Harboring: Onset

Onset is the star of today's Harboring entry...

I'm a better photographer when I'm not banging away with a Wal-Mart phone, but I go to cooler places with the cheap Asian telecommunication device. A good camera would hate going to me, it'd feel the same way that a car would feel being driven off the lot by an angry, lead-footed drunkard.

"I need a boat to get to my boat!"

People sometimes mistake us for serious press and sail away before we can get a good shot of them.

I rarely get a good shot of anything, to be honest.

This guy, who I think was by himself, is the opposite of that square-footage discussion we have later in the article.

Boat Name Rampage for the next few pics, no moderation.

Two If By Sea... Two 350 Mercs, blogga!

You gotta get that ish into the water, player...

Country Club over Country... sometimes, the political metaphors just hand themselves to you.

A personal use lighthouse/waterfall that was probably made just before they started making ashtrays that look just like it (OK, sans waterfall)... for the love of Mary, they had to build a garden around it.

I sank my only boat, but this one looks like it would be too costly for the square footage. The thing on the front to ram larger boats is pretty cool, however... very Monitor/Merrimack.

The best part is that they can probably afford a better shanty, but they know how cool this one looks.

The flag says SATURDAYS ARE FOR THE BOYS, and the demographics on board were like five girls and two guys... two guys who it is impossible to hate.

I love boat names, believe that all boats are female (even the Edmund Fitzgerald), and I love when someone names the boat after his wife or his mom or his daughters. However, single name girl monikers are weak. Does Jane not have a sister or a middle name or something?

All that broad daylight and clear blue sky messes up my pics.

I do better on cloudy days, although I just made Onset into a hill.

Later, Onset!

Clouds, Fair And Foul

Today was a very nice day, so we thought we'd bring you some clouds... just in case you missed all of our storminess recently.

I lifted this one from a Westport article.

Nothing like 150 yards of visibility when you're tooting along at 75 mph, taking pictures...

Let's have some more blue sky...

The next 4 were taken about 30 seconds apart in the same thunderstorm...

... and this one was taken in happier times.

Cold, Hard GPS Reality Hits Cape Cod

Cape Cod in general and Bourne in particular are somewhat used to Los Angeles-style traffic plodding through a 2500 person village on a 55 degree rainy/raw day. Memorial Day Weekend 2017 did not disappoint.

If you go back an article or two and dig up our "much like how an Eskimo has 200 words for snow, Bourne residents recognize 200 forms of traffic"tangent, you'd want to score tonight's entertainment at the rotaries as "people coming down to ready their rental properties for the 11 AM arrival of the first Summer People of 2017."

Facebook began to fill up with horror stories by 1 PM, and they were getting very ugly by 3 PM. "I can't get out of my driveway on Cypress Street" was one that got my notice. "45 minutes to clear Main Street" also was worrisome. Pictures from Duxbury, Wareham, Marion and Plymouth showed that it was jamming up everywhere.

"So it begins," as they say during the first Cape Cod traffic jam of every year. It's the high cost of doing business. The business benefits all, but the brunt of the burden is borne by Bourne. Bourne is the home of the two Canal bridges, also known as "the only ways to drive off of the Cape."

But the highways were not the only jammed roads. Normally safe side roads like Bournedale and Puritan began to fill up. Soon enough, bumper-to-bumper traffic was dominating side streets that normally get village traffic.

How did it come to this?

For much of the post-bridges history in Bourne, the only way to Cape Cod from due west was to crawl through Wareham and Buzzards Bay to the bridges. The locals knew this, and lined the roads with clam shacks, mini-golf and antique stores designed to feed off the tourists. It's why Wareham, which in Plymouth County and exists miles from the Canal, is known as the Gateway to Cape Cod.

This changed in 1987, when Route 25 picked up an extra 7 miles east of Wareham. You could take the highway right to the bridge, and the banshee screamed for the Buzzards Bay tourist industry.

Wareham got a reprieve when Wal-Mart dropped a store there (which has since moved west),and survives now via fast food and a very tenuous Stop & Shop anchor.

