Ever wonder why fly fishermen wear dishpans around their waists? These contraptions are called stripping baskets, and the Vineyard was a testing and proving ground for them. A stripping basket is a container into which fly line is retrieved or “stripped.” It gives the angler the ability to control the loose line so that it doesn’t tangle with rocks or seaweed or other detritus or get rolled up in breaking waves.
By Kib Bramhall
Once upon a time it was standard wisdom that the hurricane of 1938 was the first and worst to hit the Island. But hidden in the bottom of coastal marshes, and in old logbooks and newspapers, is the true story of New England hurricanes.
By Tom Dunlop
Owner: Chris Morris, 20, Oak Bluffs Boat: Lucky Blue, nineteen-foot fiberglass Boston Whaler Montauk Home Port: The Morris backyard. It gets towed to landing sites when Chris goes out.
By Ivy Ashe
Lately food trucks are all the rage but they’re hardly a new idea. Cowboys driving cattle in the 1800s had what were probably the first food trucks – they called them chuck wagons. In the 1890s lunch wagons did a good business catering to late-night workers. And of course mobile food trucks have been around for years, serving up food at construction sites.
By Geoff Currier
Charlie Blair was five years old, living in a summer house on Katama Bay in Edgartown, when Hurricane Carol slashed the Vineyard on August 31, 1954, sixty years ago this summer.
By Tom Dunlop
In 1953 I found a wooden Atom in the mouth of a dead shark on South Beach. It was the first plug that I owned, and a couple of weeks later I caught a striper on it. That began my decades-long love affair with striped bass plugs, which continues to this day.
By Kib Bramhall
Captain: Fred Murphy Home Port: Vineyard Haven harbor The Name: Ishmael The Boat: Forty-eight-foot knockabout (i.e., no bowsprit) schooner
By Ivy Ashe
It was all very genteel, downright “Corinthian” as sailors would say, referring to the British tradition of “gentlemen sailors” who race around buoys for the pure honor of being able to say they won.
By Sean McNeill
Ask almost anyone about their childhood days at summer camp and they will regale you with tales of adventure, summer friendships, and cheesy camp songs they love to this day. At Sengekontacket Pond in Edgartown it’s no different.
By Olivia Hull
“It’s crispy and delicious, almost a little sweet,” says Tim Broderick, a man who knows his fluke. The Chilmark fisherman was the host of last year’s fisherman’s fish fry, an annual tradition to mark the end of the commercial fluke season and a chance for the fishermen to slow down and enjoy this summer specialty they unload daily on Menemsha docks.
By Catherine Walthers
Three or four times a year, an excavator crawls out to the barrier beaches between some of our great ponds and the open ocean and makes incisions in the sand that open up floodgates. This is a diesel-powered version of a ritual that goes back to ancient times.
By Geoff Currier
Captain: Wayne Iacono Home Port: Menemsha Name: Freedom The Boat: Thirty-five-foot Bruno & Stillman fiberglass lobster boat. Built 1980 in Newington, New Hampshire. The Other Boat: Warrior, a twenty-foot fiberglass scallop skiff, makers unknown.
By Ivy Ashe
