Scallop Festival Alternatives

We recently heard the news that there will be no Scallop Festival in 2018. The threat of inclement weather is a disaster for the SF, which suffered mightily in attendance and may I dare say performance last year as a tropical storm lurked nearby. It is tough to postpone things involving pre-purchased mass scallop orders, and no one in their right mind would go to the Week Old Scallop Festival. It’s probably more than that, but it’s what I have as we go to press.

The Festival ditched Buzzards Bay, which had been a loving host with big crowds and awful infrastructure, going to the Cape Cod Fairgrounds on-Cape.

Even residents of Bourne who agreed with the Festival’s reason for leaving still viewed her departure as a slap in the face. Bourne has always been Cape Cod’s weak sister, and here was yet another indignity thrust upon us. “Oh, we’re not even good enough for the Scallop Festival?”

There was talk around Bourne of sabotaging the Scallop Festival once it left town. Schedule an OysterFest or Lobster Roll Championsip on the same day as the Scallop Fest, then purchase 20 junker cars and have them all break down on the bridges/at strategic rotaries during the time people would be heading on-Cape for scallops. Put up a sign reading “MASHPEE: 20 MILES, 475 MINUTES” right about on Routes 3 and 25 where a man could say “Eff Scallops,” and instead bring the fam damnily to Buzzards Bay for whatever Mollusk Marathon event that we had cobbled together.

Thankfully, it never came to that… but you can understand how a town that bears every other town’s summer traffic might want to roll dirty when they take our Scallops away.

No metaphor that I can come up with for this 2018 scallop void is pretty. The Festival is very much like a loose spouse, who left a perfectly good relationship in search of greener pastures. She’s a fortune hunter, and it’s tough not to enjoy a snicker when Spouse 2.0 kicks her to the curb with her hat in her greedy little hands.

Bourne, a cuckold of a town, would probably take her back. Not a lot of events are throwing themselves at the B, and at least she knows how we like our shellfish. We would never really forget that she left us, but she came back, so she must love us. Right?

Eff her, and eff scallops. Let her peddle her scamp ass to Barnstable or New Bedford. Nobody wants Sloppy Seconds, and this would actually be Sloppy Thirds. There would be little consolation to the fact that we had her first when someone else had her second. Scallops are dead to us.

However, there are many different sorts of festivals. Buzzards Bay has a nice park, and we can do what we can with our rotten Main Street business district. Here are a few ideas, some already mentioned in the previous paragraphs.

The Million Clam March
A cutesy play on the more serious Nation Of Islam protest march, we serve up steamers and chowder and quahogs and anything in a shell.

I don’t know what we would pull in attendance, but if we got half of the 50,000 people that the Scallop Festival drew, that would be like 40 clams per person to get the Million Clam mark.

I propose running the Million Clam March until one million clams are consumed, even if we have to run it until Wednesday.

OysterFest

This would be the same festival as the one with the scallops, just with a less popular bivalve.

Oysters do have a reputation as an aphrodisiac, and we shall play on that. The big deal here is that we tie it in with all of the hotels in the area, who would offer packages for couples. We have a big new hotel going in right near Buzzards Bay Park, and those rooms won’t fill themselves.

Properly done, Bourne could be the spot of conception for a million future children if the festival succeeds.

Lobster Fight Championships

I’m not sure if this is legal… but lobsters fight all the time in the tank, right? It’s not like we’re making them do it. Zoom a camera in, broadcast on a big screen, accept betting and drop two big hungry lobsters in one small tank. Two lobbies enter, one lobby leaves… the winner moves on, the loser goes in the lobster roll. The eventual tournament winner is released or sent to an aquarium as a celebrity, his choice.

I’m pretty sure this would get us some national media attention, although it may not all be favorable.

I realize that it’s late March, but honestly look me in the eye and tell me that you have something better to do next October 22nd or whenever.

Jump The Shark Festival

This also is most likely afoul of the law, as they say. It involves catching a Great White Shark in the Canal, luring him into an underwater pen, and then charging rich people piles of money to jump it on water skis off the back of a cigarette boat while we have a big party in the park.

