CapeCodToday Blog Chowder

President Palin

There, I said it, stare at it, let it wash over you. Any statement ever made about Obama's experience or judgment, washed away by the presence of 20 month Alaska Governor, Sarah Palin. It's breathless, I'm not even sure where to begin? A person that proclaimed she didn't know for sure what the VP does? Someone who had met John McCain, once? That fact alone would tell you, this is not John McCain's idea. As I've said before, you can dispel the notion that there is such a thing as the straight talk express anymore.

You cannot possibly take serious a campaign that speaks of how dangerous these times are, domestically and overseas, then nominates someone who has never had a whiff of experience with these matters. Dismissing Palin is easy, so easy that the Obama campaign most likely won't need to lift a finger. The first, more important decision you make before the American people in these crucial times, and compare what the 2 candidates have done.

It is not a matter of holding up a female to a different standard. It is a matter of holding Palin or anyone, up to the standard of what is needed in a vice president, particularly a vice president when the presidential candidate just turned 72.

So yes, The Obama campaign just says- the American people will look at out respective decisions and draw their own conclusions. Fresh meat to the media is a dangerous thing. Sarah Palin has not been on the national stage, having to answer questions about why she is being investigated, why she thinks global warming isn't man made, why she laughed at an opponent being called a bitch and a cancer on a radio show, knowing the person was a cancer survivor?

The GOP has to hope she is a quick study in being able to parrot McCain's positions, because they will go after her hard for details. Though I understand that Cindy McCain said Palin had foreign policy experience since Alaska is close to Russia.

STEPHANOPOULOS: But she has no national security experience.

McCAIN: You know, the experience that she comes from is what she's done in government, and remember, Alaska is the closest part of our continent to Russia. It's not as if she doesn't understand what's at stake here.

 

Bourne To Labor

Residents of Bourne should know X amount of local knowledge, with X = "roughly whatever this column feels you should know." You may miss an election or a great storm now and then, but you'll break about even statistically. You'll never miss an event that has food.

Today, we'll give you the things that people of Bourne are discussing.

Labor Day...

While we value the contribution of the working man to American culture, we're using the ol' LD to discuss transportation and tourism. It breaks down to about 3 or 4 different tacks:

- The bridges should be fun.

- Things are about to get a LOT more silent after Monday night. All those annoying but free-spending Connecticut and NY folks are Going West, Young Man. If your business isn't in the black already, you just might end up on the welfare all winter.

- If you prefer the quiet, desolate Cape Cod scene for your tourism dollar... start making reservations now. I'd recommend late September/early October, but to each their own.

A friend of mine at Mann Farm in Buzzards Bay told me that they have already begun the advanced stages of the cranberry harvest... may as well peep that if you drove all the way out here.

- If you live in Sandwich or Falmouth and you're not going over the Canal to get your gas in Bourne (and by "Bourne," I mean "Buzzards Bay"), you're straight up Busta. You can save like $150 a tank by crossing the mighty Bourne Bridge.

A friend of this column runs a gas station in Wareham, and he says that maybe half of his business right now is people coming over the bridge from Cataumet and Sandwich and so forth. These customers tell fuel horror stories of gas being 65 cents higher where they live, which is generally 5-20 minutes away.

People come off the Vineyard with worse stories, ranging from "I had to give the pump jockey some brains for gas" to "I put a gallon on layaway."

To put it monetarily, you're paying around $3.80 or so on the Cape side of Bourne. It gets worse the further you go out on yonder Cape. Likewise, it gets better as you go off Cape, maybe a $3.55 average. It's $3.65 at the former tugboat rotary for self-serve, $3.55 at Xtramart in Buzzards Bay, $3.54 at full-serve Lukoil in Wareham, culminating at a station near Tobey Hospital offering $3.49.

Or you can just gas up in Falmouth for indentured-servant prices. Or you can ride a f*cking bike, for all I care. I've done all that a girl can do here.

Refugees? NewBournes?

Much like his sister Katrina, Hurricane Gustav is looking at southern Louisiana and licking his chops.

