batten down the hatches guin!
Re: batten down the hatches guin!
Plymouth harbour has never frozen.
“If you trust in yourself, and believe in your dreams, and follow your star. . . you'll still get beaten by people who spent their time working hard and learning things and weren't so lazy.”
Re: batten down the hatches guin!
lol. new Plymouth.
Re: batten down the hatches guin!
Wes, I live in Plymouth County, but not the Town. I'm further up the coast towards Boston.
Does that harbor freeze? Perhaps after an extended cold spell. It's been a cold month and there may be ice, but the whole harbor won't freeze. In 15 years here the commuter ferry into Boston has needed ice breaking assistance a handful of times. And no you could never walk out to the islands - that's Nantucket Sound, not a harbor. The old timers were pulling your leg.
Oldr, glad you survived ok. Some rough times here but we escaped the worst of it. Two neighboring beach towns got hit even harder than we did - clean up still ongoing there and here. Schools closed again tomorrow and more snow coming Friday and again Monday.
I'll post some pictures tomorrow.
Does that harbor freeze? Perhaps after an extended cold spell. It's been a cold month and there may be ice, but the whole harbor won't freeze. In 15 years here the commuter ferry into Boston has needed ice breaking assistance a handful of times. And no you could never walk out to the islands - that's Nantucket Sound, not a harbor. The old timers were pulling your leg.
Oldr, glad you survived ok. Some rough times here but we escaped the worst of it. Two neighboring beach towns got hit even harder than we did - clean up still ongoing there and here. Schools closed again tomorrow and more snow coming Friday and again Monday.
I'll post some pictures tomorrow.
“I ask no favor for my sex. All I ask of our brethren is that they take their feet off our necks.” ~ Ruth Bader Ginsburg, paraphrasing Sarah Moore Grimké
Re: batten down the hatches guin!
well ive seen Plymouth harbor frozen over. I ll google the thing about the islands....
Re: batten down the hatches guin!
http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q= ... qHaFDizAoQ
there you go. that s the vineyard, I ll check Nantucket now....
there you go. that s the vineyard, I ll check Nantucket now....
Re: batten down the hatches guin!
my grand mother told me about when her dad would drive across to ocean city Maryland at low tide, before there was a bridge and before the hurricane cut the OC inlet thru between assateague and OC
-
MajGenl.Meade
- Posts: 21516
- Joined: Sun Apr 25, 2010 8:51 am
- Location: Groot Brakrivier
- Contact:
Re: batten down the hatches guin!
Those were some real old-timers......In 1634-5 Boston Harbor was frozen over In 1637-8 was a severe winter. The winter of 1641-2 was the coldest for forty years, the rigor extending to Virginia where the unprepared settlers lost most of their swine and many cattle by it. Boston Harbor was extensively frozen. Plymouth Harbor being entirely closed, so that for five weeks oxen and carts were driven over the inner and outer harbor
THE PILGRIM REPUBLIC
an Historical Review of the
COLONY OF NEW PLYMOUTH and
SKETCHES OF THE RISE OF OTHER NEW ENGLAND SETTLEMENTS,
THE HISTORY OF CONGREGATIONALISM, AND THE
CREEDS OF THE PERIOD
BY JOHN A. GOODWIN
1899
Very glad to hear of safe landings for Guin and Oldr.
For Christianity, by identifying truth with faith, must teach-and, properly understood, does teach-that any interference with the truth is immoral. A Christian with faith has nothing to fear from the facts
Re: batten down the hatches guin!
well the fellow who told me was the oldest ironworker I ever met who was still working. he had to be at least 80. his name was larry. it was in 1999 or so. he was running a peddinghaus punch line at the time, which required little physical labor. he told about his youthful ironwork, in boston, when they still used red hot rivets to connect steel.
he would have remembered the 1933/1934 freeze in the above link to the vineyard gazette
he would have remembered the 1933/1934 freeze in the above link to the vineyard gazette
Re: batten down the hatches guin!
Wes, read your article. The Sound didn't freeze, just some of the harbors on the Vineyard, which is not unheard of.
Meade, in 1634 Boston harbor was a completely different size and shape than it is now. As was the entire City. I'll look for some of the old maps, later.
