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- 🐚 🐚 You're not allowed in this part of the bay
🐚 🐚 You're not allowed in this part of the bay
A thousand-yard circle off Eastham, on the books since 1949, never repealed
Arthur Radtke
August 20, 2026
with
Our screen door swells shut in August and fits again in September, and I have never once caught it in the act.
Right now you have to lean on it. Give it three weeks and it'll swing like it was hung yesterday, and nobody planed anything, and nobody complained, and the whole adjustment will have happened while everybody was looking at something else.
Half the things worth knowing on this peninsula work like that door.
Here's the week.
A Ton of Onion Rings. Every Week. One Building.
It's printed right there on the menu, underneath the $9.99, and most people read straight past it: We serve two thousand pounds per week! Two thousand pounds is a short ton. A ton of onion rings, every week, coming out of one kitchen on Route 6 in Eastham.
Do the arithmetic on that however you like — by the hour, by the batch, by the person standing at the fryer — and it stops being a side dish and starts being a logistics problem somebody solved a long time ago.
That number explains Arnold's better than any award it's ever won, and it has won a lot of them. The number, the fifty seasons behind it, and why the line is the point.
Everybody Remembers a Different Number
Ask anyone who was here in August of 1991 how long their power was out and you'll get an answer immediately. No hesitation. Four days. Nine. Eleven. People remember it the way they remember birthdays.
Now ask their neighbor. You'll get a different number. Ask three more people on the same street and you'll get three more. Thirty-five years after Hurricane Bob came up Buzzards Bay, the Lower Cape is still quietly holding four thousand slightly different versions of the same week — and nobody has ever put them side by side.
We'd like to try. This week we're asking one question, and next Thursday we're printing the answers with your name and your town on them.
Santa Comes In by Coast Guard Boat. Hallmark Noticed.
First Sunday of December, one in the afternoon, Chatham Fish Pier. Santa arrives escorted by the Coast Guard on one of its rescue boats, hands out candy canes on the dock, then climbs onto a fire truck and rides to the community center to give every child a present.
For years the boat was CG36500 — the same 36-foot motor lifeboat that crossed Chatham Bar in the February 1952 nor'easter and brought back thirty-two men off the Pendleton. That's the kind of thing a town does for so long it stops noticing. Hallmark noticed.
Chatham is now one of twenty-five Christmas towns on a national list, the only one in Massachusetts, and voting closes September 4. Vote for Chatham — but read the two catches first.
You Are Not Legally Allowed to Enter This Part of Cape Cod Bay
Title 33 of the Code of Federal Regulations, section 334.60, describes a circle of water a thousand yards across, centered on a spot off Eastham inside Billingsgate Shoal. The next line reads: No person or vessel shall enter or remain in the danger zone at any time, except as authorized by the enforcing agency. It went on the books in 1949. It was amended in 1997. It has never been repealed.
At the center of that circle is a Liberty ship called the James Longstreet, which the American military used as a bombing target for years. Most people who fish this bay have never heard of the regulation, and a piece of what's down there washed up in Orleans on Tuesday.
For Eleven Years, Provincetown Didn't Bother Naming It.
Everybody knows this year's Carnival theme. Deep Sea Disco, forty-eighth annual, parade down Commercial at three this afternoon. Here's what almost nobody knows.
After the very first Carnival in 1978 — a single night, called A Night in Rio — Provincetown ran the thing for eleven consecutive years without naming a theme at all. The Business Guild's own records say it flatly: 1979 to 1989, no specific theme was named. Eleven Augusts of a parade that was simply a parade. Themes started in 1990 and never stopped.
We pulled the whole list, from the Guild's own archived pages, and put all forty-eight in order. See what your town was dressed as the year you moved here.