Let the Internet show that the last time a hurricane created a huge refugee problem, Bourne represented fully. We opened up our naval air station and housed the houseless. If you go to New Orleans, you'd be hard-pressed to find someone with something bad to say about the good people of Bourne.

So, Cajuns... if y'all get smashed by bthe wrath of God again... we'll put you up. We're good like that.

Scallopfest 2008

While I'm allergic to seafood, I can still see the outright awesomeosity of the 2008 Bourne Scallop Fest. This year, the fun starts on September 19th and runs through the 21st.

Peep the details at www.bournescallopfest.com

Secrets Of Love, Tolerance - the "Code of AA" and Air Conditioning

Link: http://gourl.org/dsfaq

One of my favorite 'off-topic' topics about which I write and speak of is 'love'. The only thing better than 'love' is 'hate' - and with good reason as I shall later explain. Writers, poets, teachers, gurus, preachers and lovers of all ilk and persuasions have been trying to define love for centuries and they have come up with all kinds of descriptions. As with most things however, I find simplicity to best and it is a very poplar notion to agree with that - at least verbally . . . in actual practice? Eh....not so much.

Some people's idea of simplicity seems very complicated. I know some Simple Simon's who think that avoiding Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous is"Keeping It Simple". Can you believe that?

As alcoholics - or as any spiritually sick segment of humanity - we seem to have more than our fair share of hatred and we love little if at all. That is not exaggeration and I know it may even be a little offensive. But many of us define "love" as something "we feel" - something that "pleases us". That we know. We spend our entire lives pleasuring ourselves.Go forbid if we should experience any discomfort at all - then all hell breaks loose. Do you know how to tell an alcoholic in a restaurant? Simple. He's the one demanding to see the owner.

I like to think of air conditioning. When I was a kid growing up in D' Bronx during the summers were hot and humid. I did not like them. My mother had a room air conditioner for sleeping at night while we kids just sweat through those dog-nights. Stores had huge Fedders units that blew hot smelly air that reminded me of stale pretzel rods and dripped water onto our heads as we passed under them because they were mounted right over the entrance to the store. We had to run quickly under it and into the store or else receive that warm blast or smelly exhaust and maybe even get dripped on. The most considerate store owners ran a garden hose along the door jamb and up to catch that extra condensation - just like a little roof gutter system for a house.

When you are a kid you assume that that big noisy grey smelly machine is what has magically through the miracle of science- turned the air inside from warm to cool. It had not done that at all. It is not true. What it has done is that it has sucked out all of the heat from the air and then returned it into the room -- but sans the hot air. That's what that uncomfortable blast in the face was in the doorway - it was heat formerly in the room! It turns out that air conditioners do not pump in cold air - they remove the hot air and the default is devoid of heat - COLD! Damn!

What is light but the absence of dark? What is goodness? Isn't it the absence of evil? Dry means nothing more than 'not wet'. Even male is very simply the absence of female - perhaps not in biological terms but in spirit and purpose.

MediaNation reports on the Cape Blogger libel suit

MediaNation writes about the Robbins Report libel suit

Dan Kennedy is the region's preeminent media critic, and he wrote on Sunday about the attempt to stifle dissent here on Cape Cod by attorney Paul Revere II and his client Joe Dugas, both of Barnstable. We reprint Mr. Kennedy's complete column below;

Cape Cod blogger is sued for libel

Dan Kennedy is an assistant professor at the Northeastern University School of Journalism. He writes for the Guardian (U.K.), CommonWealth Magazine and the Boston Phoenix, and is a regular panelist on WGBH-TV's "Beat the Press," hosted by Emily Rooney. E-mail him at da {dot} kennedy {at} neu {dot} edu. Posted by Dan Kennedy at 10:53 AM

Whale-rescue program in trouble

Whale-rescue program in trouble

by Greg O'Brien

This article originally appeared in the Providence Journal on Sunday, August 31, 2008

It is 5:30 P.M. on a stunning late August day here, and the sun is low on the horizon, presaging the end of summer with an inky blue sky and a golden reflection on the water. Not far from MacMillan Wharf, just down from Town Hall in a stately clapboard home on Bradford Street once owned by renowned industrialist and art collector Walter B. Chrysler Jr., Provincetown Center for Coastal Studies Executive Director Rich Delaney sits at his desk, pondering the future of this world-class scientific research and public-education center and its expanding vision. Its vision, he notes, has morphed beyond the center’s foundational study and preservation of endangered right whales and humpback whales. But today, he’s all about whales.

