Don Smith and Clayton Friis, captains of the Menemsha Bike Ferry, don’t know if it covers the shortest distance of any ferry on the East Coast. It travels a shorter distance than the Chappy ferry does, but the bike ferry takes longer – the current in the Menemsha channel is swift, as swift as six knots in a full-moon tide, with the mid-channel buoy lying down flat in the water. The harder the current, the longer the trip.
    
One beautiful, breezy summer morning the buoy merely leans at a slightly drunken angle as we cross from Menemsha to the small dock at the West Basin boat launch on the Aquinnah side, a run it makes every day in summer from eight in the morning until six in the evening, in all weather. Clayton, who is at the helm today, smiles and says that we may have set a new bike ferry record, a “wind-aided” three minutes flat.
    
The bike ferry, a twenty-five-foot pontoon boat with bench seats down the sides, is driven by an electric outboard and two ranks of batteries stowed beneath the seats (an overnight charge lasts all day if the current is favorable). It can carry pedestrians, strollers, dogs, and of course, bikes – up to six at a time.
    
Our passengers back to Menemsha, Peggy and Ron Defelice of Ocean City, Maryland, are on the bike ferry for the first time. After a long bike ride from Vineyard Haven through Chilmark and around the Cliffs of Aquinnah, they saw two signs that read Alternate Route and Bike Ferry. They were happy to find a shortcut home. The captains say that most of the bikers seem “kind of tired out” coming from Aquinnah – except for the spandex specials: “You know, the real bike riders. They’re never tired.”
    
The Menemsha Bike Ferry is owned by Hugh Taylor of Aquinnah, who also owns and operates the Outermost Inn and Arabella, a catamaran that sails on charters out of Menemsha. Thirteen or so years ago when the ferry was proposed, some Chilmarkers opposed it on the grounds that it would “honky-tonk” the fishing port. But the ferry has crisscrossed its way into the life of the village, and nobody worries much about that now. The cost of a round-trip from Menemsha is seven dollars, which helps to cover payroll, insurance, maintenance, and lease of the dock on the Menemsha side.
    
Don and Clayton have ferried their share of celebrities across the channel: Bill Murray, Billy Joel, Ted Danson, and Mary Steenburgen (he biked, she jogged). A high point for Clayton was when a tour group of thirty or forty people rode across on the ferry in small groups. Among the tourists was Miss Brazil, and Clayton says, “You did not have to point her out.” He says that she was “very unaffected,” but he himself “was affected.” That crossing took about twenty minutes.
    
Don, who is also Hugh Taylor’s father-in-law, is a former Marine with four children and eight grandchildren living on the Island. He began skippering the bike ferry six years ago, after a long career on fishing boats. “If I didn’t get another job, I’d have had to move in with Hugh,” he says. “I got one.” Don captains the bike ferry four days a week; Clayton is at the helm for three.
    
Clayton, who’s been a bike ferry captain from the start, is a former Navy man. He is an accomplished chamber music violinist and a nationally known mycologist – a person who studies mushrooms (people come down to the dock to ask him questions about them). He writes
poetry and teaches English as a second language to Spanish speakers. His German is also quite good, and his Danish and Swedish are passable. He spends part of the winter making yacht deliveries around the world; he’s delivered boats to Spain, the Caribbean, the Azores, and many ports in the Mediterranean. Clayton lost his own sailboat, a Tahiti ketch – a famous wooden double-ender – to the southern flank of the Perfect Storm in 1991. Her seams opened up and he was pumping a hundred gallons an hour, trying to make Bermuda, when he was rescued from his vessel in thirty-foot seas in the middle of the night by the Polish freighter Kopal nia Walboyic. After his boat sank, Clayton says he went into a deep depression for three months. He’s all better now.
    
The bike ferry has an unblemished safety record, and the captains are proud to say that they have never lost a passenger overboard, although one time a riderless bike was knocked off the dock at West Basin. When asked whether there is a women-and-children-first policy if, for some reason, the little ship has to be abandoned, the captains are in agreement. “No, the captain goes first,” says Clayton. “Oh, yeah, right after me,” says Don.
    
Actually, safety is the guiding principle on the bike ferry. Both captains are licensed and the boat is well maintained. Youngsters are required to get out of strollers or child bike seats before they can ride across the channel.
    
Clayton guides the ferry to the low floating dock on the Menemsha side. The pontoons gently bump the pier as he slows the whirring little electric engine. He throws a neat half-hitch around a wooden piling. Peggy and Ron smile, say goodbye, and wheel their bikes up the narrow gangplank. They pass two kids with fishing poles and a family with a wet Labrador retriever filing onto the dock. The bike ferry is ready for the next trip back across the channel.