Mark Alan Lovewell
Far from the Island's shoreline lies a harbor in the woods. Edgartown's innermost harbor has all the elements of a waterfront, minus the water, the swift-moving currents and high-priced real estate.
The 12-foot-long storefront sign for Edgartown Hardware came down on Tuesday afternoon. A small group assembled in front of the store to witness the retirement of the sign on a quiet midwinter day when few people were out and about on Main street. Work crews moving boxes from the old store into a waiting truck stopped and looked up as the sign came down.
There is snow in the air this holiday season and even better there are plenty of oysters in the ponds. This has been a good year for winter’s favorite bivalve. Tisbury Great Pond wild oysters are being sold at the market as a new report suggests a promising future for oysters in Edgartown Great Pond.
A huge snowstorm that brought blizzard conditions and record snowfall to much of the Northeast a day after Christmas was comparatively kind here, where only a light snow fell. Still, with winds gusting to nearly 70 miles per hour on the Vineyard and extreme high tides, the severe storm left thousands of down-Island homes without power, many holiday travellers stranded, Island roads flooded and icy enough to cause several accidents, and erosion transforming some Island beaches.
Wet, windy, warm and sunny are terms to describe weather, and there was plenty of it on the Vineyard in 2010. There was record rainfall. The National Weather Service cooperative station recorded 56.18 inches of precipitation for the year, 10 inches above average.
Yet for all the rain clouds, the Vineyard had one of the sunniest, hot, dry summers in a while. Much of the drama of bad wet weather, or the threat of bad weather, came late in the summer, making the year good for tourism and also fine for the aquifer.
A historic catboat named Edwina B. is the most recent acquisition of the Martha’s Vineyard Preservation Trust. The 22-foot wooden boat, built by Manuel Swartz Roberts in Edgartown in 1931, is possibly the last of three catboats he built still in the water.
The nearly 80-year-old boat has had a circuitous life with different names and different ports of call. She has been part of the Edgartown waterfront for at least the past 20 years. The former owners see the boat’s journey bringing her to Edgartown to stay.