Buying Fish at the Dock

Rhode Island legislators are making an effort to promote locally-caught seafood, which is fine, but what caught my eye in this story, from the Block Island Times, is that there’s actually a law in R.I. that prevents people who have caught fish on charter boats from selling it at the dock.

I had no idea that such a law existed and it explains why I continued to be mystified August after August on the occasions that I wandered around the Old Harbor marina vainly looking for someone from a charter boat -- customer or crew member -- selling surplus bluefish or striped bass.

I had seen it happen in New Rochelle in the late 1980s when I’d sometimes wait on warm summer afternoons for the party boats to arrive back at the Fort Slocum dock so I could interview the captain or customers about fishing conditions. Fishermen who had caught a mess o bluefish would sell them, whole, to women who had come down to the dock looking to buy a good, cheap meal. It seemed like a perfectly good thing to me.

(As seen on Twitter, via @soundbounder)

The Buried Past

Because there’s so little left of Native American culture -- place names, archaeological sites -- we’re freshly surprised when something new turns up, like this archaeological site on Block Island, which I learned about via Matt (@Soundbounder) on Twitter this morning. It’s intriguing to learn that a site we pass every day still has relics of quotidian life, in place, just below the surface of the ground.

Native Americans, of course, thrived along the coast of southern New England and on Long Island, at least until the Dutch and English arrived in the early 1600s, and there are literally dozens of archaeological sites, some quite famous and well-researched, in the area. I’m no expert but I did a fair amount of secondary research on Native Americans for my book, and my recollection is that Rhode Island and eastern Long Island were the centers of wampum-making, and trade was common, among Native Americans and European colonists, on the mainland, on Long Island, and on the offshore islands as well.

One of the things that fascinates me about about contemporary archaeology is the practice of leaving things alone. As soon as archaeologists excavate a site, the site is gone, destroyed. So unless they have to, they don’t. If an archaeological site is undisturbed, whatever is there and whatever it has to teach us, remains there and available. If it finally gets excavated, the archaeologists doing the job will know more than we know now, and what the site reveals will be all the richer.

The folks on Block Island know that the site, on Ocean Avenue, that they excavated recently is on the edge of a larger site. Here’s what the Block Island Times reported:

Jacob Freedman, an archeologist working on the project, said the site was only the edge of a more significant area to the northwest. What was discovered along the road was mostly waste left from activities like cooking and producing arrowheads. …

The area was only a small section and will be marked should a larger excavation ever be done. The full expanse of the settlement would have stretched to the northwest into an area that remains undeveloped. Freedman said the town should make sure the area is preserved.

Salps: Not in Long Island Sound Apparently

About salps in Long Island Sound, Mickey Weiss, the head of Project Oceanology, at Avery Point, told me:

There are no scientific reports of salps occurring in LIS according to my LIS data base (Weiss, et.al. 1995. Plants and animals of Long Island Sound: A documented checklist, bibliography and computer data base. Project Oceanology, Avery Pt., Groton, CT). However, these planktonic critters can be quite common in southern New England (i.e. Cape Cod) during the late summer months, sometimes carried there by the Gulf Stream.

Rick Damico, a marine biologist who used to work for the New York State DEC, told me:

In the past, I've seen them while diving off Block Island. I strongly suspect that they're more common offshore (at least around here). Remember, Block Island is offshore, with respect to LIS. Furthermore, I've never seen them in inshore plankton samples--again, my personal experience.

The Block Island Times published a story online yesterday about boat owners in the Great Salt Pond having problems with salps clogging their intake pipes , which you can read here (it's an interesting story but in general I consider a clogged air conditioning pipes on a pleasure boats to be one of life's problems I'm least sympathic towards).

Salps in the Surf

The shallows where we swim on Block Island, and the sandbars in the Great Salt Pond, where we clam, have been invaded by transparent, pellet-sized, glass-like animals called salps. We've vacationed on the island 10 times in the last 13 years and we've never seen them before, and people who have been going there for longer have never seen them before either. Swimming through them is like swimming through tapioca. On the sand, in the late afternoon sun, they shine like diamonds or cut glass or tiny mirrors. My guess is that they've been around before but not in such abundance. Swimmers think they're jellyfish or fish eggs. But salps are primitive vertebrates in the tunicate family (or so two marine biologists at the Block Island Maritime Institute told me). They have tiny hooks on each end and at times apparently latch on to each other and form long chains. Over the last two weeks they were unhooked, and the hooks sometimes give you a needle-like stick when you're swimming.

Some people at Soundwaters, by the way, found a seahorse in Long Island Sound a few days ago. Salps I had never heard of; seahorses I didn't realize were so unusual in this area.