I would not be above bringing ESPN in, and getting this set up as an event in the X Games. It would also give the band Great White something to do, as they have seemed a little down since that whole Station fiasco. I’m sure that whoever sings Mack The Knife could use a weekend’s pay by this point, too.

We should move on this fast, while Henry Winkler is still alive and can serve as Grand Marshall.

It’s not like we’re mistreating the shark, who would get to eat anyone who actually got into his pen and disturbed him… we’re just jumping him.

The Irish Riviera Festival

Bourne isn’t mentioned in most definitions of the Irish Riviera, as we are under the 30% Irish population levels that you see in the true Scituate/Weymouth parts of the Riviera.

However, we have enough Irish to stake a claim, and none of the South Shore towns are having an Irish Riviera festival. Bourne would be 100% Irish Riviera if we hosted the Irish Riviera Festival every year.

This could very much turn Buzzards Bay into a battleground, as 50,000 Irish descend into the village for a weekend of power drinking.

That stuff we always joke about happening at the Cape Verdean Festival that actually doesn’t happen? It would actually happen at the Irish Riviera Festival.

This is also a reminder to the rest of the Cape that, should the disrespeck continue, we are perfectly capable of working with the South Shore.

Sled Mountain

Scusset Beach just sits there, useless, from October through May. Why not get it making us some money?

Dump 10 stories of sand in one end of the parking lot, buy a few snow guns, coat the hill with fake snow, and charge people to park/sled/rent sleds. We instantly become the region’s sledding Mecca. It’s what whoever owns Water Wizz should be doing, but that’s Wareham’s problem.

Every kid has a sled in the house somewhere. We don’t get snow all that often. When we do get it, it is often dangerous or uncomfortable to go out in it. Sleds are often wasted on southern New England kids, especially on the coast. That won’t be the case with Sled Mountain.

Why the hell not?

Best part? At the end of Sled Season, we push all the sand into the Canal and make it wash over to Sandwich, where it would fill in spots hurt by winter storm beach erosion. It would help make up for all the sand that the Scusset Beach jetty blocks from washing over there naturally.

Everybody wins, year-round.

The Christmas Sub

Nothing like a Christmas story in late March, right?

The Deli, located in the spectacularly named town of Sandwich, has a weekly contest. They put a trivia question on the menu board. Whoever solves it first gets either a breakfast sandwich a day for a week or a three foot sandwich.

Stephen, who knows all sorts of useless stuff, walked in, ordered a pastrami sandwich, saw the question ("Where is the city of Batman located?" They don't mean Gotham City, by the way... that's "in" New Jersey) and answered- appropriately for a deli- "Turkey."

Boom! That 400 level Ottoman Empire class just paid for itself, player.

Steve ended up collecting on Christmas Eve, visited a friend who was down on his luck enough to have no Christmas Eve dinner and became the most popular guy in Cedarville.

We forgot to publish the article in December, but maybe this little Christmas miracle will brighten your day.

Stop by The Deli and get a sandwich. They're good people, it's harder than you think to find a good deli and these people do it properly.

Lug Nuts At The Kingston Collection

Some very fancy cars were stored at the Kingston Collection recently.

We took these pics in early March and then forgot about them, in case you are wondering what the opposite of Breaking News is.

The cars are still pretty cool.

It was either this or the 2007 Toyota Yarris, and the Yarris had better cup holders.

Mini-van!

"You can't get laid in one, but you'll get laid."

March Supermoon Storm Tide, Marshfield and Duxbury

Supermoon nor'easter? You know we're sending a crew out!

Marshfield and Duxbury were Poseidon's canvas on Friday.

Deluxebury and Vegas got off easily. The storm went south to north through the center of SE Massachusetts. We didn't spend much time in her strongest wind field. The east winds came at low tide, and were north winds at high tide. This knocked the seas down some, saving the area from more dangerous surf.

Supermoon tides, which are the tides when the moon makes her closest approach to us (the Moon has an egg shaped orbit, and distances from Earth vary), are dangerous. If a storm is behind them, the danger is exponentially increased.

