A 38-foot pleasure craft caught fire off East Chop late Monday afternoon, sending a massive plume of black smoke high above Vineyard Sound and prompting a mass mutual aid response. All passengers were safely evacuated.
Eight men, and perhaps others, paid the toll in a tragedy of the sea in Vineyard Sound last Friday morning, during a thick fog.
At six o’clock that morning, the fog lifting for a short while, the Cuttyhunk Coast Guard crew observed a distress signal at the masthead of a steamer of apparently 125 or 150 feet length, midway in the Sound between the Vineyard and the Elizabeth Islands.
