After a flurry of emergency preparations that went on through the week, Hurricane Earl was downgraded to a tropical storm by the time it arrived on the Island late Friday night, sparing the Island any damage save from drenching rains that flooded some cellars and washed out driveways.

The Vineyard was in a state of emergency and high alert at nightfall yesterday as Hurricane Earl crawled up the Eastern Seaboard, a category three storm packing winds up to 111 miles per hour with drenching rains, its huge eye pointed straight at eastern Cape Cod, the Vineyard and Nantucket.

The Massachusetts Land Court has upheld the town of Aquinnah in a pivotal case that will ultimately decide whether a large swath of rare, salt-blasted coastal heathland along Moshup Trail remains forever wild or is opened up for development.

The Chappaquiddick superintendent for The Trustees of Reservations has resigned and Trustees are taking full responsibility for an incident late last month where an unfledged nest of least tern chicks was nearly run over by a Trustees-owned four-wheel-drive truck that was on the barrier beach conducting a natural history tour.

Vandals have been targeting the boat house at the Sailing Camp Park in Oak Bluffs, leaving a trail of smashed-in doors, broken windows, floats set adrift in the Lagoon Pond — and, in a dangerous turn, the latest offense this week saw gasoline poured around the grounds.

At the receiving end of all this vandalism is Sail Martha’s Vineyard, the community-supported nonprofit program that leases the boathouse on the Lagoon from the town to teach sailing to Island children.

State police and federal drug enforcement authorities made their annual helicopter sweep over the Vineyard early this week looking for marijuana plants under cultivation.

Sgt. Jeffrey Stone who works out of the Massachusetts state police barracks in Oak Bluffs, said yesterday that 62 plants were found and removed at six sites in Oak Bluffs, West Tisbury and Edgartown.