February 2004

By Sandy Macfarlane

    The next line of defense in Pleasant Bay's protection must be the Bay's watershed. The Friends of Pleasant Bay spearheaded the drive to get the Bay designated an Area of Critical Environmental Concern, and we have contributed in many ways to the Bay-wide management plan that was reaffirmed for a second five-year term by local residents last spring. These two achievements bode well for the Bay. But they aren't enough. Now we must look further back, to the land around the Bay.
 
    What we do on the land around the Bay can profoundly affect the water in it. The Friends are extending our stewardship responsibilities to encompass concern for any land activities that affect the well-being of the Bay -- and that means an expanded focus on the Pleasant Bay Watershed.  Watershed has become our new buzzword -- and that of Cape Cod environmentalists in general -- and FOPB has taken on the challenge to color everything we do with a watershed perspective.

    By now, most people who live on Cape Cod know that we rely on a sole-source aquifer for our drinking water, a term that took at least a decade to become common knowledge.  It makes sense now - all our drinking water comes from the sky and is stored in the ground beneath our very feet, not in some remote reservoir somewhere, piped to us in the way the Quabbin Reservoir and MWRA system serve Metropolitan Boston.  Here, we have individual septic systems instead of municipal sewer

Continued on page 4

Page 2

Early Autumn
On Muddy Creek

Photo by Barry Donahue

Continued from page 1

Your directors also renewed our membership in The Compact of Cape Cod Conservation Trusts for another year.
 
    Wastewater management in the Pleasant Bay watershed is a major concern for the Pleasant Bay Resource Management Alliance, made up of the Towns of Chatham, Harwich and Orleans. All Friends of Pleasant Bay should know that the management oversight of the Pleasant Bay Alliance was renewed by the voters of the three Town Meetings this past Spring and ratified by the Secretary of the Executive Office of Environmental Affairs for another 5 years.  We hope Brewster will join its neighbors in the Alliance soon -- the Bay's watershed includes a sizeable fraction of Brewster's land. 
 
    Uncontrolled movement of nitrogen compounds from septic systems through the groundwater into the Bay has demonstrable effects on the Bay's ecology. As an example of this, last summer saw an unusual outbreak in Little Pleasant Bay of 'witches' hair', tentatively identified as Enteromorpha clathera, a macroalgae. A similar macroalgal 'bloom' in Chatham's waters was identified as Enteromorpha flexuosa spp. paradoxa. These are both native seaweeds! Biologists think that last year's unusually cool Spring prevented one-celled algae from taking advantage of nitrogen compounds coming into the Bay in large quantities due to the heavy Spring rains. That in turn made the nitrogen available for rapid and unusually sustained growth of the more complex 'witches' hair' macroalgae during the summer.
 
    In addition to the Pleasant Bay Alliance's program for adult citizen volunteers, under which biweekly water testing is conducted throughout the Bay from June to September, local school children do water testing in the Bay year-around. Each year we fund School Grants for science projects. Last year's recipient, Harwich Middle School teacher Sally Andreola, continues to take her fifth-graders on monthly trips to Pleasant Bay to perform tests of water and wind conditions. Those of you who attended last July's Annual Meeting of the Friends at

September to $20,000, and added to it the $1,642 contributed by Robin and Tony Davis from the entry fees they collected for the annual August catboat regatta sponsored by Arey's Pond Boat Yard.
 
    In the same vein, as stewards of Pleasant Bay, your board commissioned a study of land use in Pleasant Bay's watershed this past year, a study conducted by The Compact of Cape Cod Conservation Trusts. The Compact ranked for us all undeveloped properties of 2 or more acres, and all underdeveloped properties of 5 or more acres, in terms of several criteria, such as importance as wildlife habitat, proximity to freshwater ponds, and presence of public wellheads or saltwater ponds. Our objective was and remains to help inform and guide public efforts to limit development in the Bay's watershed.
 
    There are a total of 21,306 acres in the Pleasant Bay watershed. Over 60 percent --- 13,422 of those acres -- remain either as undeveloped parcels of 2 or more acres or underdeveloped properties with 5 or more acres which could be further subdivided. These are distributed over the Towns of Brewster (2783 acres), Chatham (3323 acres), Harwich (2290 acres) and Orleans (5026 acres).
 
