Everyone who sees it up close calls it impressive. The Norton Point breach in the Katama Bay barrier beach is not going to be closing up anytime soon. Observers say that it is flowing freely and that it is growing wider rather than narrower.
The Chappy Ferry captains have not been able to come to any predictable conclusion regarding how the tide and current at the ferry crossing have been affected by the breach. They all agree that wonky is an overall good description. The current often continues to flow into the harbor for hours after the tide reaches its high point. It behaves as if the narrow section of the harbor entrance was a river bed. The current will run fast on one side and back eddy on the other. The low tides aren’t as low. When concrete mixers are scheduled to come to Chappy, the water level is often high enough a whole hour before the predicted time. The high tides often aren’t as high as expected. Since the breach occurred on New Year’s Day, storms that should have caused feet of flooding on Dock street have only caused inches.
The breach of 2007 drew the attention of the folks who publish Eldridge’s Tide and Pilot Book. In the spring of 2008, they spent several days on the Edgartown waterfront interviewing folks who might shed some light on the new behavior of the tides and current. The Chappy Ferry offered a place to install gauges, meters and recording equipment. They eventually threw up their hands. There seemed to be no consensus or predictability about the direction or strength of the tidal currents. They decided that the best they could do would be to add a cautionary note to the Edgartown predictions.
The ferry captains assumed that with the new six knot currents, vessel traffic would cause chaos for the ferry boats cutting across the channel. We imagined unskilled sailors now going six knots faster. It’s actually the entire body of water and all of the vessels floating within it that is moving at six knots. What happened was that the vessels going with the current were swept past so quickly that they had less time to interact with the ferry. The ones that were stemming the current could effectively move sideways without moving forward over the bottom. They had many more options for avoiding the ferry. As it turns out, the strong currents just made the ferry trip longer as it would be swept down current hundreds of feet before it could turn and get headed upstream. We expect the same this coming summer.
Dana Gaines kayaked through the breach last weekend and had to deal with ocean swells moving unencumbered through the opening. I asked him if the breach was migrating. Here is his response:
“Wish I’d thought to line up two stakes at the foot of Wasque avenue when the breach happened to establish a ‘range’ with which to measure eastward progress; if anything, the Chappy side has indeed moved east a bit— not sure if the Katama side has followed suit, or if the breach has just gotten wider. I recently asked Kara Shemeth if the Con Com has done an updated drone measurement, but they haven’t; it’s definitely wider than the 504’ they measured back in January. The beach on the Chappy side across from where the Wacks house was is incredibly wide — there’s an awful lot of sand for nature to move as the breach progresses east (and of course it broke through at least a half mile west of where the Wacks breach happened). The 2022-23 breach lasted just over a year, and of course did no damage at all beyond the tragedy at Wacks bluff…. this one should take a little longer, and of course it’s impossible to know if it will close before reaching Wasque Point.”