Nature Conservancy Seeks

Volunteers to Clean Seeds

The Nature Conservancy is seeking volunteers to help with seed cleaning at the organization’s Hoft Farm field station off Lambert’s Cove Road in West Tisbury.

Three two-hour sessions of seed cleaning are scheduled in November. Session times are Thursday, Nov. 8 from 3 to 5 p.m.; Tuesday, Nov. 13 from 9 to 11 a.m.; and Friday, Nov. 16 from 1 to 3 p.m. Volunteers are also welcome by appointment during normal business hours.

A town gathered on Saturday to commemorate a much-loved Islander whose vivacity and self-determination affected members of the many different areas of the Martha’s Vineyard community she moved between.

The next time you sit down to a steaming bowl of clam chowder, consider this: your meal may be older then you are. Much, much older.

Indeed ocean quahaugs, often used in chowder, are probably the longest-lived animals on the planet. Earlier this year, researchers dredged up a 405-year-old quahaug from the frigid waters off Iceland. They did not eat it.

Samilly Arrives

Kamilla and Gilkleber Guimaraes of Oak Bluffs announce the birth of a daughter, Samilly Guimaraes, born on Oct. 22 at Martha’s Vineyard Community Hospital.

BOSTON — The Wampanoag Tribe of Gay Head (Aquinnah) publicly stepped back into the casino game this week, as tribal leaders formally announced that they have formed a business partnership with Seneca Nation, an upstate New York tribe that owns and operates three successful casinos.

Aquinnah Wampanoag tribal chairman Donald Widdiss announced the partnership at a press conference at the Omni Parker House in Boston late Wednesday morning, although news of the partnership had been reported in the regional print press early this month.

Ask someone when they think the first Native American attended Harvard and they might guess somewhere in the 1950s. Perhaps they’ll go back as far back as the mid-19th century. In fact, the first Native American was a Vineyarder, Caleb Cheeshahteaumuck, and he graduated from Harvard in 1665. Now, more than 300 years later, the second Wampanoag tribe member to attend as an undergraduate is settling in as a freshman.

One of Menemsha’s most respected fishermen, Jonathan Mayhew, has quit fishing the high seas.

Mr. Mayhew recently sold his federal permits, giving up his license to ply the offshore waters of Georges Bank for cod, flounder and other fish.

A Vineyard native who grew up in a family of generations of fishermen, Mr. Mayhew, 56, said a chapter has closed in his life. He said he worries now for the future of young local fishermen facing current fishing rules.

The changes that have come down are killing the fisherman and not necessarily saving fish, he said.

Oak Bluffs voters may soon be asked to spend $100,000 to pay for engineering work associated with an ambitious waterfront improvement project along Seaview avenue from Oak Bluffs harbor to Farm Pond.

The total cost of the project is pegged at $2.7 million.

The news come on the heels of the release of a 35-page report entitled Sea View Revitalization Concept Master Plan, drafted by a special task force created last year to develop a plan to revitalize the town beach.

Scott Bermudes jealously guards his privacy.

So back on Nov. 27, 2001, when he got word that a land bank employee was coming to mow the old path which runs through his block in West Tisbury, he went down to order them off, as he had done with others who wandered across his land on the path.

As he told the superior court in Edgartown this week, he went down in his Bobcat earth mover and confronted them, raising the bucket of the tractor over the mower, then pushed rocks in the path and called the police.