"Well," they said back in 1988, "business will suffer, and we will have to transform ourselves into a bedroom suburb. At least the traffic in town will ease up."

Nope.

In 1960, the US Navy put up a global positioning satellite to track their warships. It was improved upon and eventually made available for civilian use by Ronald Reagan. Navigation devices became available for phones.

Route 25 didn't make the Cape traffic go away, it just made it go away from Buzzards Bay. People were getting into gridlock on an empty highway with no Bourne businesses to feed off them. Wareham and Buzzards Bay then became the shortcut of choice for people used to the old route.

Things start getting odd when the GPS came about. It put local side streets into the game plans of people who aren't locals. That's another bad omen to see popping up on Facebook, the "tourists jamming roads they shouldn't know" event.

"Bournedale Road" isn't a townie secret anymore. People of the Griswold archetype from somewhere like Utah might be aware of it.

It wasn't like that in 1968, but they didn't have GPS technology on the streets then, either.

Not everything was negative yesterday. I did see a new business model emerging, the prey-on-passing-traffic gig revisited.

Granted, one must adjust to the new realities, and put their businesses where the people are. That's how they did it in 1987, and it's how they're doing it 30 years later.

It's the same basic business strategy as old Bourne, and not far at all (just 75 years or so) from a kid opening a lemonade stand. I shouldn't have been shocked, as it made perfect sense.

As I rode down Head Of The Bay Road in Bourne yesterday, I saw an odd sign...

I should add that it took about 45 minutes to go from Hideaway Village to the Belmont Circle rotary. Most of that was spent in bumper-to-bumper traffic, crawling 10 yards a minute.

I still took awful pictures... lol.

I expected to see kids at the bottom of this signage, which ran three signs or so as we inched down Head Of The Bay Road.

I didn't see kids, and instead saw someone who might have grandkids.

Some old guy (with a circular driveway, nonetheless) set up a table and umbrerlla, got out a hot dog steamer and a cooler, and went into the hot dog stand business.

Sorry for the rotten shot, but "Look... dude has a hot dog stand!" isn't a good enough rubbernecking excuse to avoid an asskicking by whoever was behind me.

It's not like you can call the cops on the guy for running a shadowy roadside stand business in a non-zoned area, because by the time that the cops get through the traffic, this guy may have gone to his Reward and the business will be in the hands of his grandkids. The kids can just flee into the forest, as kids do.

Opening a beer stand on Head Of The Bay Road may have been prescient. "BONG HITS... $5" might have turned a profit as well.

In 1977, they set up on Main Street to get at the road-trippers. In the GPS era, that shifted the onus onto the side streets.

I made it to the rotary eventually.

The Cape Cod Times recently ran an article that gave away the shortcuts locals use in several Cape Cod towns.

Dude must have been a washashore, because I can tell you from experience that locals frown on that. Skipping Route 28 by using County Road is something that a Cape Codder earns, and it makes them angry to see someone from Ohio with the same shortcut in mind.

You don't want to be doing 45 minutes in the traffic on Head Of The Bay Road before you get to the 30 minute rotary-negotiating nightmare in Belmont Circle. Someone will get killed, eventually.

I spent some time at the Trowbridge Tavern after the grueling commute, and I can tell you that the bridge (and the roads leading up to it) still had bumper-to-bumper traffic at 10 PM. You were still doing bumper to bumper briefly at 1 AM just off the Sagamore Bridge.

And so it begins...

Sonic, Olive Garden Cometh: Fast Food Oversaturation In Wareham?

If your doctor told you that you needed more cholesterol, you might want to get into the Fatmobile and bring the pod to East Wareham.

Sonic Drive-In, an Oklahoma-based restaurant chain that banks much green in the South, is slowly edging into Massachusetts. They have set their sites on Wareham, via the Patel family, owners of a bunch of Taunton-area convenience stores.

We had to go to Somerset to get these pics, but of course you know that I stopped for a salad on the way and didn't eat any artery-clogging fast food. We include the pictures for SE Massachusetts people who have never been to a Sonic. They're rare around here.