The north wind is cool because I can stand pretty much right on the seawall and the spray is blown away from me. I was dry for almost all of this assignment.

The lessened wind/wave interaction was the difference between waves smashing the wall and waves smashing the houses. A supermoon high tide is usually all of the head start that a damaging storm needs.

A good day not to go fishing. Just kidding, every day is a good day to go fishing. Consider the alternatives...

It would be funny if the fisherman stayed home, only to have the ocean come to him.

Gurnet Road floods during supermoon tides even without a storm, although that only stops some people.

Duxbury Proper doesn't flood much, but supermoon tides get it done on Washington Street...

...and Powder Point.

Powder Point doesn't get waves, however... this is why the townspeople rightly voted for seawall repairs on the barrier beach.

Otherwise....

We usually add Hull or Scituate into these articles, but I instead used the travel time to get a linguica bagel from The Coffee Shack in Green Harbor. I do not regret this decision.

Duxbury's seawall repairs held up, although I left before the tide went out.

Overall, it was a good show. No major damage anywhere I saw...

We may even have ended with the last snow of the season, below...

Borden Flats Lighthouse

One of my favorite lighthouses around is in Fall River. This is odd, because I tend to romanticize lighthouses as isolated things on the end of a lonely beach. In that regard, it's odd to see one while I'm eating Popeye's chicken in the car.

Borden Flats Lighthouse sits at the mouth of the Taunton River, where it empties out into Mount Hope Bay. If I were a better photographer, you'd see how cool it looks there, but that's why you can read this for free.

Borden Flats Lighthouse was erected in 1881. It, and the flats it sits on, are named for the famous Borden family of Fall River. The Bordens may have had a daughter turn up in the news at some point for some reason or another, I'm not sure....

I think the Borden family may have been into hotels, because the Lizzie Borden house is now a B&B. The Borden Flats Lighthouse, which looks pretty much like a lighthouse to me, is actually a hotel!

The actual good pictures are lifted from the Borden Flats Lighthouse website.

Fall River, a bustling textile town in the 1800s, got a lot of shipping traffic, as well as steamboat ferry action. Mount Hope Bay is rather shallow, and Borden Flats were ship-wrecking treacherous. It was formerly marked by an unlit beacon. $25K was set aside for construction of the lighthouse.

It went into action on October 1, 1881. It had a kerosene-fed fourth order Fresnel lens, and you know that I have no idea what that means. It got a modern plastic lens in 1977.

It was electrified in 1957, automated in 1963, and the fog bell was replaced by an electronic foghorn in 1983... a mistake in my view, but I also don't live near/have to listen to it.

The 1938 hurricane didn't topple Borden Flats Lighthouse, but it did give it a Pisa-style tilt that you notice once someone points it out to you. They built an additional caisson around it to keep it from having a ruined-castle style look.

In 2000, the lighthouse was auctioned off to Cindy and Craig Korstad, who are in the Buy Lighthouses And Turn Them Into Hotels business. I think they dropped $53K on it, then many K more renovating it.

It stands 50 feet tall, it has a 250 mm white light that flashes every 2.5 seconds, The foghorn goes off every 10 seconds, or- as Elwood Blues said when showing his apartment to Joliet Jake- "so often you won't notice it after a while." It is an active US Coast Guard aid to navigation, and is of the "Spark Plug" variety.

It seems to be tastefully decorated, and it looks delicate enough that I will be on the "Don't touch anything!!" prohibition orders from my photographer when we tour it.

That's right... you can tour it for $20 a pop. You can also stay the night, for rates as low as $299 a night off-season.

Here's what I can learn about it from the website without calling the people like a real reporter does:

- Swimming is "strongly discouraged"  as this is both a shipping channel and not too far down the coast from where the last fatal shark attack in Massachusetts happened. The current is around 7 knots, and the lighthouse is surrounded by large, diver-paralyzing rocks.

- It runs off solar panels, so having Chief Brody kill the shark by tricking it into biting the electric wire running to the lighthouse isn't a viable exit strategy.