“We’re a nexus between good science and proper management,” declares Delaney, no stranger to either, given his previous tenures as former Massachusetts assistant secretary of environmental affairs and former director of the Massachusetts Coastal Zone program. “It’s science with a deadline!”

The deadline that most concerns Delaney, named last year as head of the coastal-studies center founded 32 years ago, is the pending depletion in December of $450,000 in federal grants for the center’s distinguished Whale Disentanglement Program. This program covers a wide swath of ocean, from the Bay of Fundy, in Canada, to Key West, Fla.

The deadline that most concerns Delaney, named last year as head of the coastal-studies center founded 32 years ago, is the pending depletion in December of $450,000 in federal grants for the center’s distinguished Whale Disentanglement Program. This program covers a wide swath of ocean, from the Bay of Fundy, in Canada, to Key West, Fla.

In partnership with the National Marine Fisheries Service, under the domain of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the center oversees a network of more than 800 scientists and volunteers called the Atlantic Large Whale Disentanglement Network (ALWDN), which responds to whales caught in debris and fishing gear — the mammals’ prime cause of death, along with ship strikes. Since 1984, when the highly publicized effort began, the not-for-profit Provincetown Center for Coastal Studies has freed more than 97 large whales from life-threatening entanglements, as it has such other marine animals as dolphins, porpoises, seals and sea turtles. It is the only organization federally authorized to disentangle large, free-swimming whales.

“Without an infusion of additional monies now being sought, the program is in jeopardy,” says Delaney, noting that most, if not all, of the surviving 350 North Atlantic right whales, up to 56 feet long, will have migrated to Cape Cod Bay by January, and will remain in local waters until May, when migrating humpback whales, up to 50 feet long, arrive and stay through October.

“On their migration up from Florida in the fall, the right whales will run thorough an obstacle course of entangling fishing nets and debris, ” says Delaney, noting that coastal-center teams disentangled eight right whales last year, most from January through April. The right whale was so named in 18th Century days because it was the “right whale” to catch — “slow, right for the picking, plenty of whale oil and they floated after being harpooned,” says Delaney, noting that the species is now closely monitored under the coastal center’s Right Whale Habitat Studies program.

“The principle disentanglement technique,” adds Delaney in a reference to the center’s Web site ( www.coastalstudies.org), “is a modification of an old whaling practice called kegging, involves attaching large floats, or kegs, to the gear entangling the animal. The floats add buoyancy and drag to the animal, making it difficult for it to dive, eventually tiring it out. The desired result is a relatively immobile animal that is safer to cut free.” The kegging system, he adds, is designed for swift release should the rescue attempt fail; in those cases, a transponder or small buoy is attached to track the whale for a more appropriate time to disentangle.

In early July, for example, a Provincetown Center for Coastal Studies team responded to a nine-year-old female humpback whale that was reported severely entangled with one-inch line. After seven hours of fighting strong southwest winds, the rescue team succeeded in removing much of the life-threatening entangled rope, but the whale’s long-term health will not be known for months. The young humpback, known to researchers as Estuary, had been identified earlier as part of the center’s Aerial Photo Identification Program and catalogued in a research consortium with Boston’s New England Aquarium.

Such rescue efforts — often splashed on front pages of newspapers across America or on the evening news — are in as much peril as the whales themselves, if additional funding is not obtained by December.

The pending funding cut in the whale-disentanglement program, representing close to 25 percent of PCCS’s annual operating budget and half of its federal grants, would deeply damage the program. Additional private funding and/or an emergency federal supplement are being urgently sought.

