It was as cold as charity at 8:30 a.m. on the West Tisbury School soccer fields last Saturday. The wind cut right through you, and it was periodically spitting rain.
The Vineyard’s fall youth soccer season was ending, not with a bang, but with a shiver.
It might have seemed a sad end to the season — particularly considering that the previous week’s play had been abandoned to the remnants of Hurricane Noel — except that the kids didn’t seem to mind at all.
The developers of the high-end Field Club recreation project in Katama have bought an adjoining housing subdivision for $12.35 million from a group of Island businessmen that includes Edgartown selectman Michael Donaroma.
The deal, which closed on Oct. 30, relates to land around the old Grant’s pit site off Katama Road, bought by Mr. Donaroma and his three partners for about $800,000 six years ago.
Three years ago, the Nantucket bay scallop harvest suddenly more than doubled in size, from around 15,000 bushels to more than 32,000. It was the year the industry ate its future.
The following season the harvest crashed. The total catch in 2005-06 was one-sixth as large — just 5,500 bushels. It was even worse last season, when fewer than 4,000 bushels were hauled up, the lowest tally since they began keeping records 30 years earlier.
The irony of Oak Bluffs is that people so loved its beaches, they set about destroying them.
They built so close to the ocean’s edge they had to defend their development with a seawall. And the seawall prevented the natural replenishment of the sand, so the beach eroded away.
The next time you sit down to a steaming bowl of clam chowder, consider this: your meal may be older then you are. Much, much older.
Indeed ocean quahaugs, often used in chowder, are probably the longest-lived animals on the planet. Earlier this year, researchers dredged up a 405-year-old quahaug from the frigid waters off Iceland. They did not eat it.
Scott Bermudes jealously guards his privacy.