Small stories, told the way you'd hear them over a fence
Celebrate Lower Cape — issue of August 20, 2026
Lower Cape
Four Hundred Seventy-One Thousand Fish, and Somebody Counted Every One
Twenty-two years is a long time to wait for permission to catch a herring. Harwich lifted the moratorium this spring — first harvest since 2004 — and the whole thing rests on a number: 471,000-odd fish through the counter at Johnson's flume ladder in West Harwich. The state allows a 10 percent take. Ninety-three residents and all thirty non-resident permits sold, twenty fish a day, seven days. Final tally: 4,405 herring. Under one percent. That's what patience looks like when a town spends two decades leaving something alone. Now Natural Resources is going after the plumbing, and there's still one crossing in Harwich a herring cannot get through at all. The Chronicle has the repair list and the culvert that's still a dead end.
Nobody Has Ever Checked Whether This Works
Forty years. Twenty towns. Zero studies. Chatham votes Sept. 1 on a 20 percent residential tax exemption — roughly $350,000 knocked off the value your year-round bill is figured on, and a higher bill for everyone else. This week the finance committee came back with thirteen pages and a one-word verdict: don't. Their sharpest finding isn't about Chatham at all. In the four decades since Massachusetts created this exemption, only about twenty of 351 communities have adopted it, and nobody, anywhere, has ever measured whether it does the thing it's for. Chairman Stephen Daniel calls it a blunt instrument and says they're not going away. Chair Jeffrey Dykens says the board votes anyway. The report doesn't just say no — it lays out what it wants instead, paid for out of money the seasonal economy already throws off. The Chronicle has the alternative.
Five Things in the Sand at Rock Harbor, and Four of Them Were Underwater
They closed the beach Tuesday and called Newport. One World War II-era projectile turned up on the sand, so crusted over with decades of marine growth that the State Police explosives tech couldn't say what it had been — or whether it could still go off. He carried it up the beach by hand. The other four sat out on the flats near the channel, submerged, which makes them a Navy problem: a bomb squad came up from Naval Station Newport, the cordon held better than an hour, and the town warned residents about a controlled detonation at the transfer station before 5:30. Nobody hurt. And it'll happen again — there's a specific reason ordnance keeps coming ashore on that stretch of bay, and it's been parked out there since the war. The Chronicle says what's down there.
Chatham Owns a House on Old Harbor Road, and It Comes With a Preference List
Four to six homes at 127 Old Harbor Rd. — a quarter deed-restricted affordable, the rest "attainable," the existing house kept and renovated, solar required. Standard enough. The interesting part is that the select board asked that one specific group of local employees get first crack at the attainable units, which tells you exactly which hiring problem Chatham is trying to solve. The Chronicle names them.
You Can Vote for Chatham Once a Day Until September 4
Twenty-five towns in the country made Hallmark's shortlist for "Merriest Christmas Town in America." Chatham is one of three in New England — nominated on Santa arriving at the fish pier by Coast Guard boat, the tree lighting, Christmas by the Sea. Voting's open, once per person per day, through Sept. 4, and the winner may get a movie made about it. Which is either lovely or your worst nightmare about December traffic, and it's probably both. The Chronicle has the link and the competition.
Outer Cape
Wellfleet Has an Auditor. It Cost Fifty Percent Over Budget.
Three fiscal years, no completed audit. Wellfleet's old firm walked last November mid-restructuring, and on Aug. 18 the select board signed Scanlon & Associates of South Deerfield — two years, $57,000 a year against $38,000 budgeted. That buys the 2025 and 2026 books plus the federal-grants certification, which the bonding agencies require, so this was never really about tidy paperwork. Auditors were due on site Monday. What's worth knowing is how a small town finds a firm after eight months of what the town administrator called beating the bushes. It wasn't procurement. It was two staffers who happened to know a guy, and one of them who wouldn't stop calling him. The Indie names them.
