Harboring: Brant Rock/Green Harbor

Hi! 

We continue our Harboring series with a visit to Brant Rock/Green Harbor.

Thought we were lying, didn't you?

Green Harbor, unlike some of the other harbors that I visited (coughPadanaramcough), was very busy for my pre-July arrival.

The good thing about our Harboring series is that, unlike our Foliage trips, a good harbor can work a bad day. I visited Duxbury during foul weather, and my pictures were no more or less awful than they usually were.

It's OK to hang a wind sock above Ol' Glory in a marina.

You know your boat rocks when Steve has to go vertical-camera to fit it in the frame.

Green Harbor spent too little on the Harbormaster house (Cranberry County Online is firmly in the corner of the Harbormaster getting a picturesque Harbormaster House, if only to please tourists and bloggers)...

Green Harbor spent just exactly enough on the Harbormaster ATV. Cool ride, HM...

I wasn't kidding about Green Harbor being early-season busy... if you need to check the blue collardness (?) of your local harbor, go there before July and see how busy it is. I'm convinced that Duxbury, by contrast, has some social rule where you don't put the boat in until August. Marion may be worse.

I love boat names. I dated a Tara Lynn once, the boat is most likely less frustrating.

I was at the Brant Rock part for a while, but the Green Harbor section gets in here now and then.

I dated a Jennifer Kelly once, but we're starting to beat that bit into the seabed.

Stephen still needs the "a little less dock, and maybe get the whole mast into the shot" prompts from time to time.

Two different types of seawall, stacked...

You can't take a bad picture of this boat in this harbor. If it were possible, we'd have done it.

These pots only go out in October.

You can't name boats after boys for some reason. "Here comes the Jeff!"

GG is out of the water for some TLC.

facing Green Harbor

Rather than buy one of those little boats to take out to the big boat, it's cheaper to just build  75 yard dock.

If they all had to leave at once, it'd be like that Who concert.

I needed a blue boat, and God shall provide...

Sometimes if you sneak up on Green Harbor, you can get a good pic. I used the Cut River approach.

Parking lot posts

The Green Harbor Yacht Club

It's always OK to hate the owner of "Too Austintatious."

Brant Rock was named for Brant Geese, who favored the rocks offshore. That's not a Brant Goose, but he knows a bunch of them.

Green Harbor was not named because of her color. She was named after some guy named William Green, who staked his claim there in 1627.

The Green Harbor River also is in the mix. She used to end further South or something, but dykes and hurricanes settled the argument.

I don't know who that is, but I was afraid of him being offended if I didn't take his picture.

Fear the shady malice of the Lady Alice.

I was never any good at parking the boat, so they gave me my own dock where I could do less damage.

I'm 100% pro-Dikers.

Catch ya next time, GH!

Harboring: Barnstable

We took our Harboring series onto Cape Cod this week, to check out Barnstable Harbor. Barnstable is Cape Cod's largest town.

Barnstable is home to 45,000 souls, many of whom have boats in the water already.

We've sort of been saving Cape Cod for the summer, and our Cape versions of Harboring should have more rich guy boats for us to gawk at.

Barnstable Harbor is a sweet place to roll into. You can do some gift shop action, eat dinner at the Mattakeese Wharf (free plug for them...they let me shoot some pics off the deck), watch the fishermen, cast a line in the water... and perhaps even go on a whale watch, if I'm interpreting that sign above properly.

Barnstable is the whale watch that you want to go on if you want a longer boat ride for your money. If you go from Provincetown, you're there more quickly and don't have to be seasick as long.

This setup also comes in handy if you're a kid used to slipping unwanted dinnertime vegetables to the family dog. If you can get one of those windows open, you can feed crabs, seals, stripers,,,,

I like to think that if you pulled your boat up to the Wharf and managed to pass some money up. they'd do Boat Takeout. If not, they should... parking boats is a pain in the ass, and sometimes you're too drunk to get out.

This diving ban is more for recreational divers instead of suicidal ones. You'd have a hard time killing yourself with a jump off this bridge, you can almost step down from it.

I advocate hanging on for as long as possible.

There are better ways to go, such as taking one of those boats from the picture below and trying to jump a jetty or something like the M/V Iyanough did.

Skiff Row

Barnstable was Wampanoag for thousands of years, and Mr. White showed up in the 1630s. Barnstable has expanded ever since.

She is the regional center, the largest town in both area and population, and is one of the earlier settlements.

Even in the modern era, you can still get a little taste of how the town was founded if you hang around the harbor long enough.

The pilings in Barnstable Harbor suffered mightily during the glacial winter of 2015. They still have a Pisa-style lean to them that you will hardly notice at all unless you roller-skated there.

Cape Cod has strange weather. You don't have to look too hard to find someone old enough to remember a winter where we had no snow, but you also get winters cold enough for iceberg-style activity.

Barnstable Harbor is sheltered by Sandy Neck to the north. Sandy Neck serves as Barnstable's barrier beach, and is invaluable to the health of the region.