Call the Coast Guard! Ferry Collides with Coast Guard Cutter

It could have been worse, but in general when you're taking the ferry to Block Island, you don't want to collide with a Coast Guard cutter, which is what happened yesterday. Here's what it was like:

Shortly before the collision, John Daveau said he heard the ferry sounding its horn and felt the ferry trying to slow. Then he saw the Coast Guard vessel cutting across the bow of the ferry. He said the ferry hit the cutter in the stern.

It was a bump “like hitting a dock,” said Daveau, who was sitting near the bow. “People started running for lifejackets. All the kids put on lifejackets.”

His wife, Michelle, said, “It took 20 years off my life.”

Brad Barco, 28, of West Greenwich, said he was riding on the top, outside level of the ferry close to the front with his girlfriend. He said the fog was thick and the ferry captain was blowing his horn every five minutes when they saw the Coast Guard cutter appear about 100 feet off the left of the ferry.

Barco said both ships tried to avoid an impact and were able to slow down quite a bit before they collided.

“I knew we weren’t going to be able to stop. I was like, ‘We’re going to hit this thing.’ And then it got closer, closer, closer. They started honking their horns back and forth. And before we knew it, we made impact,” he said.

John Austin, of Greenfield, Mass., was also aboard the ferry when it was hit, on the upper deck on the starboard side.

In a phone conversation with projo.com as he returned home on another ferry later yesterday, he said that the Coast Guard vessel “just appeared right out of the mist in front of us.”

“It took a few seconds for contact –– it was like everything was in slow motion,” he said, before the collision, which he described as “one glancing blow.” The ferry then glided to a stop.

The Providence Journal story is here. (You'll have to bear with me. It's summer and I'm as usual looking ahead to a couple of weeks on BI, so I'll be more inclinded to blog about things that will have very little interest to people interested in Long Island Sound.)

It Would Be Nice If We Could Pick Up the Pace on Clean Energy Projects, Even Small Ones Like This Proposal for Block Island

I suppose it’s wise to go slowly before we approve new clean energy projects, like the wave energy project that Rhode Island and a company called Oceanlinx are working on for the waters off Block Island. On the other hand, we’re sort of in a global climate crisis, and speed can be a virtue. Here’s how the Block Island Times describes what still has to happen to get this small – 1.5 megawatt – project built:

The state energy office hasn’t yet decided whether it will be the state or Oceanlinx that applies for permits. Once that is decided, there could be a long wait: procedures for permitting by the state’s Coastal Resources Management Council and the federal Energy Regulatory Commission are still being written, although Dzykewicz said federal permitting for a pilot plant has been issued before and should take no more than six months.

Most crucially, it won’t be clear until early next year whether the General Assembly is willing to approve $45 million in revenue bonds to finance the project.

If the state legislature fails to create a state power authority next session, then the state’s Economic Development Corporation could initiate the bonds, said Dzykewicz — but the General Assembly would still need to give its blessing.

We wouldn’t want to act rashly and end up making things worse. On the other hand, as I said once before, if we’re going to move slowly, we need to hurry up about it.

Slow Growth on Block Island

Almost everyone on Block Island wants to see more land protected, less development, and smaller houses. At least that's what the Nature Conservancy learned when it took a public opinion poll recently. From the Block Island Times:

A telephone survey last month found that support for preserving more Block Island land as open space has grown over the past six years, from 87 percent of voters asked in a 2001 poll to a staggering 90 percent now....

Growth was a serious issue for many respondents, with 63 percent saying the island is being developed too fast, up slightly - 2 percent - from 2001. The number who think the island is being developed at a rate that is good for the community dropped slightly, from 33 percent to 30 percent.

Long-time residents of the island, people born here and those aged 51 to 60 were most likely to see a problem.

Growth, development and overcrowding are actually hurting the quality of life on the island, 70 percent of those polled agreed.

There aren't a whole lot of other details about the method of the survey, but the fact that it was conducted in mid May indicates to me that it is year-round residents who support more land protection. Almost half the island is protected from development, which is amazing.

Wind Power and Block Island

"I think wind farms would be acceptable to many people; they certainly are to me. I believe there's been a shift of perception - we're getting used to the idea and understand the need." – Block Island First Warden Kim Gaffett, on a study that says the best place out of several good locations in Rhode Island for power-producing windmills is off Block Island’s south shore.

The south shore is a long stretch of wild beach where people surf, sunbathe in the nude, and fish. The bluffs erode boulders and sand and a grayish clay that kids use as body paint. Barn owls supposedly nest there. Houses sit on top of the bluffs, but you can’t see them, and with the noise of the wind and the surf, you feel you’re in the wilderness.

I’m a proponent of wind power. I wish the ocean off Block Island’s bluffs wasn’t a good place for them. I have a feeling though that First Warden Gaffett’s opinion about people’s acceptance of wind farms is way optimistic. Here’s what the Block Island Times reports.