Mytoi Garden still needs a gardener for the upcoming summer season. Contact TTOR Superintendent Chris Kennedy at Kennedy@thetrustees.org. Imagine how fabulous that will look on your resume.
Margaret Knight and Sidney Morris will be hosting the next CCC potluck supper on Wednesday April 18. Appetizers begin at 6 p.m. with the buffet line forming at 6:30. Please bring a dish to serve six. There are only three more potlucks after this one. You can sign up to be a host by calling Lynn at 508-627-8222 or by putting your name in the little black book the next time that you are at the center.
Elizabeth Whelan will hold the season finale of her winter art workshops on Thursday, April 19 from 6:30 to 9:30 p.m. at the CCC. Come to sketch or paint or bring your own project to work on.
When the Nantucket SSA governor was quoted as saying that the series of mechanical issues which recently plagued that ferry service could never happen again, I was reminded of an old saying around the waterfront – “Don’t tempt worse.” Turtle Lawry, owner of the trawler Elizabeth L, said it more often than the other fish boat captains who tied up at Memorial Wharf. Probably because during his many years of fishing he had experienced plenty of bad situations.
Back in the 1970s and 1980s there were half a dozen big boats based out of Edgartown. When the weather got nasty another half dozen boats from away would seek refuge here. There would be as many as four rafted up on the face of the wharf during a northeaster, all pitching at different tempos, gear jangling, dock lines coming up bar-taut when one vessel rose as her neighbor dipped.
One particular morning we woke up to two feet of snow and northeast winds blowing sixty. Captain Lawry called the ferry house pay phone to say that he was snowed in at home and would I keep an eye on his boat until one of his crew could get down there. The Elizabeth L was the inshore boat on the face of the wharf. With the exception of one long, thin over-worked bow line from the second boat, all the boats outside of her were depending on her dock lines to keep them tamed. The majority of fishermen tend not to waste money on dock lines. Turtle was no exception. After the one long thin bow line from the second boat chafed through, the various mongrel chunks of rope that the whole raft of boats was depending on began to part one by one. In those days, sea scalloping was king and everybody was rigging up flopper-stoppers or anti-rolling gear which required lots of extra steel framework and rigging overhead. All that equipment gathered a lot of wind. The Elizabeth L’s bow began to swing away from the wharf.
I had tied pieces of two broken lines together to temporarily arrest her departure and was rummaging around on deck for more lines when one of Turtle’s crew men skidded into the parking lot in a pickup truck. He leapt into the wheelhouse, the Elizabeth L’s engine roared to life, she strained ahead on what was left of her stern lines. She hugged the dock as we dragged a couple of nice thick hawsers out of the pickup bed and ran them between boat and pier.
When Turtle arrived later I remarked that if his crew man had not shown up in just the nick of time things would have turned out very differently. That was just one of the times when he said,” Don’t tempt worse.”
Send Chappy news to peterchappyferry@gmail.com.
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