There's a Federal No-Go Zone in Cape Cod Bay, and Almost Nobody Out Here Knows It

On Tuesday afternoon, Orleans police closed part of Rock Harbor because somebody had found a deteriorating piece of military ordnance near the shoreline.

Orleans Fire-Rescue came. The Massachusetts State Police Bomb Squad came. So did the Navy. They secured the thing, carried it off the beach, and destroyed it at the town transfer station between five and half past, with an advisory going out first: residents may hear a loud noise, this is expected, there is no cause for concern.

If that reads like an odd Tuesday, consider that the same harbor produced a nearly identical afternoon in April 2018, when a dragger came in with an unexploded shell in its net.

Orleans Police Lt. Kevin Higgins offered an explanation back then. It may be left over, he said, from when the military used to practice on the old target ship in Cape Cod Bay.

He was almost certainly right — and the target ship is still down there.

The thousand-yard circle nobody mentions

Open the Code of Federal Regulations to Title 33, section 334.60, and you'll find something most people who fish this bay have never heard of.

And then, in the next line: "No person or vessel shall enter or remain in the danger zone at any time, except as authorized by the enforcing agency."

That regulation went on the books in 1949. It was amended in 1997. It has never been repealed. There is, right now, a circle of Cape Cod Bay off Eastham that you are federally prohibited from entering — and the reason is a Liberty ship the American military used for target practice.

The enforcement clause is its own small piece of history. It assigns the job to "the Commandant, First Naval District" — a command that hasn't existed in decades. The prohibition stands anyway. The paperwork just never caught up.

The ship they spent thirty years shooting at

The James Longstreet was built in Houston in 1942 — a Liberty ship, steel, 417.7 feet long, 7,176 gross tons.

In October 1943 a gale drove her onto the flats at Sandy Hook, New Jersey. Badly damaged, she wasn't refloated for nearly a month, and she was finished as a working vessel.

So they towed her to Cape Cod Bay, set her inside Billingsgate Shoal off Eastham in twenty to twenty-five feet of water, and started shooting.

By 1973 the hull had been described as riddled with holes from bullets to bombs — a steel-plated Swiss cheese. A 1978 aerial photograph shows the middle of the ship simply gone.

The Massachusetts Board of Underwater Archaeological Resources puts the present-day situation in a single sentence, and we're quoting it as published, typo and all:

Litters. Not "may contain." Litters.

And on land, a firing line along the cliff

Rock Harbor's neighbor up the shore has its own version, and you have almost certainly parked on it.

Camp Wellfleet was 1,738 acres, leased beginning in 1942 as an anti-aircraft artillery training base — with the firing line running along the beach cliff. The Army used it into 1944. The Navy took it in 1945 for radar training and missile practice. The National Guard and Army Reserve fired anti-aircraft guns there until 1961.

The camp was declared excess and closed on June 30, 1961. That August the Interior Department took the land, and it became most of the Cape Cod National Seashore. When you pull into the Marconi Beach lot, you are parking on a shooting range.

There's one moment in that history worth knowing, because it tells you something permanent about these towns. In 1951 the Army announced it was expanding the firing range to some 300 square miles, from Race Point to Chatham. The announcement landed on August 23; written objections were due, in triplicate, in Boston by September 4.

The Cape did not take it quietly. The Army agreed to a hearing at Wellfleet's American Legion Hall that September, and it drew five hundred people and ran, in the Cape Codder's phrase at the time, five lunch-less, smoke-less hours. Orleans, Chatham and Eastham each held a special town meeting to object.

The range did not get expanded.

What's still out there, officially

Camp Wellfleet is a Formerly Used Defense Site, which means the Army Corps of Engineers has spent years surveying it and hauling things out. Helicopter magnetometer surveys in 1999 flagged eighty sites with possible unexploded ordnance. The first two cleanups recovered more than 3,541 pounds of munitions debris and 5,109 pounds of scrap metal — smoke grenades, bazooka rounds, missile and bomb debris — according to an Army Corps document cited by the Provincetown Independent.

The Corps' own project page doesn't soften it: munitions and explosives of concern may remain within the project area.

Gina Kaso, a project manager on the site, said it less formally: "We can never say for sure that our site is free of munitions."

Worth holding right alongside that: David Crary Jr., the Seashore's retired fire management officer, points out that in the sixty-odd years since the land came over, nobody has been hurt by any of it.

Which is about the right amount of alarm. Not none. Not much.

If you're the one who finds it

Three words, and they're the same from Orleans police and from the federal explosives-safety program.

Recognize. It may be a munition, and it is dangerous. These come out of the bay and the dunes after storms and big tides, and eighty years underwater doesn't make a shell safer. It makes it less predictable.

Retreat. Don't touch it. Don't move it. Don't get down on your knees to photograph it. Walk away, carefully.

Report. Call 911 or the local police or fire department, and tell them exactly what you saw and exactly where.

Orleans PD's version, from Tuesday: "If you come across an item that appears to be military ordnance, a shell, or other military ammunition, DO NOT TOUCH OR MOVE IT. Move away from the area and immediately contact the Orleans Police Department or Orleans Fire Department."

Recent Lower and Outer Cape finds
Nov. 13, 2025 — a bay beach in North Eastham; detonated in place.
July 23, 2014 — Marconi Beach, Wellfleet; a fisherman's find, beach evacuated. A bomb squad sergeant told the Cape Cod Times the color of the smoke showed the round was live.
April 11, 2018 — Rock Harbor, Orleans; snagged in a dragger's net.
2020 — Wellfleet; nine WWI-era bombs in a back yard, detonated at the town sand pit.

Eighty years on, the bay is still handing pieces of it back. A little at a time, at low tide, to whoever happens to be walking there.