     Only 1520 acres, or 11 per cent of the 13,422 acres ranked by the Compact, were considered worthy of public acquisition or of being prime candidates for  conservation restrictions.  The Compact ranked 681 acres out of the 1520 as high priority properties. Orleans, which has the most acreage in the watershed, had only 182 acres considered as high priority.
 
    The Compact of Cape Cod Conservation Trusts generated a color-coded ranking map of properties in Pleasant Bay's watershed, along with a spreadsheet breaking down the rankings by Town and by priority. The Friends subsequently authorized and funded the Compact to disseminate this information to Town Conservation Commissions, Land Trusts, the Pleasant Bay Alliance and to individual landowners in the watershed.

Continued on page 3

Page 3

Summer
Reading
In the Narrows







Photo by Barry Donahue

Page 4

Pilgrim Lake,Orleans.

The Pleasant Bay watershed encompasses freshwater sources in four towns - Brewster, Chatham, Harwich and Orleans.



Photo by
Barry Donahue

Bay And Watershed: Activities Miles From Pleasant Bay's Shores

Continued from Page 1

of the pyramid. Now imagine another pyramid-shaped mountain sitting directly to the right of the first one. Rainfall flows down four sides of the second mountain as well. It's easy to visualize a particular stream flowing down one side of the first mountain -- the east-facing side, for example -- and easy to see that stream merging with water flowing down from the opposite (that is, west-facing) side of the second mountain. The water from those two mountain streams will merge into a river flowing down through the valley between the two mountains -- to make it easier, imagine the river's course is due south. Any rainfall that lands anywhere south of the two mountain peaks will flow down to the valley river and eventually reach the sea.

    That land -- where all the rainfall flows in the same direction -- constitutes a watershed. The principle is the same for a peninsula like Cape Cod, because even without mountain peaks and rivers, water everywhere must flow downhill. Here it might be helpful to imagine the center of the peninsula as the peak of a pyramid-shaped mountain. Rainfall is still influenced by gravity, so it seeps into the ground and flows downhill in exactly the same way as in our imagined two-mountain scenario, but here it flows primarily as groundwater, rather than as surface streams. Here groundwater flows in four directions as well, to Cape Cod Bay, Buzzards Bay, Nantucket Sound or the Atlantic Ocean.  Remember, though, before the groundwater gets to each of those major bodies of water, it hits the smaller estuaries first -- just as water falling on the east side of the Rockies runs through smaller tributaries before it gets to the Mississippi and then the Gulf. As the largest estuary on Cape Cod, Pleasant Bay has a huge watershed. Scientists using test wells and computer models have only recently defined the boundary of the entire watershed and the boundaries of the numerous sub-watersheds that make it up. The over

systems, and so our wastewater eventually enters our drinking-water supply. Once the idea of a sole-source aquifer became established, public discussion of wastewater issues became much more substantial and focused.

    Our first task now is to make sure that the concept of a watershed also becomes part of the common knowledge of Cape Codders. Our unusual geography makes the effort a bit tricky. The standard definition of a watershed is "the region or area drained by a river or stream; a drainage area," and a common illustration uses the Continental Divide. All the rain and snow that falls on the west side of the Rocky Mountains flows downhill and eventually, via rivers, to the Pacific Ocean. That western land between the Divide and the Pacific is a drainage area, one huge watershed, with each individual stream or river having its own sub-watershed. Similarly all the precipitation that falls on the east side flows downhill and eventually to the Mississippi River and the Gulf of Mexico, and hence encompasses another distinct watershed.

    We don't have mountains on the Cape to make the drainage patterns easy to figure out. We don't even really have rivers.  Oh, there are a few streams we call rivers that may flow from a lake or pond to the sea, and we have a few salt rivers, but there are few features on the Cape that the rest of the world would call rivers. So it becomes a bit more difficult visualize a watershed on the Cape.
 