“Hopefully with our congressional delegation’s help, money will be allocated in the ’09 budget, but with a new administration and a new Congress, next year’s budget won’t take affect for least three months, and perhaps six to nine months,” says Delaney, noting that Congressman William Delahunt, of the 10th Congressional District, and Massachusetts Senators John Kerry and Edward Kennedy were working diligently to restore the funding. “At the moment, no money is available for this program in January, and we don’t want to be in the position of having to dismantle it, even temporarily.”

Concedes Delahunt’s chief of staff, Mark Forest, “We’re facing a crisis for the disentanglement program. Congress has significantly cut funding while demands have grown.” Forest, however, is hopeful that the funds ultimately will be restored. Delahunt, he said, has won initial approval for a $500,000 disentanglement-fund earmark in the House Appropriations Committee’s draft of the fiscal ’09 budget. But earmarks — appropriation requests outside the line-item federal budget — can be politically contentious, particularly in an election year when the divisive topic of such earmarks is sure to be debated again. Meanwhile, Delahunt is also speaking with top NOAA officials about “reprogramming” funds for whale-disentanglement efforts while the federal budget is being vetted, Forest said

Acknowledging the uncertainty of politics and a new presidency, Forest noted, “The coastal center’s disentanglement program is highly regarded, and we are confident that in the long term we will resolve the problem. Unfortunately, the budget will not get resolved until some time next year. Meanwhile, we need to throw out a lifeline to keep this program alive.” Let’s hope they get it.

Greg O’Brien is editor and president of Stony Brook Group, a publishing and political/communications strategy company based in Brewster, and the author/editor of several books about Cape Cod and the Islands.  Read Greg's blog, Codfish Press here on CapeCodToday.com.

I'm With the Band

Thanks to all participants... mostly that's Rob Logan's Surf Series in the background... you can see my ANGEL-MERMAID WAR behind the neck of the bass fiddle of Cheryl Kain and her Swing Crew...  photo courtesy of The Grateful Dead Guy...   the show's up for a month... www.studioonsloughroad.com

Derby time; Sportsmen are heard at the polls; Line crews thrive on working above it all

Fishing derby season here
Tuna on Stellwagen, Bass and Blues off Ptown

The stripers have been a little spotty in the Canal, but night fishing is producing some fish up to 25 pounds. There are plenty of blues in Cape Cod Bay, and I guess you won't have any trouble catching your limit of 10 fish.

The big news over the past couple of weeks has been about the giant tuna caught off Stellwagen Bank. The smaller bluefins, between 50 to 150 pounds, have been giving local charter skippers plenty of action. Capt. Mark Owens landed three "footballs" that went about 75 pounds, and Steve Putney has had some great luck with the big ones, landing one that weighed about 704 pounds and Aug. 17 took one that tipped the scale at 510 pounds.

The bass and blues are still active off Race Point, and the power plant has been producing some good fish in recent weeks. The freshwater fishing has slowed down considerably, as it always does in mid to late August. Steve and I went down to Long Pond last week and he caught one small brown, which was released, and all I caught was a couple of white perch. We moved about three times and even the white perch were tough to find.

The state will be stocking local ponds next month, so the fall fishing should be excellent. Little Pond has been good, if you're fishing from a boat, and largemouth bass on Billington Sea have been good. If you're trying your luck at Billington, try surface plugs in the early evening and shiners throughout the day... Old Colony Memorial.
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Power boosters
Line crews thrive working above it all

This is a high-wire act laced with 345,000 volts of electricity to make it interesting. For the overhead line workers at power company NStar, a typical day means hauling hundreds of pounds of gear up a pole almost 10 stories high, regardless of the weather, to work on wires that carry enough electricity to kill a person in an instant.
   "We chose to do this. It's a different job, but it's nice being outside with a sense of independence," said Robert Sprague, 49, of Plymouth, an 18-year veteran of line work for NStar. On this day, he and his crew were doing maintenance on power lines that run from the Cape Cod Canal power plant through Carver and into Bridgewater. "You're out here away from other people."
   The work is long and arduous, necessitating driving heavy ladder trucks down rugged dirt access roads and setting up on hilly terrain, breaking out the safety gear, tools, and equipment in all kinds of weather. "You either like this work or you don't," said Don Boudreau, manager of the Plymouth district for NStar. "When you get out here, everything's bigger and heavier"... Globe.