- Just like when it was built in 1881, the lighthouse has a DVD player and can get local stations on the TV. It lacks WiFi.

- The best access is from Borden Light Marina, the trip takes 5 minutes. I'm not sure if they ferry you over themselves. It would be a heroic swim, especially while carrying luggage.

- BYOB allowed, no smoking inside.

- You call 911 for emergencies, unless you know the Sea Mafia or perhaps even Aquaman. They say that the Justice League only keeps Aquaman around in case trouble arises at the Borden Flats Lighthouse.

- The Coast Guard has 24/7/365 access rights to the lighthouse.

- Sunsets are amazing from the lantern room. I'd imagine that the rest of the day is pretty nice up there, too.

- The lighthouse, like every other one, is haunted. The ghosts seem to be a giggling little girl, a classical music fan, and one of the keepers entering the lower floor while you're on an upper one.

- If you dream of buying a lighthouse, understand that there is Herculean maintenance involved. "You can't buy it and visit it once a year, your investment will wash into the sea." Much of the hotel revenue is poured back into the lighthouse via renovations and maintenance.

- Two guests only, and no pets allowed... even seals.

- There is also a hotel/lighthouse in Bourne.

- The picture below is from US Coast Guard, circa 1900:

Ned's Point Light in Mattapoisett

We paid a visit to Mattapoisett, Massachusetts to check out Ned Point Light.

The South Coast has some cool lighthouses, you just have to move a bit to find them.

I love all lighthouses and I love this one, but Ned is a pretty good example of why lighthouses need a lightkeeper shack near it. Lighthouses are more about Duty than Beauty, which of course increases their beauty immeasurably. A shack wouldn't hurt, though... even if they just keep DPW stuff in it.

A cooler name wouldn't hurt, either. "Mattapoisett Light" would be better. So would "Dexter Point Light," which was the last name of the eponymous Ned in question.

New England fishing villages most likely weren't hacked out of the forest by guys who stopped work and said, "You know what? We should give it a more catchy name, so our greatgreatgreatgreatgreatgreatgreatgreatgreat grandchildren can use it to draw in tourists," and that's probably a good thing.

Ned Point Light is also known as Ned's Point Light by the locals. It was built in 1838 for $4500 of those 1838 dollars. John Quincy Adams was instrumental in getting the funds. It is older than Mattapoisett, which was part of Rochester until 1857.

It was made with stones that they found nearby. The contractor (Leonard Hammond), who also owned the town tavern, didn't finish in time. Stalling an inspector at his tavern, he had a crew try to make it look finished. The inspector stepped into the lighthouse and fell through the floor, which was merely planks laid over barrels.

It used to have a lightkeeper's house, but that was floated across Buzzards Bay to Bourne, where it now serves Wings Neck Light.

Ned Point Light was deactivated from 1951-1963. It was restored by locals in the 1990s.

It isn't open for touring, other than once a week in the summer. It's 39 feet high and has 32 granite steps.

She guards the northern edge of Mattapoisett Harbor.

Wings Neck Light

Wings Neck doesn't have an apostrophe, and I checked more than once. It's a peninsula, which is actually a typo away from being a dirty term describing "a piece of land that is bordered by water on three sides but connected to mainland."

As near as I can tell from the Wikipedia, the big difference between a Peninsula and a Cape is that a Cape manifests itself as a marked change in the trend of the coastline. Essentially, Bourne to Provincetown is a Cape via her right angle hook, while the more Mexico-aligned Baja is a peninsula.

I think that Cape Cod is technically two Capes, with one running from the mainland to Chatham, and the Outer Cape sort of caping off of the Cape.

Keep in mind that I started in journalism as a Sports Betting columnist when I am telling you all this stuff about Geography. I actually confuse Geography with Geology and even Geometry now and then, which is why I am rarely obtuse with people.

Wings Neck is a notable point where Buzzards Bay begins to narrow into the Cape Cod Canal. It is across the Buzz from Stony Point in Wareham. It's not as narrow as the Mashnee Neck/Codman Point bottleneck, but it's pretty narrow. If you've sailed north into the Cape Cod Canal, you passed Wings Neck on your starboard side.