Twenty-Five Thousand Five Hundred Dollars, and the Fence Was Still Standing Tuesday
Three hundred a day, back to May 21. Provincetown's historic district commission met specially on Aug. 14 and started the meter running on the Grace Gouveia condo board at 26 Alden St., which fenced off the public stairway down to the newly rebuilt Motta Field about two months before the town cut the ribbon on it. The rec director had been negotiating for months; talks stalled. A waiver was on the table if the barrier came down by Friday. Tuesday afternoon it hadn't, and the board was "discussing its options." One commissioner used a two-word term for what he thinks this fence actually is, and it isn't a compliment. The Indie prints it.
Two Pages. Nine Pages. One Page. Three Pages. Seven Pages.
That's two towns that share a water system and a border, corresponding. Truro and Provincetown haven't held a joint select board meeting since roughly February 2025 — what they do instead is write. On Aug. 14 Truro took its latest, seven pages addressed to the Provincetown Select Board, and mailed it to every subscriber of the town newsletter. For plenty of Truro residents that was the first they'd heard of any of it, and the letter did not ease them in: it accuses Provincetown of trying to "sabotage housing on the Walsh Property altogether," and calls Provincetown's move to have the Cape Cod Commission fence off the Pamet lens "a serious escalation that Truro cannot and will not tolerate." The actual request is buried at the end, and it's almost sad. The Indie has the whole sequence.
"Nonexistent"
That's the word, in an email, from a town administrator to his own staff. Records from the reporting on the March drowning of 22-year-old Nicholas Alvernaz off Wellfleet show Town Administrator Tom Guerino directing that discussion of the rescue effort be kept "nonexistent" — and separately asking a marina committee chair to strike it from an agenda. The same records show the harbormaster had no boat ready when the 911 call came, that a personal vessel launched off a truck went out instead of the official rescue boat, and that the rescue boat ran out of gas about thirty minutes into the search. The town still declines to comment. Nicholas's father wrote to the paper this month to thank it for the reporting. CAI has the documents, and that morning laid out hour by hour.
Bubala's Is Sold. What Replaces It Is Two Fights Away.
The $7 million sale closes Oct. 9. What Victor DePoalo wants at 183–185 Commercial St. — three stories, a hundred-seat restaurant, nine hotel rooms, ten condos — took an informal Planning Board poll Aug. 13 and came up 2–3, short of the supermajority it needs. Hearing continues Sept. 10. Meanwhile ten taxpayers went to Superior Court on Aug. 11 over something much smaller: a curb cut approved at 23 feet against a town guideline of 18. Five feet of pavement, and a restraining-order hearing set for Sept. 1. The Indie shows where the votes actually sit.
The Tiger Sharks Aren't Visiting. They're Moving In.
Not a beach-closure story — stay curious. Researchers from the Center for Coastal Studies, Woods Hole, the New England Aquarium and a Georgia Aquarium tagging team say the tiger sharks turning up off Eastham, Wellfleet, Truro and Provincetown are a real northward range shift tracking warmer Atlantic water. Not a blip. They're also blunt that the loud part of this — everybody's phone, everybody's video — is not the same thing as more risk, and they'd like you to hold those two facts apart. The Indie lets them explain what's actually changing.
Two lives
Gerard "Jerry" Boucher, 72, and Kathleen "Kit" Boucher, 71, Eastham. If you ever stood inside the Eastham Windmill while somebody explained the grindstones, there's a fair chance it was Jerry — keeper, unofficial historian, and the Council on Aging volunteer who helped rebuild its deck. Kit taught kindergarten in West Hartford for twenty years and volunteered with IFAW. Twenty classes of five-year-olds, and the man who knew the oldest working thing in town. The family has set up Kit & Jerry's Foundation for Good; the Indie's obituary pages carry the full account.
Theodore J. Moran, 90, Wellfleet. Wellfleet DPW, then assistant harbormaster, and before that a commercial fisherman and scalloper — a working life spent on the two things that keep a town like that upright, the water and the roads. He never married. If you watched a Fourth of July parade in Wellfleet in the last fifty years, you saw him. His nephew gave the eulogy, and it's candid the way only family gets to be. The Indie printed it.