Meade, in 1634 Boston harbor was a completely different size and shape than it is now. As was the entire City. I'll look for some of the old maps, later.
“I ask no favor for my sex. All I ask of our brethren is that they take their feet off our necks.” ~ Ruth Bader Ginsburg, paraphrasing Sarah Moore Grimké
Re: batten down the hatches guin!
guin, read further into the article....
Re: batten down the hatches guin!
The Sound is all froze up.
“It was queer to be walking out past the harbor light, to be leaning against the channel buoy. Then we walked straight out across the frozen water, out and out and out, over what should have been the sea, where the steamboats used to ply. The town began to grow smaller, and we were alone and far off from land on the ice under a cloudless blue sky. Far off toward the sea we could see where the ice rose into mounds, bordering the open water. In places there were little translucent circles under our feet, like the glass discs which are inserted in city sidewalks. Farther along the water had congealed in the air and formed sharp scales and jets which broke off as we stepped on them. . . .” - See more at: http://vineyardgazette.com/news/2014/02 ... w9mJx.dpuf
“It was queer to be walking out past the harbor light, to be leaning against the channel buoy. Then we walked straight out across the frozen water, out and out and out, over what should have been the sea, where the steamboats used to ply. The town began to grow smaller, and we were alone and far off from land on the ice under a cloudless blue sky. Far off toward the sea we could see where the ice rose into mounds, bordering the open water. In places there were little translucent circles under our feet, like the glass discs which are inserted in city sidewalks. Farther along the water had congealed in the air and formed sharp scales and jets which broke off as we stepped on them. . . .” - See more at: http://vineyardgazette.com/news/2014/02 ... w9mJx.dpuf
Re: batten down the hatches guin!
Ah yes, during The Little Ice Age (approx. 1350-1850):In 1634-5 Boston Harbor was frozen over In 1637-8 was a severe winter. The winter of 1641-2 was the coldest for forty years, the rigor extending to Virginia where the unprepared settlers lost most of their swine and many cattle by it. Boston Harbor was extensively frozen. Plymouth Harbor being entirely closed, so that for five weeks oxen and carts were driven over the inner and outer harbor
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Ice_Age
The History Channel did an excellent documentary on this a few years ago...(That was back when The History Channel made excellent documentaries; before they went to the All Pawn Stars All the Time format...
)
Re: batten down the hatches guin!
wesw wrote:The Sound is all froze up.
“It was queer to be walking out past the harbor light, to be leaning against the channel buoy. Then we walked straight out across the frozen water, out and out and out, over what should have been the sea, where the steamboats used to ply. The town began to grow smaller, and we were alone and far off from land on the ice under a cloudless blue sky. Far off toward the sea we could see where the ice rose into mounds, bordering the open water. In places there were little translucent circles under our feet, like the glass discs which are inserted in city sidewalks. Farther along the water had congealed in the air and formed sharp scales and jets which broke off as we stepped on them. . . .” - See more at: http://vineyardgazette.com/news/2014/02 ... w9mJx.dpuf
Bordering the open water
“I ask no favor for my sex. All I ask of our brethren is that they take their feet off our necks.” ~ Ruth Bader Ginsburg, paraphrasing Sarah Moore Grimké
Re: batten down the hatches guin!
I'm sure those same old timers also told you about the tunnel onto the Cape, so you could avoid the bridges, right.
“I ask no favor for my sex. All I ask of our brethren is that they take their feet off our necks.” ~ Ruth Bader Ginsburg, paraphrasing Sarah Moore Grimké
Re: batten down the hatches guin!
boy you are hard headed. I know that your reading comprehension is ok, so it is just willful ignoring of words on the page.
Re: batten down the hatches guin!
Courtesy Martha's Vineyard Museum
Island Ice Age; Freeze of '34 Was Cold Enough to Cover the Ocean
Tom Dunlop
Thursday, February 6, 2014 - 4:41pm
True, it has been a cold winter. Throw in the two blizzards that bracketed January and it might even rival an old-fashioned winter, the type your grandparents boasted so often about living through.
But if so, there is still a good distance to go before we scrape the depths your grand folks were probably thinking of 80 years ago — that stretch of weeks between the ends of December 1933 and February 1934 that caused remarkable things to happen on the waters around Martha’s Vineyard.
