Here we go again, Norton Point has breached. At first it looked like a wash-over, but as the tide went down Katama Bay gushed through the opening. It got wider with every tide cycle and now appears to the historical eye to be established. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency had predicted that the first four morning high tides of the new year would be a whole foot higher than our average tides. Add to that a south west breeze that gusted to 30 miles per hour with the same exceptionally high tide on the outside of the barrier beach and the recipe for a wash over to become a breach has all of the necessary ingredients.

There are many very informative photos of the new breach on the Chappy Chat Facebook page. This breach formed at roughly the halfway point between where the previous break occurred and the corner of Wasque where the openings finally close. That break occurred in 2007 and closed off finally in April of 2015. For that period of eight years that opening migrated eastward, doing some of what breaches do including causing a whole lot of erosion of the Wasque bluffs. When you look at the Facebook aerial photos, keep in mind that the opening doesn’t close up when it comes even with the nearest part of Chappaquiddick Island. It has to get all of the way eastward to the north/south flow of Muskeget Channel. At that point it is reduced to a trickle and then finally, at a quiet moment in the weather, it smears closed.

We have all learned, somewhat to our embarrassment, that making guesses about the speed of migration, the width and depth, the degree of erosion, time of closure and any other variables regarding the behavior of a breach are merely guesses. Mother nature gets to determine all of those factors and apparently gets to change her mind at any time. Chappy is an Island once again.