Thanks from the ferry captains and crew for all of the goodies and gifts bestowed upon them by Chappy Ferry travelers. Your show of appreciation means a great deal.

The most recent Google Earth images of Chappaquiddick and Martha’s Vineyard are from this past October. There is a wonderful bird’s eye view of the Memorial Wharf reconstruction project showing the wharf pavilion moved back into the parking lot. The new steel pilings cast shadows on the then- still intact old wooden decking. The crane barge looks even bigger from above.

The oldest clear photos are dated March 1995. Very interesting to click back and forth between 1995 and 2021. Norton Point barrier beach and Wasque Point have of course undergone the most drastic changes. The Katama breach makes its first Google Earth appearance in July of 2007. A year later it is at its maximum opening as it progresses from west to east. Finally, the Vineyard and Chappy are reunited in the May 2015 photo. The narrowness of the beach at the very corner of Wasque in the most recent view shows why vehicle passage there is not dependable.

The accretion of sand around the Edgartown Lighthouse has narrowed the entrance into the harbor by almost 20 percent over a quarter-century. I have a Brownie camera photograph of one of my brothers goofing around on the base of the lighthouse. The water came all the way up to the stone on both the east and south sides, even at low tide.

Out at Cape Poge you can roughly date the tumbling down of one of the twin chimneys. On Simpson Lane, you can see when Mrs. Simpson’s house and the row of stables disappears and the open dirt parking lot becomes crowded with houses. Way over on the far end of the Vineyard, look at how Dog Fish Bar grows. Other than the Edgartown Lighthouse spit, that shoreline is one of the few on the islands that is growing.

However, the grand prize for the greatest transformation goes to Muskeget Island. Mother Nature has done an alarming amount of sculpting of that tiny Chappy neighbor.