Woods Hole, for example, is one of those channels where the currents run hard enough to drive channel buoys over onto their sides. But it froze over so solidly that year in early February that people on the shore couldn’t see the tide running at all. Gulls on the Island, desperate to find food, flew inland and fed beneath backyard bird feeders. And on Feb. 10, 1934, the ice lay thick enough that Henry Beetle Hough, the co-editor of the Gazette, and his colleague Bill Roberts walked across outer Edgartown harbor from the lighthouse to the entrance to Cape Pogue Pond and back.
Bill Roberts embraces channel marker at harbor entrance. — Courtesy Martha's Vineyard Museum
“No matter how severe those old seasons may have been,” declared a Gazette editorial, which took the moment to look back on even icier winters, “at least they produced no such sub-zero occasion as that witnessed by the spoiled and luxury loving youth of the world on Feb. 9, 1934. No matter how cold it may get, most of us do not mind, so long as a new record is being set. At a temperature of anywhere from 10 to 24 below zero, there was plenty of excitement and almost enough thrill to keep us warm. At a mere 4 degrees above zero we could have had no satisfaction and would doubtless have suffered much more discomfort.”
The cold first set in during the final week of December 1933. Steamers slowed on their passages between the mainland and the Islands because the reek — or vapor from the warmer sounds — was rising densely enough to keep officers and crew in the wheelhouses from seeing the pennants snapping from the bows.
Ice caked and silenced the bells and blocked out the lights of channel markers, which soon capsized from the weight. The spars and rigging of fishing boats at Menemsha, Vineyard Haven and Edgartown were cabled with ice, thick and white. Ducks froze alive in the ponds and harbors because the threat of frostbite to their webbed feet prevented them from walking on land. Gulls that evidently did not get their fill at the bird feeders attacked the most disabled ducks and ate them where they lay stuck.
A journal kept by S. Bailey Norton of Edgartown when he was 14 offers a day-to-day record of how the cold transfigured things along the waterfront early in the year. Between the last weeks of January and February, he noted day after day of near-zero morning temperatures (10 on Jan. 29; 6 on Feb. 3; 2 below on Feb. 7). He wrote that the harbor was “frozen over” on Jan. 31. On Feb. 8 he reported for the first time that “Some people walked across to Chappy this morning before the sun was out . . . . Some cold!”
Then came Friday, Feb. 9, 1934: “16 degrees below zero! Boy it’s some cold!” wrote Bailey. “Every one is walking across the harbor. The steamboat never left Nantucket [because it was iced in]. The one that left Vineyard Haven took six hours to reach New Bedford. The Sound is all froze up. No school all day. . . . The coldest in history around here. Pa walked across the harbor and went eeling on Caleb’s Pond. He didn’t get many. All the ice houses are getting 9 inch ice.”
Tony Bettencourt cuts channel so Chappy ferry can run.
The next day Mr. Hough and Mr. Roberts, a linotype operator and pressman at the Gazette, ventured across the field ice atop the outer harbor, walking from the lighthouse to the entrance of Cape Pogue Pond and back. In his 1940 book Country Editor, Mr. Hough wrote:
“It was about ten degrees above zero when we started. We had, between us, a hatchet, an iron bar (these for testing the ice), and coil of rope. Salt water ice is likely to be dangerous. It may soften quickly, and there are always the tides scouring away underneath. But this morning the harbor ice was flinty, and we could not find a place where it was less than twelve inches thick . . . .
“It was queer to be walking out past the harbor light, to be leaning against the channel buoy. Then we walked straight out across the frozen water, out and out and out, over what should have been the sea, where the steamboats used to ply. The town began to grow smaller, and we were alone and far off from land on the ice under a cloudless blue sky. Far off toward the sea we could see where the ice rose into mounds, bordering the open water. In places there were little translucent circles under our feet, like the glass discs which are inserted in city sidewalks. Farther along the water had congealed in the air and formed sharp scales and jets which broke off as we stepped on them. . . .”
Of their return, he wrote:
“Within sight of [Edgartown Memorial Wharf] we had our heart’s desire that day, and I have thought of it often since — how over the blue, deep, shining strait where the steamboats used to run and where the tall yachts sail, we walked one February morning. The secret of it is that the things of nature come into some fresh and intimate association with the spirit of man, and this is one of the objects of travel as well as one of the objects of living. But one may find it at home, at his front door.”
