The Chappaquiddick Community Center will again host the Spring Egg Hunt and Tea this Saturday at 3 p.m. You will want to be on time for the beginning of the hunt. Those kids will make quick work of recovering the cleverly hidden treats. The tea following will be more leisurely.

There are only four more potlucks scheduled for this spring. Fortunately, we have hosts signed up for all. The CCC has lots of activities planned for the coming season. Subscription forms were sent out with the spring newsletter. If you didn’t get one in the mail, you can print it from the CCC website. Summer is a mere 11 weeks away.

When people think outside the box, solutions to problems that at first appear to be unsolvable may come from the most unlikely source. I just put down the phone after a long conversation with the current owner of the Daggett House. Her property abuts the Chappy ferry waiting line. She had just received her real estate tax bill before hopping on a plane to fly to Tibet to participate in their Women Can Be Monks Too! program. Since the usual vow of poverty is involved, she has been brainstorming ideas on how to make ends meet back here in the U.S. while she is away. She wanted to run an idea past me while she had the chance. Her vow of silence begins Saturday and I know that it alone will be a pretty big challenge. It occurred to her that perhaps there was a way to address the ferry line issue while at the same time bringing in a little income to pay off her taxes and water bill and such.

Her idea is really quite simple. Why not use her yard to queue up the vehicles waiting to get on the ferry and charge a small embarkation fee like they do with the Steamship Authority? After all, right now it’s just a grassy lawn that she pays someone to rake and mow. Lord knows we have enough lawns along the Edgartown waterfront. At this point our phone connection got a little iffy and I was hearing maybe every other word. At any rate here’s what I’m certain she said. She told me to go ahead and hire the guys who designed the new Vineyard Haven Stop & Shop. Get them to draw something up with maybe two or three levels. “Like a parking garage,” I think she said. “You know, with ramps and stuff. Anyway, let’s get this done before summer. Talk to you when I get back.”

Inspired by Andrea’s genius I have decided to pursue another idea that also might seem a little outside the box. It involves an innovative power system for the ferryboats. There is actually precedence for this type of propulsion that dates back to the 1900s. Small ferryboats utilized a horse harnessed onto a treadmill to turn paddle wheels to move the boat through the water.

So think back a few decades ago when annual automobile inspections included driving your car onto a set of rollers and revving up the engine. Buddy’s garage paid big money to have one of those contraptions installed. It’s called a dynamometer. The DMV no longer requires it. I figure that Buddy would love to get that thing out of there.

My idea is to install it in the deck of the ferry in just the right spot so that somebody’s drive wheels are resting on it. When it’s time to leave the slip, the ferry captain just gives the car driver a thumbs-up, they put the pedal to the metal and off we go. There would be a learning curve of course, but most folks seem to prefer leaving their engines running on the way over anyway. At some point we can rig up some sort of gizmo so that the driver in the front car can steer the ferry. I see a lot of folks trying to do that already. Kind of an interactive ferry operation concept. We’ll see. There are lots of little details to work out.

I heard from a friend who works in a big office in Washington, D.C., that a bigwig in the Army Corps of Engineers just retired. In the process of cleaning out his desk, my friend says, they found an old faded memo dated April 1, 2008 that said, “Note to self: Remember to go ahead with closing up Katama breach. Wait until after fishing derby.”

Send your Chappy news to: peter@chappyferry.net.