Abundant wind power, with no fuel cost, is destined to replace the most expensive source of electrical generation — and that is from oil-fueled power plants.

Allow me to explain. In New England, unlike the rest of the country, oil-generated electricity plays a large but diminishing role. Almost a quarter of the installed capacity of all power plants here use oil as fuel.

As the Chilmark shellfish department wraps up its first summer, efforts at spearheading restoration projects have been successful. Selectman Warren Doty, chairman of the board and liaison to the department, reported a low mortality rate among planted scallops and a very high production rate.

“It has been a very successful season,” he said.

To date, 100,000 scallop seed have been set to grow in an upweller, purchased by the town this spring and located in Menemsha, as well as in spat bags and pearl nets.

The Dragonfly Gallery, in conjunction with the Periwinkle Studio (diagonally across the street), is featuring a retrospective show of Virginia Reilly Gosselin’s art work spanning more than 50 years.

A graduate of Endicott College in 1956, she worked in the art department of newspapers and advertising agencies until she began freelancing for Stanley Home Products. From the early 1980s to the present, Ms. Reilly Gosselin has been creating her whimsical pen and inks as well as her expressive drawings and paintings. All will be on display, and most for sale.

In Oak Bluffs this week, great mounds of earth were being shifted, walls to turn back the sea were being built and beaches were being fortified and expanded.

And although there seemed to be something Biblical to it all, in reality all the moving of sand and building of walls was more routine then epic.

The construction crews at the tip of the North Bluff were working on a new seawall that is the first step in a larger plan to replace the bulkhead running from the parking lot to the Steamship Authority terminal.

A Dredge With Potential

A former summer visitor to Chilmark plans to appeal a recent Middlesex Superior Court decision which favors the Chilmark selectmen’s right to manage their harbor and essentially keep him from spending more than 14 days a summer at a slip.

Paul DeJesus, an aggrieved owner of a 70-foot Hatteras yacht, told the Gazette yesterday he will appeal the Hon. Dennis J. Curran’s decision.

Weather was a big factor in creating memories in this past Saturday’s annual Pat West Gaff Rig Race. A squall line came through that will be talked about for years to come.

Three schooners were the top winners in the race.

The Island-built 65-foot schooner Juno, captained by Scott DiBiaso, won the race on both corrected time and elapsed time. The vessel completed the race in 2 hours 44 minutes and 8 seconds.

Court TV debuted> a show last year called Murder By the Book. They invited five crime novelists to choose a true crime case that fascinated them, and present it in the series — full of interviews with witnesses and detectives and prosecutors. Linda Fairstein, pictured above, was selected for the second series.

My childhood was of the dirt-beneath -the-fingernails variety. I spent fall afternoons uncovering salamanders from under old logs and trapping slugs to see if they did indeed wriggle up when sprinkled with salt. (They do.) Summer days found my cousins and me on Chilmark ponds filling buckets with blue crabs and moon jellies, and out on Sengekontacket digging for quahogs with our feet. My fingers and toes were immersed in dirt.

Friday, Sept. 14: Sunny morning. Clouds on the increase in the afternoon. Humid and cool. Clouds are dramatic in the late afternoon; a mix of cirrus clouds and cumulus clouds stretch across the western sky. Rain arrives late at night. Stormy night.