(“Boy! It’s just like Alaska,” young Bailey Norton added that day, footnoting with some deft attention to detail: “The heaviest man to walk on the harbor was Burt Vincent at 252 lbs. The heaviest woman, Abbie Butler, 208 lbs.”)
Youngster plays with sled just off ferry wharf on Chappy.
There was a brief thaw in the middle of February, but then the temperatures fell away again — as low as zero on the 24th and 25th. A blizzard struck on the 25th and 26th, leaving a foot of snow on the flat and drifts four and five feet deep against stores and homes. Finally on March 2 Bailey Norton wrote: “All the ice and snow is melting, everything is slush.”
The winter of 1933-1934 keeps company with earlier epochs of remarkable cold. In 1857, the Vineyard was cut off from the mainland for two weeks, and men were said to have walked from the vicinity of Oak Bluffs (not yet a town) to Cape Pogue. In 1905, four men sailed an iceboat from Eel Pond to the gut of Cape Pogue, then across Cape Pogue Pond. They visited for the day with the keeper and his family at the lighthouse there.
There have also been old-time winters since — 1942, 1950, 1961 and 1968 can claim the title — and within the memories of many today there stands the winter of 1976-1977, when ice sheeted over Vineyard Haven harbor and Katama Bay, and the Chappy ferry steered around plates and continents of ice that were trying to fill in the entrance to Edgartown harbor. But in none of those years did the temperature fall sharply enough or long enough for even the lightest men or women of the town to walk across it.
Island Ice Age; Freeze of '34 Was Cold Enough to Cover the Ocean
Tom Dunlop
Thursday, February 6, 2014 - 4:41pm
True, it has been a cold winter. Throw in the two blizzards that bracketed January and it might even rival an old-fashioned winter, the type your grandparents boasted so often about living through.
But if so, there is still a good distance to go before we scrape the depths your grand folks were probably thinking of 80 years ago — that stretch of weeks between the ends of December 1933 and February 1934 that caused remarkable things to happen on the waters around Martha’s Vineyard.
Woods Hole, for example, is one of those channels where the currents run hard enough to drive channel buoys over onto their sides. But it froze over so solidly that year in early February that people on the shore couldn’t see the tide running at all. Gulls on the Island, desperate to find food, flew inland and fed beneath backyard bird feeders. And on Feb. 10, 1934, the ice lay thick enough that Henry Beetle Hough, the co-editor of the Gazette, and his colleague Bill Roberts walked across outer Edgartown harbor from the lighthouse to the entrance to Cape Pogue Pond and back.
Bill Roberts embraces channel marker at harbor entrance. — Courtesy Martha's Vineyard Museum
“No matter how severe those old seasons may have been,” declared a Gazette editorial, which took the moment to look back on even icier winters, “at least they produced no such sub-zero occasion as that witnessed by the spoiled and luxury loving youth of the world on Feb. 9, 1934. No matter how cold it may get, most of us do not mind, so long as a new record is being set. At a temperature of anywhere from 10 to 24 below zero, there was plenty of excitement and almost enough thrill to keep us warm. At a mere 4 degrees above zero we could have had no satisfaction and would doubtless have suffered much more discomfort.”
The cold first set in during the final week of December 1933. Steamers slowed on their passages between the mainland and the Islands because the reek — or vapor from the warmer sounds — was rising densely enough to keep officers and crew in the wheelhouses from seeing the pennants snapping from the bows.
Ice caked and silenced the bells and blocked out the lights of channel markers, which soon capsized from the weight. The spars and rigging of fishing boats at Menemsha, Vineyard Haven and Edgartown were cabled with ice, thick and white. Ducks froze alive in the ponds and harbors because the threat of frostbite to their webbed feet prevented them from walking on land. Gulls that evidently did not get their fill at the bird feeders attacked the most disabled ducks and ate them where they lay stuck.