It sort of sticks out from the mainland like a wing, hence the name. I'm guessing, and there could be some guy named Wing who may have a legitimate grievance with me.

The area was of regional importance before the Cape Cod Canal was dug out. The swampy area was rich in Iron, and the Pocasset Iron Company was powerful enough to greatly increase shipping traffic. Shipping into Wareham and Bourne/Sandwich had also increased heavily. Wings Neck merited a lighthouse by 1849. The original light was 50 feet above the water, and it cost a look-at-how-they-spend $3,251.

The first keeper, Edward Doty Lawrence, ran it almost uninterrupted through 1877. He was briefly removed in 1854 for belonging to the wrong political party. His daughter married the Keeper who followed him. John Maxim, who both replaced and preceded EDL as Keeper, was killed at Gettysburg.

Other notable Keepers were George and William Howard. The Howard brothers were noted lifesavers, and they saved 37 lives in their time running Wings Neck. One of the reasons that a U-Boat never attacked Bourne is that the Germans feared retribution from the badass Howard brothers.

It has a very lengthy history of lightkeeper's wives being the assistant keepers, doing the shift while hubby slept. At least one keeper's wife is famous for saying a prayer over her husband's newly-dead corpse, and then going up to run the light and clang the bell before the town doctor had pronounced him dead.

There was an 1878 fire that led to the 1889 construction of a new light, which had all that fancy stuff like a 1000 pound fog bell. They even floated an assistant keeper's house across the Buzz from Mattapoisett in 1923. It went from a fixed to a flashing light in 1928, and converted to electricity in 1934. This light was 44 feet above the water, and was visible for 12 miles at sea.

Wings Neck was once docked at by the US presidential yacht, Mayflower. The keeper, Wallace Eldredge, did a 21 gun salute with the fog bell for President Warren Harding. 

As a private residence, it once played host to the Von Trapp family of The Sound Of Music fame. Since former President Grover Cleveland vacationed in Bourne for many years and was an avid fisherman, he was most likely very familiar with Wings Neck. This is a ridiculous amount of clout for a literal backwater area where maybe 500 families live now.

Maps from vintage times show Wings Neck as a hazard to navigation, and it only got worse when the Canal traffic started floating by.

The lighthouse ran from 1889-1945, when it was deemed unnecessary following the construction of the Cleveland Ledge light. They then put up this Cape Cod Canal monitoring station in the picture above.

The monitoring station is the tallest thing around until you get to the Bourne Bridge. It has radar and CCTV monitoring. If you were doing some Love Boat as you were sailing up the Canal, they probably saw you. They may even have film of the act, which is why I never intend to run for President.

The station is essential to the flow of traffic through the Canal, and helps to prevent such nightmare scenarios as "LNG tanker collides with munitions ship as orphans and puppies watch from within the blast radius." Who needs to see that, right?

The hexagonal (you are either impressed that I know that word, or you know i just made it up) lighthouse still stands, and it is connected to a lovely 3 bedroom cottage by a charming breezeway.

It went up for sale, and is now a private residence. Those private residents (the Flanagan family bought it for $13K and change in 1947) use the place as a rental. You can stay there for the following rates.

Winter: January 1 – May 4  $2,500 per week

Spring: May 4 – June 15  $3,750 per week

Summer: June 16 – September 6  $5900 per week

Fall: September 6 – December 31 $3,750 per week

Now, that's some good scratch, but it's worth it to live in a lighthouse for a week. You always say that you want to live in a lighthouse, and that's what it costs. It's a bargain, trust me. Go stay at that other lighthouse hotel if you don't believe me.

There are few better places to watch a good storm from. If you loved ship-watching as a kid, you owe this place to yourself. It's also a top-notch Buddha Spot. If some people I know lived there, it would have so much smoke coming out of the top, Catholics would think there was a new Pope.

I don't know if they still have the bell, or if they let you ring it if they do. I was basically trespassing for these shots.