Back when John Willoughby and Dick Hewitt were the primary ferry drivers, the harbor used to freeze over in a solid sheet. All of Katama Bay and all of the way out to the can buoy off of North Neck would become a continuous, unmovable, seemingly permanent covering of ice unaffected by the tides. Those were very cold winters back in the 70s and 80s. The good thing about the contiguous ice sheet was that once the ferry created a channel to operate within, that channel remained open until the thaw.
Being the only protected open water, sea ducks and gulls would congregate there. Hundreds of birds hung out there. We believed that they kept the channel from freezing over at night by their constant stirring up of the seawater. As the ferry proceeded across they would climb out onto the ice, look up at the ferry as it passed and then plunge back into the water behind it.
There was a lot of bickering amongst the critters, which we thought was caused by a lack of food for such a concentration of birds. We collected dollar donations from ferry travelers to buy corn from Dick Steigelman up at the Katama grain store. We would toss that out on the ice. It seemed to keep them busy and there was less pecking of the little ones by the bigger ones. The black-back gulls, however, were just plain mean. They were killing ducks and not even eating them.
Dick Hewitt got permission from the state to shoot the black backs. He brought a shot gun down to the wharf but by the time he got to the water’s edge the black backs would have fled. They apparently had prior experience with guns. Even when Dick hid the gun under his coat they would depart. They seemed to recognize him as soon as he got out of his car. He even tried coming down in his wife’s car, wearing her coat and hat. Didn’t matter. They knew that it was Dick. He never got off a single shot.
This article appears in February 13, 2026.