The same area of Wareham is also getting an Olive Garden.

As near as I can tell, the Sonic is going onto the property currently occupied by an oil-change shop, so your fries will have a Pennzoil taste to them. The Olive Garden is said to be going across the street from Barnacle Bill's.

How much is too much?

A lonely stretch of East Wareham is now host to a veritable takeout Mecca. You can get Burger King, Subway, McDonald's, D'Angelo's, Kentucky Fried Chicken, Taco Bell, Wendy's, Krua Thai, Pizza Boy, Rice Bowl and Dunkin Donuts. I'm not throwing Papa Gino's, Lindsay's or Bailey's into the mix, as you can't order from your car there. I'm pretty sure that the 99 only closed because the building floods in heavy rains.

It's the Cardiac Highway!

We're not Food Snobbing anyone. Stephen, one of our writers, hasn't cooked his own food since 2011 or so. However, about one hundred yards of East Wareham, a depressed region of a small town, now has every fast food place in the Northeast.

They could use a White Castle or a Carl Jr's/Hardee's, but there is only so much Cranberry Highway.

Buzzards Bay had a Burger King fail, which isn't easy. Other than the Hooters: Cape Cod and the Falmouth/Kingston Pizza Huts, it is the most high profile failure of a major fast food chain in the area.

You order off this screen, into the sort of speaker that you used to see at drive-in theaters. Someone skates out with it, and you get into the goods. I need both glasses and a taller car.

We passed on the tater tots, as I ate them every day for 4 years in high school. I got the SuperSonic Bacon Double Cheeseburger (pictures below), which came with fries and a soda for about $10. The burger was a-ight, but the fries were Ore-Ida quality.

My meal had over 1500 calories and 2200 milligrams of sodium before I counted the milkshake (it had about 3000 calories with the milkshake... meanwhile, famine victims in refugee camps are happy to get 1200 calories a day), and the unknowable portion sizes makes it impossible to gauge how many calories I stole from Jessica's food. The recommended daily allowance for sodium is 3400 mg, but I consider that to be a piddling sum ascribed to a 105 pound woman. I'm a slim 240 man, so I should get to have twice as much sodium as mortals are allowed. I plan on buying a salt lick and just posting it up in my office somewhere.

I didn't get a pic of it, but when I took the bun and tomato off of the burger, it looked somewhat like William Dafoe.

My copilot got the Chicken Strips Sampler Platter, which was 3 whack strips, more Ore-Ida fries, and onion ring and some toast. That also ran ten bucks, and you can see it below somewhere.

Her chicken did not look like a celebrity.

My man Hardcore Logo got the Chicken Strips Kids Meal, which came with a shake and some Justice League stickers. He didn't let me steal any of it.

The rollerskater (who was a guy) was friendly enough. He's out hustling for his dollar, so I'm not making fun of him. I have had worse jobs. He was the first fast food employee I have ever tipped, aside from the Dunkin' and Marylou's girls.

They must have been out of the Brazilian Man rollerskating waitress neon signs, which is understandable.

Does the population of Wareham have enough kids who know how to roller skate to staff a Sonic these days? You may not want to go there until the girls get their skating legs under them, lest you get a milkshake to the face (doh!) like the cop in the Happy Days intro.

Will this be enough for Sonic- who for some reason can't seem to come to some sort of spokesmanship agreement with the Sega hedgehog- to hold up on the Cranberry Highway against the heavyweights?

We'll goof on the Olive Garden in some future article where we have pictures of one. We consider going to an Olive Garden for Italian food to be akin to going to Red Lobster for seafood. It works if you don't have Italians around to call BS on it.

Olive Garden competing against Mezza Luna should be a devastating loss, but people like franchises. Don't count the OG out of it by any means.

I stole her onion rings before the picture could be taken... because I'm eeeeeevil.

Note that Sonic and Olive Garden are two more businesses who declined to move into (and perhaps revive) the Main Street area of Buzzards Bay. The only big names willing to dance with Buzzards Bay are Subway and Dunkin' Donuts, and we know that Dunkin' would set up in Aleppo if they were allowed.