Mark it
Thu, Aug 20 — Chatham ZBA deliberates Pennrose conditions. The sidewalk meeting; decision due about Sept. 15.
Sat, Aug 22 — Early voting opens. Registration closes the same day, 11:59 p.m.
Mon, Aug 24 — Provincetown takes up the Fine Arts Work Center's $2 million ask for artist housing.
Thu, Aug 27 — Outer Cape Select Board Collaboration Project, 10 a.m., Truro library. Worth noting who turns up.
Tue, Sep 1 — A pile-up: county commissioner primary, Chatham's tax vote, the Bubala's restraining-order hearing, first day at Monomoy.
Fri, Sep 4 — Hallmark voting closes.
Mon, Sep 14 — The federal rule narrowing "harm" under the Endangered Species Act takes effect. Wellfleet's terrapins are downstream of it.
Still open
Orleans. The ZBA held its continued Governor Prence hearing Aug. 18 — 78 units, waivers on the table — and nobody has published what happened.
Truro. The zoning forum went ahead Aug. 19. Three tracks on the table, no word which one survived the room.
Chatham. The Community Scorecard was due at the Aug. 11 select board meeting. That's two issues now with nothing.
Harwich Port. Three Harbors Coastal Kitchen still hasn't opened. "Within a week" was three weeks ago.
Brewster. Cliff Pond closed for cyanobacteria Aug. 7 and hasn't reopened. Check the county's table the morning you go, not the night before.
A Parade, a Catboat Gathering, and an Eighth-Grade Orientation
The last full week of August, when the visitor calendar hits its ceiling and the resident one quietly starts up underneath it.
On Monday at noon, in a building most of you drive past without looking at, Monomoy Regional High School opens its doors to the incoming eighth grade. Tour the halls. Meet a counselor. Set up the Chromebook. Two hours, no fanfare, not on anybody's what-to-do-this-weekend list.
It is also, as far as I can tell, the most accurate thing on the calendar. All the way up in Provincetown on Thursday afternoon, Commercial Street gives itself over to the 48th Carnival parade and the season hits about the highest note it will hit all year. Four days later a fourteen-year-old is being shown where the cafeteria is. Both of those are August on this peninsula. Only one of them is in the brochure.
Monomoy's actual first day is September 1 for grades 1 through 12 — kindergarten the 3rd, preschool the 8th. Monday is just the walk-through. But the walk-through is when a family starts counting.
The rest of the week runs along that same seam. The Orleans Conservation Trust holds its annual meeting Tuesday; the Chatham Historical Society holds its Wednesday. Port Summer Nights runs its last one. Somewhere off Namequoit, a fleet of catboats is getting gaff rigs sorted out for Saturday. The water is still as warm as it will get. Sunset is a few minutes past seven-thirty and shedding light faster every night.
Below: one big thing on Pleasant Bay. Five picks. Three out toward the tip, including the parade. And two annual meetings for the people who'll still be here in February.
One Big Thing
The 34th Arey's Pond Cat Gathering. Saturday, August 22. Arey's Pond Boat Yard and Pleasant Bay, Orleans.
The catboat is not a pretty boat and it was never supposed to be. Broad in the beam, shallow in the draft, one sail, stubborn — a rig that made it a practical working boat across the shallow waters of the Northeast, and that suited the Cape's bays and shifting shoals particularly well. It could carry a load, come about inside a channel, and sit down on the flats without falling over. Thirty-four years ago a handful of owners decided to sail them all in the same place on the same Saturday, and it has happened every August since — a parade of sail, some friendly racing, an awards ceremony with the tone of a family reunion where everybody is related through a hull shape.
Go stand at the head of the pond and watch them come out. What you are looking at is an old answer to a shallow-water problem, still floating, still being argued about by the people who own one. If you'd rather participate than spectate, the Wednesday Night Sail out of the same yard runs four days later — meet at half past five, on the water by six, weather permitting. Same bay. Fewer spectators. Better, honestly.
