Between heats at Nancy’s Snack Bar in Oak Bluffs on Saturday Jon Holden, last year’s winner of the Martha’s Vineyard annual oyster shucking contest, inspected his knife doubtfully.

“I hate this knife,” he said, peering through his aviator shades at the black-handled Oxo brand shucker, “I wish I never bought it.”

The word library comes to us from the Latin librarius , meaning of, or relating to, books. But anyone visiting the Oak Bluffs Public Library on a Thursday afternoon might find such a definition sorely outdated.

Friday, June 6: Rain in the morning. Clearing skies. Warm. Fog settles over the Vineyard at night. The low dark sound of the Nobska Light foghorn can be heard from Oak Bluffs to Vineyard Haven late at night.

Saturday, June 7: Sunny. Soil is turned over by tractor at Morning Glory Farm. The soil smells fresh and looks dark. Southwest wind shifts to a strong westerly wind. Fly-fishermen line the North Shore in the late afternoon. Pretty sunset.

By MARK ALAN LOVEWELL

Larry’s Tackle Shop has a new owner. He is the same guy who has been behind the counter and stocking the walls with fishing gear for years.

Steve V. Purcell has stepped from managing the store to owner and he did it with little fanfare back in March.

For him, this is the realization of a dream. Though he has managed the store for years, he has run it as though he owned it.

“I don’t know what I would have done without thinking about the store,” he said.

The back of the T-shirt read: “Burn Crew 2007. Burning landscapes near you.” Under those words was the equivalent of a band’s performance schedule, a dozen locales across six states.

And even though the wearer of the shirt and eight other members of her group were sitting around in a circle in a weedy clearing in the woods in firefighting gear on Wednesday, it was very like the atmosphere at the sound check before a music gig.

Vineyard saltwater recreational anglers are expressing mixed feelings about an unprecedented requirement that they’ll need a license next year when they fish.

“I hate it. I wish it didn’t happen,” said Janet Messineo, an avid recreational fisherman who also is president of the Martha’s Vineyard Surfcasters Association, said about the new rule.

Leanne Giordano, restaurant manager at one of the Island’s most popular — and busiest — family restaurants, is fully staffed for the summer. And she has a running list of more than 150 prospective waiters, waitresses and bussers to call just in case a position opens.

Interrupted for lack of a quorum, the Aquinnah annual town meeting will continue on June 19 — and assuming enough voters turn out this time — the town will take up the first townwide bylaw on the Vineyard to regulate energy use.

Lengthy, detailed and focusing almost exclusively on wind turbines, the bylaw is the result of the town wide designation as an energy district of critical planning concern last December.

When the American Cancer Society’s fifth annual Relay for Life begins this afternoon, more than 400 walkers will take over the track at the Martha’s Vineyard Regional High School in Oak Bluffs to support patients in treatment for cancer, survivors of the disease and to honor the memory of those lost along the way.

Anthony Benton Gude was 21 before he realized he could paint for a living. He was working construction jobs at the time and in retrospect there were already hints. “If we had to re-plaster I always mixed the paints,” he said, “and if we needed a rendering, I did that.”

But it wasn’t until his mother suggested art college that it occurred to him he could do the same job as his grandfather, Thomas Hart Benton.