Sportsmen are heard at the polls
83% will vote, mostly for McCain

Sportsmen have a solid history of voting, with nine out of 10 registered to vote and 83 percent of those say they will vote in the November election, according to a new survey by the Congressional Sportsmen's Foundation (CSF). Overall, there are an estimated 40 million sportsmen of voting age in the United States.

"Sportsmen are active voters and prefer candidates who align with them on hunting and fishing issues," said Jeff Crane, president of the CSF. "The attention presidential candidates give to sportsmen's issues is well-aimed."

Among sportsmen, John McCain holds a significant lead over his opponent Barack Obama, with a 14-point margin according to the survey. When asked who they planned to vote for in November, 45 percent said McCain and 31 percent said Obama...

Pre-register to hunt at Otis
Deer hunters who want to hunt at the Massachusetts Military Reservation (also referred to as the MMR, Camp Edwards or Otis Air Force Base) on Cape Cod, must pre-register with the MassWildlife Southeast Wildlife District by Nov. 1. Hard copies of the registration forms along with more details on the hunt are available at the District Office in Bourne and the Field Headquarters in Westborough. The form is posted in MassWildlife's website here... Standard-Times.

Its Goodbye to Cape Cod for Some Friends

But for many others it will be until I can return again.

Old Cape Cod

If you're fond of sand dunes and salty air,
quaint little villages here and there,
you're sure to fall in love with Old Cape Cod.

If you like the taste of a lobster stew
served by a window with an ocean view,
you're sure to fall in love with Old Cape Cod.

Winding roads that seem to beckon you.
Miles of green beneath the skies of blue.
Church bells chimin' on a sunday morn
remind you of the town where you were born.

If you spend an evening you'll want to stay,
watching the moonlight on Old Cape Cod bay.
You're sure to fall in love with Old Cape Cod.

You're sure to fall in love, in love, in love.
You're sure to fall in love, in love,
with Old Cape Cod, Old Cape Cod.

Written by Claire Rothrock, Milton Yakus and Allan Jeffrey

From the time that Patti Page first recorded that song in 1957 for Mercury Records and way beyond the edge of time. It will always be the timeless song that echoes the feelings of so many people who come to visit here on the Cape. Despite the crazy traffic at times,  its a vacation for the family. Here one can find peace and connect with nature. Its not long lines in big amusement parks although the minature golf courses can draw quite a crowd. Its a less stressful vacation when plans can be flexible according to weather and there's always a chance for a stop  that will include a day at the beach. Families bond and memories are made as people begin to reconnect. In many ways  I believe we should continue to keep it simple here and not become too commercialized . Keep those high rise hotels away and support those smaller motels. Try those local restaurants or pack up your picnic baskets  and head out to the beach, the bike trails,the lake or camp in the beauty of nature. Visit the local playhouses and enjoy a play its a great change from a movie now and again. The Cape has lots to offer and much to be explored. So while others leave to return to their jobs and their lives across the bridge. I hope others will return to share in the beauty this island of Cape Cod has to offer.

P.S. Hope you enjoy the video I made on You Tube its my tribute to Cape Cod.

European tourists helped B & B season here; A Better Way to Power Your Car

South Shore bed-and-breakfasts benefit from European tourists

There are more than 200 bed-and-breakfasts on Cape Cod. Innkeepers try to help each other by communicating with one another about the occupancy of their rooms.

Just before you approach the front door, the sweet smell of fresh baked dough and powdered sugar hits your nose. It's 8:30 a.m. and Christine Cox, an innkeeper at A White Swan in Plymouth, has just baked a bagel soufflé, a signature dish at the bed-and-breakfast.

Heidi Füehner, who has spent the past few days at A White Swan, is traveling from Germany with her husband Hans-Georg and son Johannes. Füehner said staying at a bed-and-breakfast is a great way for her family to learn intimate details about American culture.