The 5 Picks
📚 Lindsey J. Palmer in Conversation with Karen Dukess — Palmer's new novel is The Salt Sisters, and she's talking about it with fellow novelist Karen Dukess in a bookstore small enough that you'll be able to hear the questions other people ask, which is the actual reason to go to one of these. Note the bookend: she does it again Wednesday at the other end of the Cape, at Wellfleet Library, with Jacquelyn Mitchard. One author, two libraries, thirty-five miles, six days. Thu, Aug 20 · 5:00–6:30 PM · Brewster Book Store, Brewster.
🖼️ Del-Bourree Bach Solo Show Reception — Bach paints coastal and wildlife subjects with the kind of close observation that only comes from having actually looked at the thing for a long time, and a solo show reception is the one window where you can ask him what he was looking at. Two hours, free, and the gallery is small enough that he won't be able to escape you. Fri, Aug 21 · 5:00–7:00 PM · Gallery Antonia, Chatham · Free.
🎻 CranFest: Eliza Gilkyson — Twice Grammy-nominated, fifty years into a songwriting career, playing a municipal building's courtyard in Harwich with her longtime accompanist Jim Henry. This is a room where you can hear the words. Gilkyson's whole method is that the words are the point; put her in an amphitheater and you lose half of it. Doors at a quarter to six. Sat, Aug 22 · 6:30 PM · The 204 Cultural Arts Municipal Building, Harwich · $30.
🍄 Introduction to Mushrooming — Rachel Goclawski spends the first stretch on what not to eat and why, then takes everyone outside to start identifying what's actually coming up in Brewster right now. Late August after a wet stretch is when the woods here get interesting, and the window is short. Three hours, forty dollars, and you leave able to name things you have walked past for years. Mon, Aug 24 · 12:00–3:00 PM · Cape Cod Museum of Natural History, Brewster · $40.
🎺 Cape Cod Jazz Festival: The All Nighters featuring Jermaine Paul — Paul won The Voice and then, unusually, went back to being a working band singer, which is a harder and better job. The All Nighters are a dance band; the Wequassett lawn on a late-August evening is a dance floor whether or not anyone admits it. Ninety-five dollars before tax and service is real money — this is the splurge night, and it's the last Wednesday of the season worth splurging on. Wed, Aug 26 · 6:30–8:30 PM · Wequassett Resort and Golf Club, Harwich · $95++.
Out Toward the Tip
🎭 The 48th Annual Provincetown Carnival Parade — Deep Sea Disco is the theme, Commercial Street is the venue, and the whole length of it belongs to the floats for the afternoon. Forty-eight years means this parade is older than most of the people watching it and it has outlasted every argument about whether the town should have it. Get there early, park somewhere you're willing to walk from, and understand that you will not be leaving quickly. Thu, Aug 20 · 3:00 PM · Commercial Street, Provincetown · Free.
🪕 Deer Tick — Twenty years of the same four guys arguing through indie rock and roots music, under a tent in Truro, on the Saturday of Carnival weekend when everybody else has gone the other direction. Payomet is running six straight nights — Back in the Saddle: Burlesque! Friday and Sunday, Sue Foley and Rory Block Monday, Jake Shimabukuro Tuesday, Suede Wednesday — but this is the one with the sweat in it. Sat, Aug 22 · 7:00 PM · Payomet Performing Arts Center, Truro · From $37.
📼 Watergate: The Eastham Connection — Jack Clarke has found a thread running from a national scandal to this town, and he's going to pull on it for an hour in the 1869 Schoolhouse. Every small town believes it has one of these. Eastham can apparently prove it. Thu, Aug 20 · 7:00 PM · 1869 Schoolhouse Museum, Eastham.
