Showing posts with label Hull. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Hull. Show all posts

Thursday, August 10, 2017

Harboring: Hull


It's a Hull of a day for our Harboring series!

Hull, home to Nantasket Beach and the former Paragon Park, juts out into the sea. It's very much like Duxbury, geologically or whatever term I should use there.

Hull was named for Kingston-on-Hull, England. Captain Issac Hull, who would be a pretty cool guy to name a town after, came to be about 150 years after Hull was settled. Captain Hull had a set of balls just like these, and he is famed for leading the Constitution against the British ship Guerriere and taking home the W. Lots of towns are indeed named after him, but not this Hull.


"Nantasket" means either "low tide place" or "at the strait" in Native American. The "Hull" part of Kingston-upon-Hull refers to the River Hull back in the jolly old E.

Speaking of hulls, they need to get this one in the water. I was here in late July, for the love of Mary.

Several staff members have noted that the boat only has to be red to become one of my favorites and to get a place in our article.

This looks suspiciously like one of those Redneck Superman memes where some guy in Alabama turns a sofa into a boat.

Other than New Bedford and, amazingly Sandwich... it's a bit strange to see a building with more than two stories turn up in our Harboring series.

Amazingly, we found that the One Foot Of Water Dock was unoccupied.

Chains look artsy when better photographers are sizing up the shot, but I do what I can for you people.

That is "A Street," rather than a play on the "I'm not a fast Captain, I'm not a slow Captain, I'm a half-fast Captain" joke.

I turned up in Hull on a raw and windy day, hence the inactivity on the docks.

Cutest boat in the harbor.

We're twenty articles into our Harboring series, and I still go "Ooooh, boat stuff, let's get a pic!"

Hey! You were already in this article!

Hull's boatyards are sheltered by Hull itself, I didn't see one boat on the ocean side of town.

God tilted the Earth on me right when I was lining up my cute Harbormaster shack photo.

It's odd to take a picture of a harbor and have the wind-powered thing in it not be a sailboat.

A quick Nantasket shot... hey, we end up where we end up, folks.

Note the Fisherman's Cooler tied to the back of the boat.

I may be disoriented, but I think that's World's End in the background.
If they made that boat cover go all the way to the top in a point, this boat would look like a floating DUNCE cap or a drowning KKK guy.



The kayak rental business slows on cold, raw days.

Hull, which may have cleaned up since my late July arrival, had the red seaweed problem that other Irish Riviera beaches had.

Hull needs just a few more of these to make a Newton's cradle. Named after English 17th century scientist Isaac Newton, a Newton's Cradle is a device that demonstrates conservation of momentum and energy using a series of swinging spheres.

The downside of having children scrawl the magazine name into the sand is that sometimes they put an extra N in "Cranberry."

Tuesday, May 16, 2017

Beach Wi-Fi And Charging Stations


We stumbled across these in Westport, at Horseneck Beach.

You can lock on to their WiFi signal while you're at the beach. This is important, because you can waste a lot of data on a beach day. Also, it allows you to buy a cheap phone for beach use. No need for any phone cards, nor any need to have an overachieving wave hit your fancy new I-phone or whatever the kids are using these days.

You can also charge up your phone. I should have memorized this process better, but you use your credit card, lock your phone in the little charging station, and come back for it after X amount of recharge time.

Rather than wasting a power line that will almost certainly get destroyed by a nor'easter, they power it by what looks like a removable solar panel. They were confident enough in her sturdiness to have it out in late-April/early-May. While the solar-based charger power may be weak on cloudy/rainy days, I'd imagine that demand for beach WiFi would also be low on those days.

I don't do my beaching in Westport (although I will in the future, Horseneck Beach is charming), so I haven't field-tested this Bad Larry. I have no idea if the signal reaches very far, Energetic beaches could actually trot them out to where the people are and remove them when the seas are threatening. Horseneck Beach has them up by the snack bar.

It seems like a good idea to me. Charlie Baker has his name on it, so maybe it is exclusive to State beach reservations or some such stuff. Larger beaches may want more than one, to spread them out some and avoid massing the phone phreaks in one spot. 


I have no idea what one of these costs (Editor's Note: $96,500 bought a dozen of them), but it might be a nice investment for a town with a beach. 

Places that have these presently:

Artesani Playground and Wading Pool - Boston
Constitution Beach - Boston
Southwest Corridor Park - Boston
Castle Island - South Boston
Murphy Rink - South Boston
Nickerson State Park - Brewster
Lynch Family Skate Park - Cambridge
Nantasket Beach Reservation - Hull
Nahant Beach Reservation - Nahant
Wollaston Beach - Quincy
Salisbury Beach Reservation - Salisbury

Horseneck Beach Reservation - Westport




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