Last Thursday morning, the new operator of the Chappy Ferry service was busy preparing for the impending weekend northeaster. When I arrived for my afternoon shift of driving the On Time 2, Brian told me about all of the concerns that he had attended to, looking for suggestions from my experiences dealing with storms at the ferry. This was his first encounter with weather that could endanger the ferryboats and interrupt service since he took over the operation. It wasn’t his first encounter with heavy weather, having lived through several dozen actual hurricanes while living on Cape Hatteras.
Already that morning Brian had made a plan with the diver to clear seaweed from the propellers before, during and after the storm; made sure that both boats had full fuel tanks; made sure that the diesel fuel supply tank on shore was full; made sure that the standby generators were ready to start up when the power goes out; made sure that ferry captains were scheduled to provide emergency service; continued to shift through weather forecasts which were conflicting with one another regarding the intensity of the storm; contacted the heads of Edgartown fire, police and highway departments regarding possible service interruptions so that extra emergency apparatus could be stationed on Chappy and determined a deadline for getting those vehicles over to Chappy; sent out text and email alerts up dating Chappaquiddickers on the status of service; addressed a glitch in the text messaging system; moved the ferry company’s Carolina skiff to a sheltered berth where it would still be readily available to use to flush seaweed from the slips; examined the tide chart and made an educated guess at the extent to which the new breach would affect ferry ramp flooding and prepared for the worst; made sure that any employees involved in maintenance and repair were immediately available, and in general, worried a lot.
I, on the other hand, had spent the morning at home planting lettuce in a cold frame.
We discussed the differing abilities of the two ferryboats and which would be more appropriate to operate during the worst of the storm and which ferryboat best to take out of service prior to the arrival of the bad weather so that it would have seaweed free propellers in case of emergency. Northeasters scour seaweed from the harbor bottom. It gets piled up on the beaches and even up onto the pavement of the Chappy point parking lot. It also gets swept into the Chappy slips, clogging them feet deep with a stingy weed that will get drawn into the ferryboat propellers, rendering them barely effective at moving the ferry through the water. During the summer Brain had his crew reinforce the Edgartown slip fender wall and the structure and roof of the ferry house to better withstand hurricane conditions.
Nine times out of ten, forecast storms of this intensity don’t materialize. This one did. The wind blew out of the northeast steadily at 40 mph and gusted regularly over 50. Seaweed in the slips was constantly removed. The diver came several times to clear weed from the propellers. A ferry captain was on hand in case of emergency. During the height of the storm a couple of runs were made to get people home. Each run convinced the ferry crew that regular service would be way too risky under those conditions. The combination of high water, high winds and unusually fast currents made entering the Chappy slip barely possible.
I, fortunately had Friday off. I was moving horse manure and compost around the tree farm up in West Tisbury, blissfully unaware of what was going on at the ferry. The freshening of the breeze was noticeable even that far inland. I guessed that it must be howling down on the water. When I returned on Sunday, several people asked, “If you still owned the ferry, would you have kept running during the storm?”
I wasn’t at the ferry during the storm, but given what I saw on the TV weather channel and the ferry webcams along with wind speeds recorded by the Chappy point weather station, I said, “I probably would have shut down by noon on Friday.”
The response was, “Well that’s what Brian did!”
So, there you go!