One More Thing
Two annual meetings this week, one town apart, and between them they explain who actually runs this place.
Tuesday the Orleans Conservation Trust opens the doors at the Yacht Club at half past four for updates on current projects and a keynote from restoration specialist Nick Nelson — the person whose job is putting rivers and marshes back the way they drained before somebody put a road across them. Wednesday the Chatham Historical Society does its business meeting and then hands the floor to Ben Shattuck, who'll talk about using history in fiction and nonfiction. Free, and open to the public — meaning open to you, whether or not you've paid dues.
These are the two ends of the same job. One group is trying to keep the land here from becoming something else. The other is trying to keep the record of it from going quiet. Both meetings will be attended by roughly the same forty people, and both would be better with sixty. The parade doesn't need you Thursday. These do.
The water is at its warmest right now and it will hold there a little while yet, but the light is going faster than the heat is, and you'll notice it first in the parking lots — people packing up ten minutes earlier without having decided to. That's the whole tell. Nobody announces the turn. It just shows up on a Monday, at noon, in a high school hallway.
Go to one thing this week that isn't on the visitor's list.
Something in here is exactly right for someone you know — forward it their way.
The Drift — August 20 – 26, 2026
Last week gave you everything on day two and quit. This week gives you almost nothing for four days and then pays you back three in a row.
Flat calm out there this morning and not a cloud anywhere on the Cape. Southwest at 3. Enjoy it while you've got it.
The flats don't open this week — not once, not for a usable daylight walk. The lowest water in seven days is plus 0.8 feet at 4:43 Wednesday morning, in the dark. Every daylight low is over a foot. Last Friday the bay handed you minus 1.2. So stop planning walks and start planning swims.
Today is clean and it ends tonight. The rain moves in after dark at better than a 60 percent clip in every town. Friday goes gray and cool on a northeast wind. Saturday got worse overnight — yesterday it read a 60 percent shower day, this morning it's showers and thunderstorms at 86 to 89 percent in all eight towns. Sunday's warm and unsettled with the biggest surf of the outlook on the outer beaches.
Then Monday reopens it. Clear, 86 in Orleans, southwest — and high water in Pleasant Bay right around noon on a 2.3-foot range, the smallest of the summer.
If you only do one thing this week: paddle Pleasant Bay Monday midday out of Meetinghouse Pond or Quanset — high water around noon, southwest at 5 to 9, and the hottest air of the week over one of the gentlest tidal setups of the year. If you've been meaning to take somebody out who's nervous about being out, that's the day.
And one more, because it's the prettiest half hour of the summer and about four people will bother to show up for it: Wednesday evening the moon comes up out of the Atlantic around 6:46. Sunset in Chatham is 7:22. Roughly 36 minutes with both above the horizon, off Nauset, Coast Guard, Marconi, Head of the Meadow. Bring a chair.
I also owe you a walk-back. Last week I printed the Sound at 78° and the bay at 74° and called it the top of the year. This morning's buoy readings say 76° in the Sound and 70° in the bay — the Sound gave back two, the bay gave back four. Both were the highest I've printed this season and both have cooled since. Whether that was the actual annual peak, I overstated. I'll stick to what the stations say.
Inside this week's Drift: what the lazy half of the lunar cycle is actually good for and why it's a gift to anybody in a kayak, the day-by-day across all eight towns, the Pleasant Bay lag most people never learn, why the Morris Island ebb climbs from 0.80 knots to a full knot by Wednesday and when to put a rod in it, why the shorebirds should be easier to find this week and how far back to stand, what NWS Boston actually says about the weekend surf and rip risk versus what people will tell you, the exact half hour to be on an east-facing beach Wednesday — and the do's and don'ts, the part worth forwarding to the group chat.
Ask somebody who's been here longer than you what August used to be like. You'll get an answer nobody wrote down, and you'll be the only person who has it.
Arthur Radtke • REALTOR®, eXp Realty
MA License #9582725
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