How much fast food can one region consume? Will the added presence of Sonic be too much for BK or lil' Miss Wendy to bear? Wendy's in Wareham is sort of smelly, and Sonic may just walk them out behind the barn and put them out of their misery.

... or maybe Wareham needs more fast food? Does more fast food exist? Wahlburgers may be a bit high end. I'm not sure if Jack In The Box still exists. In-n-Out Burger or Phatburger (Fatburger?) may not make it here. I'm not sure if dropping a White Castle in Buzzards Bay or East Wareham works, especially for B Double. Chick Fil-A will help along people looking for a less gay-friendly chicken sandwich, but would you run the Bourne rotary for one?

Will the East Wareham economy survive if it is reduced to a bunch of people selling shoddy hamburgers to each other? If that happens, will employees eventually just be paid in hamburgers?

Will the very town of Wareham fracture along supper preference lines, with the higher-end West Ham and their Longhouses and Red Robins break away from their more ghetto McChicken-eating cousins in East Wareham?

Only time will tell.

Playing ring toss with onion rings makes the hardened arteries well worth it.

Salt Water Lures Show In Bourne

Bourne is sort of Cape Cod's flyover territory for a lot of tourists, but not for the fishermen. Bourne is Fisherman Nirvana.

Bourne is the only town touching both Cape Cod Bay and Buzzards Bay... although to be quite honest, we're not 100% sure that Plymouth doesn't make contact with the upper reaches of the body of water that is Buzzards Bay. That's something for a future article.

You can also cut between those two bays via the Cape Cod Canal, another fishy factor favoring Bourne. This canal, which runs for 5 miles or so, is a fisherman's destination in itself.

Bourne is the home of legendary fisherman Stan Gibbs. He was the uberfisher who designed many of the basic lures that every fishing supplier copies today. His reputation among scholars of salt water fishing lures is similar to the reputation Karl Marx has among Communists. He has his own statue in town, and his legend is everywhere. If you heard the story about someone fishing a cap off of a yachtsmen's head, that was Gibbs. If you hear about a guy who can cast all the way across the Cape Cod Canal, that was also Gibbs.

No matter how you slice it, Bourne is a fisherman's paradise. You can cast from anywhere in town and stand a chance of catching some sort of fish.

It is the repeatedly stated opinion of this column that Bourne should attempt to cash in on all of these factors and exploit the Angler Potential of their numerous and potentially lucrative fishing hot spots.

This could be accomplished via simple things (advertising in the right places, better access, and so forth) and complicated things (construction of fishing piers, etc...) that might pay off if done properly.

I'm not the Answer Man when it comes to how this should be done. There's a reason I am not running Bourne, and instead seemed to have peaked at writing articles about how the town can profit from things like fisherman conventions.

Speaking of which...

The Salt Water Lures Collectors Club is having their annual convention in Bourne this week. Friday is a members-only affair, but they will be open to the public from 8 AM to 3 PM on Saturday.

You can come in and see the top of the line in salt water fishing lures. You can buy, sell or trade. You can also Gawk, which isn't a bad thing to do whenever you are in a room full of experts. If you live on Cape Cod, you should probably try to have some working knowledge of angler-type stuff. If you fish here, you may as well fish with excellent gear.

I mean, you can go down to the ol' fishing hole with some shoddy rubber lure that you got at Wal-Mart if you're not serious about catching fish. There's a reason that they put sandwich shops on the way home from fishing holes.

Orrrrr, you can ante up and get the good ish. These guys (and girls, fish are tasty and fun to catch for both genders) don't mess around. While I am not a member of the Salt Water Lures Collectors Club, it stands to reason that you don't join up to hock junk to people who will know better/be able to spot junk.

The show is happening at the Trowbridge Tavern and Canal Club. The Trow is an excellent place to have dinner, and is a fine spot to fortify yourself with some Fisherman Fuel before heading downstairs to gawk at the goods.

See you there!