A journal kept by S. Bailey Norton of Edgartown when he was 14 offers a day-to-day record of how the cold transfigured things along the waterfront early in the year. Between the last weeks of January and February, he noted day after day of near-zero morning temperatures (10 on Jan. 29; 6 on Feb. 3; 2 below on Feb. 7). He wrote that the harbor was “frozen over” on Jan. 31. On Feb. 8 he reported for the first time that “Some people walked across to Chappy this morning before the sun was out . . . . Some cold!”
Then came Friday, Feb. 9, 1934: “16 degrees below zero! Boy it’s some cold!” wrote Bailey. “Every one is walking across the harbor. The steamboat never left Nantucket [because it was iced in]. The one that left Vineyard Haven took six hours to reach New Bedford. The Sound is all froze up. No school all day. . . . The coldest in history around here. Pa walked across the harbor and went eeling on Caleb’s Pond. He didn’t get many. All the ice houses are getting 9 inch ice.”
Tony Bettencourt cuts channel so Chappy ferry can run.
The next day Mr. Hough and Mr. Roberts, a linotype operator and pressman at the Gazette, ventured across the field ice atop the outer harbor, walking from the lighthouse to the entrance of Cape Pogue Pond and back. In his 1940 book Country Editor, Mr. Hough wrote:
“It was about ten degrees above zero when we started. We had, between us, a hatchet, an iron bar (these for testing the ice), and coil of rope. Salt water ice is likely to be dangerous. It may soften quickly, and there are always the tides scouring away underneath. But this morning the harbor ice was flinty, and we could not find a place where it was less than twelve inches thick . . . .
“It was queer to be walking out past the harbor light, to be leaning against the channel buoy. Then we walked straight out across the frozen water, out and out and out, over what should have been the sea, where the steamboats used to ply. The town began to grow smaller, and we were alone and far off from land on the ice under a cloudless blue sky. Far off toward the sea we could see where the ice rose into mounds, bordering the open water. In places there were little translucent circles under our feet, like the glass discs which are inserted in city sidewalks. Farther along the water had congealed in the air and formed sharp scales and jets which broke off as we stepped on them. . . .”
Of their return, he wrote:
“Within sight of [Edgartown Memorial Wharf] we had our heart’s desire that day, and I have thought of it often since — how over the blue, deep, shining strait where the steamboats used to run and where the tall yachts sail, we walked one February morning. The secret of it is that the things of nature come into some fresh and intimate association with the spirit of man, and this is one of the objects of travel as well as one of the objects of living. But one may find it at home, at his front door.”
(“Boy! It’s just like Alaska,” young Bailey Norton added that day, footnoting with some deft attention to detail: “The heaviest man to walk on the harbor was Burt Vincent at 252 lbs. The heaviest woman, Abbie Butler, 208 lbs.”)
Youngster plays with sled just off ferry wharf on Chappy.
There was a brief thaw in the middle of February, but then the temperatures fell away again — as low as zero on the 24th and 25th. A blizzard struck on the 25th and 26th, leaving a foot of snow on the flat and drifts four and five feet deep against stores and homes. Finally on March 2 Bailey Norton wrote: “All the ice and snow is melting, everything is slush.”
The winter of 1933-1934 keeps company with earlier epochs of remarkable cold. In 1857, the Vineyard was cut off from the mainland for two weeks, and men were said to have walked from the vicinity of Oak Bluffs (not yet a town) to Cape Pogue. In 1905, four men sailed an iceboat from Eel Pond to the gut of Cape Pogue, then across Cape Pogue Pond. They visited for the day with the keeper and his family at the lighthouse there.
There have also been old-time winters since — 1942, 1950, 1961 and 1968 can claim the title — and within the memories of many today there stands the winter of 1976-1977, when ice sheeted over Vineyard Haven harbor and Katama Bay, and the Chappy ferry steered around plates and continents of ice that were trying to fill in the entrance to Edgartown harbor. But in none of those years did the temperature fall sharply enough or long enough for even the lightest men or women of the town to walk across it.
Last edited by wesw on Thu Jan 29, 2015 12:52 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Re: batten down the hatches guin!
Wes, could you please have the basic courtesy towards the other posters here to edit that mess? Otherwise I doubt anyone will bother to read it. (I certainly won't)
Re: batten down the hatches guin!
there you go, sorry.
Re: batten down the hatches guin!
you are welcome. my computer skills are not up to snuff, but I m trying.....