Aside from providing a traditional American breakfast of pancakes, bacon and eggs, Cox said she tries to make something new everyday for her guests.

As bed-and-breakfasts on the South Shore and Cape Cod wrap up their peak season, they can celebrate a busy summer as they've experienced an influx of guests from Europe, thanks largely to the weak U.S. dollar compared to the Euro... Patriot Ledger.
_____

Want a Better Way to Power Your Car? It's a Breeze

Cape Cod's NIMBYs
While many residents in some places, such as Cape Cod, take a NIMBY (Not In My Backyard) view of wind farms, the opposite is true in much of the rest of the country -- including the ranch country that extends from Texas north through the Dakotas. There, it's a PIMBY (Put It in My Backyard) issue. In ranching regions, competition among communities for these wind farms, and the jobs and tax revenues that come with them, is intense. Each wind turbine on a rancher's land typically brings a royalty of $3,000 to $10,000 per year, with no investment on the landowner's part. And the ranchers can continue to graze cattle on the land.

Legendary Texas oilman T. Boone Pickens is half right. We do need to harness this country's wind resources for a homegrown source of electricity, as he has been urging this summer in expensive television ads. And we do need to reduce the $700 billion we may soon be paying annually for imported oil. But part two of Pickens's plan -- to move natural gas out of electricity production and use it to fuel cars instead -- just doesn't make sense.

Why not use the wind-generated electricity to power cars directly? Natural gas is still a fossil fuel that emits climate-changing gases when burned. Let's cut the natural-gas middleman.

Plug-in cars are here, nearly ready to market. We just need to put wind in the driver's seat. Several major auto manufacturers, including GM, Ford, Toyota and Nissan, are producing plug-in hybrids. Both Toyota and GM are committed to marketing plug-in hybrids in 2010. Toyota might even try to deliver a plug-in version of its Prius gas-electric hybrid, the bestseller whose U.S. sales match those of all other hybrids combined, next year... Washington Post.

Whale-rescue program in trouble

Whale-rescue program in trouble

by Greg O'Brien

This article originally appeared in the Providence Journal on Sunday, August 31, 2008

It is 5:30 P.M. on a stunning late August day here, and the sun is low on the horizon, presaging the end of summer with an inky blue sky and a golden reflection on the water. Not far from MacMillan Wharf, just down from Town Hall in a stately clapboard home on Bradford Street once owned by renowned industrialist and art collector Walter B. Chrysler Jr., Provincetown Center for Coastal Studies Executive Director Rich Delaney sits at his desk, pondering the future of this world-class scientific research and public-education center and its expanding vision. Its vision, he notes, has morphed beyond the center’s foundational study and preservation of endangered right whales and humpback whales. But today, he’s all about whales.

“We’re a nexus between good science and proper management,” declares Delaney, no stranger to either, given his previous tenures as former Massachusetts assistant secretary of environmental affairs and former director of the Massachusetts Coastal Zone program. “It’s science with a deadline!”

The deadline that most concerns Delaney, named last year as head of the coastal-studies center founded 32 years ago, is the pending depletion in December of $450,000 in federal grants for the center’s distinguished Whale Disentanglement Program. This program covers a wide swath of ocean, from the Bay of Fundy, in Canada, to Key West, Fla.

The deadline that most concerns Delaney, named last year as head of the coastal-studies center founded 32 years ago, is the pending depletion in December of $450,000 in federal grants for the center’s distinguished Whale Disentanglement Program. This program covers a wide swath of ocean, from the Bay of Fundy, in Canada, to Key West, Fla.

In partnership with the National Marine Fisheries Service, under the domain of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the center oversees a network of more than 800 scientists and volunteers called the Atlantic Large Whale Disentanglement Network (ALWDN), which responds to whales caught in debris and fishing gear — the mammals’ prime cause of death, along with ship strikes. Since 1984, when the highly publicized effort began, the not-for-profit Provincetown Center for Coastal Studies has freed more than 97 large whales from life-threatening entanglements, as it has such other marine animals as dolphins, porpoises, seals and sea turtles. It is the only organization federally authorized to disentangle large, free-swimming whales.