Of course, it only goes so far, which is why everything is on stilts around here.

Mattakeese is a Wampanoag sub-group, and the term turns up a lot in eastern Massachusetts. I saw a lot of Mattakeesett usage growing up in Duxbury, and I have seen the term used in other South Shore and Cape Cod areas.

The basic definition is "fields by the harbor," and it fits well enough everywhere they apply it.

The Mattakeese people were also known as Mashpee and Cummaquid, and you see those names all over the area as well.

Sometimes, a little boat is just as much fun as a big boat.

Barnstable Harbor isn't that large. It does have the advantage of Location, however. One can head right out into Cape Cod Bay, or hook into the Canal to try Buzzards Bay,

You also have the navigational advantage of being able to hit a harbor with a pub no matter which way you sail. It may be Maine if you sail North long enough, but that's on you.

Barnstable has a shellfish harvesting operation going, and we hope to visit it later this summer.

Barnstable, although a fairly well off area, had a busier harbor than some I saw in Dartmouth, Wesport and Duxbury. Barnstable... and I was there pre-4th, too.

One of the side gigs when shooting at harbors is finding and shooting rich guy houses.

Owning a giant house with a dock leading to your luxury boats is pretty much the end game you should be planning for, kids.

Even the whales pitch in to advertise on Cape Cod.

... and the fish fish.

Barnstable Harbor on either side of the marina...

Happy 4th Of July From Cranberry County Online!

Humarock July 3rd Shutdown Has Ominous Implications

Humarock will be closed to revelers on July 3rd. Citing "historical" cycles of drinking and teen rabble-rousing, the Scituate selectmen voted to nix the holiday revelry.

Nothing says "Happy Birthday America" like radically curtailing personal freedoms, right?

Humarock's beach, along with other coastal villages like Green Harbor and Duxbury Beach, have for decades been host to massive Independence Day celebrations on July 3rd (the 4th, in these parts, are reserved for fireworks shows in other towns like Plymouth). These celebrations feature family parties, heroic drinking, Gettysburg-style gunpowder expenditure, roving gangs of teenagers, Dresden-like bonfires and twelve hour adult drunks. It tends to get a bit rowdy, even for the Irish Riviera.

Police naturally tire of the annual Night Of Action on these beaches, and the simple solution is to shut the party down. Seems like a good idea, no?

Most bad ideas usually do at the time they are thought up. Very few people who aren't in Congress, think "That sounds like it will backfire catastrophically, let's try it out."

The upside of the beach closure is instantly apparent. A giant, wild party will be shut down.

Let's examine the downside, shall we?

Humarock is setting a precedent that will be adopted all along the coast. A century worth of tradition can be erased by a mere wet blanket of a selectmen group... especially if they own property in the former party zone. Something that many people take for granted can be snatched away with a private vote of five people or so.

The gentrification of the Irish Riviera is never more apparent than it will be tonight in the Riviera's capital of Humarock. It's not like today's people party harder than yesteryear's. I'd take some 1968 LSD gang of student radicals over today's millennial kids in a Gettin' Rowdy contest, and I'd also wager on my own kegs-and-kegs-of-beer 1980s compatriots.

It's the people who have changed, as well as the demographics and the style of governing. Many of the cottages we remember from 1950-1990 are now 3 story beach mansions that only a wealthy person could afford. The elite, even in a town like Duxbury where the ceiling is high but the floor isn't that low, tend to not reflect the will of the people. However, they do have disproportionate influence in government. The mick with the shanty cottage won't be hosting the next campaign fundraiser, if you catch my drift.

Lacking that connection with the people and certainly not about to go forth and mingle with the rabble, the pols and elite lose touch with some of the things that make living in town special.

The beach closure won't aid public safety that much. If they were serious about this being a public safety issue, maybe they would order the bars to stop serving alcohol on a night when many people will be walking down dark roads with no sidewalks or streetlights. I'd wager that Scituate's many taverns and bars have a higher body count than her July 3rd revelry.

Somehow, I don't see the need for public safety being THAT important to the people who make laws these days. Business is business, after all.

I don't think that it will lower arrests, or even curtail the teen presence. Many teens don't peruse the news every day, and will be unaware of the ban. Many will be lying to their parents about where they are headed, and will simply get dropped off down the road some before wandering into the party area.

Police will stop the first wave, but it takes time to chase off (and especially arrest) a gang of kids. It takes less time for another gaggle to pop up just around the corner. Police resources are finite, and the law could soon be overwhelmed.

This is especially true in that kids who aren't allowed in Humarock are going to turn up somewhere else, leaving police with a choice of "Let two cops try to control Humarock while we respond to kids turning up in large numbers in other parts of town" or the far more ominous "In order to protect Humarock, we're going to abandon policing of other beaches in town. Make your own law on Scituate Neck, folks!"

