Mark Alan Lovewell
Six sailboats are participating in this weekend’s 15th annual Edgartown Yacht Club 12-metre regatta, a three-day sailing event that also is a spectator sport for anyone with an eye toward Nantucket Sound.
These are the World Cup boats, sailing out of the past, about 70 feet in length with 90-foot tall masts. This year’s participating boats include: Intrepid, Courageous, Weatherly, American Eagle, Columbia and Easterner.
Practice racing is scheduled for this afternoon; the racing takes place tomorrow and Sunday.
The summer flounder, also called fluke, season is about to come to an end. The state will close the commercial season on Tuesday, August 11. The recreational season will close three days later.
Commercial fishermen cannot land any more fluke after 8 p.m. Tuesday. As of the end of last week, 85 per cent of the quota was taken in two months of fishing. The season opened on June 10 and the fishermen have had little trouble getting their 300-pound daily trip limit.
Fish can come back.
A research paper published in last Friday’s journal Science concludes that while fish stocks remain threatened by overfishing, collaboration among scientists and fisheries managers can reverse the trend.
Boris Worm, a marine ecologist with Dalhousie University in Halifax and other scientists published a report in 2006 citing evidence that if current trends continued, all commercially harvestable fish would be gone by 2048.
The Friday report in Science takes an entirely different view.
No one needs the weather man to tell them that July has been wet and overcast; those two words are the story of the summer so far. Dampness has affected everything from hay crops on Island farms to homes where a good solution of bleach and water is the only reliable cure for mildew sprouting on walls and refrigerator doors.
As of yesterday, the Vineyard had received close to five inches of rainfall, almost twice the monthly average. The Martha’s Vineyard Airport weather station had recorded 5.13 inches of rainfall for the month yesterday morning.
Quite a few of the fishermen boarding the party fishing boat Skipper in Oak Bluffs on Wednesday morning before 8 a.m. were repeat customers. They toted their own coolers loaded with refreshments, and towels for keeping their hands clean.
By MARK ALAN LOVEWELL
Fishing season has finally hit its stride. And if they can keep from getting lost in the fog, anglers are finding dinner. There are reports of bonito. Striped bass are still around, although in deeper water. Somebody caught a nice bluefish in Nantucket Sound on Wednesday morning. Someone else was seen toting five gallon buckets full of black sea bass.