“Without an infusion of additional monies now being sought, the program is in jeopardy,” says Delaney, noting that most, if not all, of the surviving 350 North Atlantic right whales, up to 56 feet long, will have migrated to Cape Cod Bay by January, and will remain in local waters until May, when migrating humpback whales, up to 50 feet long, arrive and stay through October.

“On their migration up from Florida in the fall, the right whales will run thorough an obstacle course of entangling fishing nets and debris, ” says Delaney, noting that coastal-center teams disentangled eight right whales last year, most from January through April. The right whale was so named in 18th Century days because it was the “right whale” to catch — “slow, right for the picking, plenty of whale oil and they floated after being harpooned,” says Delaney, noting that the species is now closely monitored under the coastal center’s Right Whale Habitat Studies program.

“The principle disentanglement technique,” adds Delaney in a reference to the center’s Web site ( www.coastalstudies.org), “is a modification of an old whaling practice called kegging, involves attaching large floats, or kegs, to the gear entangling the animal. The floats add buoyancy and drag to the animal, making it difficult for it to dive, eventually tiring it out. The desired result is a relatively immobile animal that is safer to cut free.” The kegging system, he adds, is designed for swift release should the rescue attempt fail; in those cases, a transponder or small buoy is attached to track the whale for a more appropriate time to disentangle.

In early July, for example, a Provincetown Center for Coastal Studies team responded to a nine-year-old female humpback whale that was reported severely entangled with one-inch line. After seven hours of fighting strong southwest winds, the rescue team succeeded in removing much of the life-threatening entangled rope, but the whale’s long-term health will not be known for months. The young humpback, known to researchers as Estuary, had been identified earlier as part of the center’s Aerial Photo Identification Program and catalogued in a research consortium with Boston’s New England Aquarium.

Such rescue efforts — often splashed on front pages of newspapers across America or on the evening news — are in as much peril as the whales themselves, if additional funding is not obtained by December.

The pending funding cut in the whale-disentanglement program, representing close to 25 percent of PCCS’s annual operating budget and half of its federal grants, would deeply damage the program. Additional private funding and/or an emergency federal supplement are being urgently sought.

“Hopefully with our congressional delegation’s help, money will be allocated in the ’09 budget, but with a new administration and a new Congress, next year’s budget won’t take affect for least three months, and perhaps six to nine months,” says Delaney, noting that Congressman William Delahunt, of the 10th Congressional District, and Massachusetts Senators John Kerry and Edward Kennedy were working diligently to restore the funding. “At the moment, no money is available for this program in January, and we don’t want to be in the position of having to dismantle it, even temporarily.”

Concedes Delahunt’s chief of staff, Mark Forest, “We’re facing a crisis for the disentanglement program. Congress has significantly cut funding while demands have grown.” Forest, however, is hopeful that the funds ultimately will be restored. Delahunt, he said, has won initial approval for a $500,000 disentanglement-fund earmark in the House Appropriations Committee’s draft of the fiscal ’09 budget. But earmarks — appropriation requests outside the line-item federal budget — can be politically contentious, particularly in an election year when the divisive topic of such earmarks is sure to be debated again. Meanwhile, Delahunt is also speaking with top NOAA officials about “reprogramming” funds for whale-disentanglement efforts while the federal budget is being vetted, Forest said

Acknowledging the uncertainty of politics and a new presidency, Forest noted, “The coastal center’s disentanglement program is highly regarded, and we are confident that in the long term we will resolve the problem. Unfortunately, the budget will not get resolved until some time next year. Meanwhile, we need to throw out a lifeline to keep this program alive.” Let’s hope they get it.

Greg O’Brien is editor and president of Stony Brook Group, a publishing and political/communications strategy company based in Brewster, and the author/editor of several books about Cape Cod and the Islands.  Read Greg's blog, Codfish Press here on CapeCodToday.com.