Kids who are turned away will be free to choose a new spot, in parts of town that will hardly be policed at all. Kids who wander into Humarock will get nonsense trespassing arrests, at the expense of chaos in other parts of town.

If the town does manage to cover all of the real estate, it  seems logical to assume that the same amount of kids will be arrested, just in different parts of town. We're left with a ceiling of "we arrest people in other parts of town now" and a floor of "white riot.' Neither of these seem like a benefit worth gutting a cherished holiday celebration over.

This closure could even hurt property values and rental rates. July 4th is the peak week for renting cottages, and the block party is the engine that drives it. "The town square has a barbershop quartet tonight" doesn't pull the same weight as "Relive your childhood for $3000 a week."

Again, if you are an elite not dependent on rental income to maintain your property, this tradition matters little to you. The ban may actually squeeze some of the rabble out of the neighborhood, in favor of the more acceptable rich man who will snatch up his property.

As we said before, you can't fault the police for wanting to control a ZooMass-style block party, but this beach closure sounds a lot like the downside always expressed in giant asteroid impact movies when someone mentions exploding the asteroid with a nuclear weapon... rather than a million ton asteroid hitting the planet all at once, we instead get the same weight hitting the planet in a buckshot-like manner. You get just as much damage, at least in a F=MA sense.

Humarock seems to be headed in this direction. After them, Marshfield, Duxbury, Plymouth, Cape Cod... it can only happen if you let it happen, people.

Harboring: Padanaram

Our series on local harbors takes us this week to Padanaram, a village in South Dartmouth, Massachusetts.

Padanaram was bought, with most/all of Dartmouth, from the Wampanoag tribe in  1652. It was burned down by the former owners during King Phillips War, but it came back strong soon enough.

The British also took a crack at Padanaram in the Revolution, and may have feinted at it (my memory of this is shoddy) in 1812's squabble with John Bull. Padanaram may have hosted several privateer/pirate type ships which probably didn't have this paint job.

It went through a boom with the whaling industry, and when that played itself out, they gradually settled into a rich guy boat thing. As you can see here, the more vital rich men aren't afraid to climb into the rigging now and then, just like their ancestors did back in the proverbial Day.

...or he hired some laborer to do it while he had a few Bloody Marys at the dockside bar, and wondered why the shabby lookin' photographer was taking pictures of his boat. Ambitious divorce lawyers employ people who look like I do now and then, but my own ambitions were more of the "Cool! Some guy might fall to his death in front of me while I have the camera on."

I grew up in a wealthy seaside town, but I also served as a teacher in some pretty poor ghetto locales. A problem seen in Duxbury that is not seen in Dorchester, and one seen while my friend Hardcore Logo and I were strolling the mean streets of Panadram (I spell it wrong constantly, maybe I'll edit it later) involves "The guy towing the 50 foot yacht wants to make a left turn up a side street but someone parked a Range Rover on the curb of that street in a manner that prohibits the turn from being performed."

They were walking up and down the street asking people if that (the yacht-blocking SUV) was theirs. I heard a lady ask 3 different groups of people within earshot if that was their Range Rover. She came up to me, started the same question, looked over my attire (I dress constantly in a manner similar to how The White Shadow dressed, even when I get summoned to court), and amended the question to "Do you know who owns that Range Rover?"

The Boston Globe famously described Padanaram as "where life slows down." They were talking about the drawbridge, opened hourly, that cuts across Apponagansett Bay. They could have also been talking about piloting a Sea Cadillac down a side street of a town dating back to 1652.

The drawbridge in question sits behind this lovely work boat. Unfortunately for Logo and I, the drawbridge was being worked on when we visited.

Padanaram shares a trait with fellow rich-person town Duxbury that I have seen during our Harboring series... rich guys don't tend to get their boats into the water until July. Granted, this guy may stay in Florida until the 4th of July for all I know. By contrast, my friend Tony from back in the day would get his Boston Whaler wet every April if the weather gods allowed it.

Most of our Harboring series involves shooting at cool boats, especially if Access issues prevent me from getting a good panoramic shot at the whole harbor. I'll get a boat if you guys read hard enough and visit our sponsors, but for now, I'm a landlubber.

As you see above and below, we have an odd interest in Boat Naming. 

The little boats that you take out to the big boat, be you a yachtsman or a fisherman.

You could throw out the old fence, or you could could carve/paint it into a Tuna stairwell decoration... your call.

A better shot at the drawbridge, and the attendant who can now tell his grandchildren "I was in Cranberry County Magazine once! I was 2 millimeters high."

Not a lot of people know this, but you're actually looking at a cleverly disguised boat.

You thought we were kidding about that "rich people are slow to get their boats into the harbor" thing... 

I want to hate this guy, but I just can't bring myself to do it.... that's a nice boat.

I know a girl who waitresses here. She wants to quit, but the place has a Nonquitt policy, posted clearly for all to see. She's like Charlie on the MTA now...

You probably don't want to fish on a drawbridge, anyhow... well, maybe if you're Spiderman or something.