gift shop in Wellfleet. Other stores out there also have them.

Seaberry Surf Beach Shop

Wellfleet, MA... 

There wasn't enough cheesy nautical stuff in my house, so we headed out to Seaberry Surf.

Mommy Raft

If I brought this home, Bay Bay Cat would fight it.

"You got city hands, Mr. Hooper..."

Air Hockey

I wonder if other birds think flamingos are tacky?

Every time you go here, the lizard tries to get you to change your motorcycle insurance.

We have socks in both Conservative and Liberal... and Spongebob.

Obligatory nautical stuff pic

"Give me that Filet o Fish..."

You'd figure that Uncle Drew and the boys in green might merit a buoy, but No. 

Industrious little shucker, huh?

I am from the Old School... if the buoy looks freshly painted, moor it out in the ocean until it doesn't.

The one on the left tastes like Chrissy Watkins

So says him

Eat fudge until you can't budge

Awwww

I wonder if sharks won't eat people on unicorn rafts because it looks too ridiculous. "I have my reef credibility to keep up..."

Cape Cod Surf Check, 10/5/18

Tropical Storm Leslie is far offshore, but her surf was reaching us Friday. We sent the team to the Outer Cape to check it out. We started in Wellfleet. 

We only go so far, however...

We arrived at low tide, which took away some drama and limited our close-ups.

We could have tried to go down the dune...

... but No.

No surfers today, but one also got devoured here recently.

One last shot, and we're Audi.

Next stop... Eastham

The wind was letting up by this time,  but we did the best that we could.

If "the best that we could" means "too lazy to walk down to the beach."

To be fair to our staff, we had already been to Scituate, Marshfield, Duxbury, Kingston, Plymouth, Bourne, Hyannis and Wellfleet. You can see the South Shore stuff by clicking here.

There's a really cool looking lady walking there, but I was shooting with a phone.

Have a good Saturday!

Will A Fatal Shark Attack Hurt Cape Cod's Tourism?

One of the great fears of Cape Cod was realized this September. A bather was attacked and killed by a Great White Shark.

It was the first shark attack fatality (on a human) in Massachusetts since 1936, when a child was partially devoured off of Mattapoisett. Our previous shark attack fatality, off of Scituate, was from before the Civil War, and the one before that- and the only other shark attack fatality in Massachusetts since the Pilgrims arrived- was before the American Revolution.

Your chances of becoming a shark's dinner are, according to the Daily Mirror, 300000000 to 1. By rate of comparison, 250000000 to 1 is your chance of being killed by a falling coconut.

Sharks swam by thousands and perhaps hundreds of thousands of swimmers on Cape Cod this summer. They tasted two of them.

All of this means very little to a tourist region. Millions of people will see the headlines touting a shark attack fatality on Cape Cod. Not many of them will bother to look up the frequency of such events. They react viscerally, essentially crossing Cape Cod off of the Let's Go There list.

Cape Cod can't afford that. As Mayor Vaughan once said, "summer towns need summer dollars." If they don't get those dollars, as Quint noted, they'll "be on the welfare all winter."

In a number of surveys, "the beach" is listed as the top reason for coming to Cape Cod. Anywhere between 1.6% (Bourne) and 5.6% (Provincetown) of the workforce is directly related to tourism, while the indirect associations are probably closer to the 90s.

In 2011, which I am reading a summary of, $852 billion was spent on Cape Cod by visitors. Over $200 million of that went to wages. Orleans makes $900k on parking fees alone, while Truro does $300k.

Tourism is the golden goose of Cape Cod, and things would be less kosher here if our goose is cooked.

It remains to be seen if the fatality (I've attended a lecture by Dr. Gregory Skomal, and he refers to shark attacks as "interactions") does damage to Cape Cod's tourist industry.  Some damage is inevitable, but is it a crippling blow?

Old Cape Cod has a few things going for her in this situation. The numbers favor us in several ways. This attack, nasty as it was, was the first fatality in 82 years. In about 400 years, we have had 4 fatal interactions. If you ignore the recent upward trend, it would seem that the next attack would be far enough in the future that it happens to someone with a George Jetson lifestyle.

That 1 in 300 million number works in our favor, as well. There are 6 billion people or so on the planet. In the last 60 years, there have been 2785 shark attacks, 439 of which were fatal. Massachusetts has one of those. At about 7 fatalities a year, someone else is going to be killed somewhere, and the odds are that it will be somewhere else.

The Wellfleet attack also happened at the very end of our tourist season, especially the Let's Go Swimming part. We had pretty much already juiced the tourists this year, and the next round is 8-9 months away. Our wound has time to heal.

That also buys us time to work on solutions. It will be tempting for pols to ignore this, and hope that the Wellfleet attack was an anomaly. You'll hear a lot of ideas floated around, some good and some bad.

We really should reverse engineer backwards from a scene where we suffer an attack or two early in the season that crushes Cape Cod tourism, and see where we could have made a difference.

Sharks getting a taste for People Food is only going to be bad for us.

Cape Cod Surf Check, 9/20/18

Former Hurricane Florence was nice enough to kick some surf back at us as she went back out to sea. We sent our people to the Outer Cape on Thursday to see what was what.

Not this person, she just got into one of our shots. We needed someone in the foreground for scale, as Hooper once told Brody.

We started at Coast Guard Beach, in Eastham.

We got out there way after high tide, so the pics have a bit less drama.

The surf on Cape Cod was about a foot higher than the South Shore surf.

Outer Cape seawall 

"The path of the righteous man..."

Surf always.looks better from an angle until it gets really big.

My kid calls this "Potato Chip light"

After Nauset, we were off to Marconi Beach, in Wellfleet. 

We were there hours after high tide, but we did our level best for you.

My phone keeps auto-correcting Marconi Beach into Macaroni Beach... and when I spam it around Facebook, it keeps changing it to Missy Marconi, some girl I went to high school with.

Either way, that's all for today's Cape Cod surf check.

We also did a South Shore Surf Check.