    But water flows downhill everywhere, even where elevations only extend a few feet above sea level. To get the picture, visualize a "mountain" shaped like a pyramid, with a peak and four sides, each facing a different compass direction, North, South, East and West. Rainfall lands on each of the four sides and so a mountain stream flows down each side

Continued on page 5

Can And Will Affect The Bay's Long-Term Environmental Health

Continued from page 5

perfect conditions for seaweed mats to choke and clog the waterways, or for so much plankton to grow that light can't get to eelgrass.  Eventually, the seaweeds and other organic matter that go wild with excessive nitrogen fertilizer will break down into a heavy black ooze where shellfish can't live, and the oxygen will be depleted so much that fish can't survive either.

    We know most of you know all this already.  You've  read about nitrogen and watersheds for several years now - they have been added to your vocabulary.  But the Pleasant Bay watershed has many residents who are newcomers and who may not have heard this message before.  The Friends' job is to ensure that everyone who lives in the watershed gains insight into the connection between the land and the water.  We can't fully protect the Bay if we falter on the land - they are intricately and intrinsically connected.
 
    We have a newly expanded Watershed Issues Committee that includes participation by numerous FOPB board members, and we will be searching in the weeks and months ahead for new ways to demonstrate the importance of watersheds to everyone who has a Pleasant Bay Watershed Address. We also need to ensure that those who use the Bay and recreate on it -- even if they don't live in the watershed - also gain the knowledge that the Bay's beauty and bounty are in danger.  We have a long road ahead in correcting past mistakes and many of the remedial projects will be extremely costly.  We desperately need Cape Codders to support initiatives aimed at protecting the water quality of our groundwater, of our beloved Bay, and of the other water resources of the peninsula.
 
    You will be hearing a lot more about this in the coming months.  Stay tuned!

all boundary line runs north of Pochet Neck in Orleans, reaches west almost to Route 137 in Brewster and Hawksnest Pond in Harwich, and encompasses all of Chatham north of Old Queen Anne Road and Main Street.

    What does this mean for the Bay?  It means that anything we do on any of the land within that boundary line will eventually have an impact on the Bay's water quality.  It also means that people who live miles from the shores of Pleasant Bay are impacting it.

    Above ground, because water flows downhill, the consequences are easy to see. Picture a lawn sloping to the road. Suppose it's just been fertilized and then the skies open up in a spring thunderstorm. The rain will wash off the lawn and into the road, carrying some of the fertilizer with it. From there, it will travel down the road or to a catch basin, or be piped to another catch basin or leach into the ground -- whatever route it takes it eventually will get to the Bay. That's what happens too to the soap used in car washing, and to the chemicals from a leaky car hose, and to the pesticides spread around the house to eliminate insects or moles or unwanted plants in our lawns. Any of the things we normally take for granted as no big deal can add up to a tremendously big deal when they all converge down at the Bay.
 
    Below ground, the same thing happens. What substances aren't  washed off the surface by rainfall will filter down and reach our groundwater, and within the watershed, all groundwater flows eventually to the Bay.  Everyone's septic system contributes nitrogen to the groundwater, whether it's an ancient cesspool or a brand new approved system costing thousands of dollars.  Nitrogen is the key element in lawn fertilizer, and it acts as the Bay's fertilizer too, helping to provide

Page 6

By George Cooper
 
     What a difference between the amounts of 'marine' trash found on Nauset Beach versus the shores of Pleasant Bay! A score of almost 1,500 pounds to 112!
 
     The Roots and Shoots Club of the Cape Cod Lighthouse Charter School recently reported in a Letter to the Editor of The Cape Codder that some 120 school volunteers picked up nearly 1,500 pounds of 'marine trash' from Nauset Beach during Coastsweep 2003 on the morning of September 28th.
 
     On that same day, the Friends of Pleasant Bay sponsored a similar cleanup, coordinated with Coastsweep 2003. Eight of the Friends' board of directors and 20 other public volunteers assembled at five public access sites during the afternoon low tide of September 28th. A total of nine and one-half miles of shoreline, from Allen (Minister's) Point to Ryder's Cove and Fox Hill Island around to Little Pleasant Bay, were 'swept' on that afternoon and subsequent low tides. Trash objects picked up were bagged and data entries were recorded for each item recovered. Gloves, bags and pencils and data cards were supplied by the organizers of Coastsweep 2003.

     'Marine' trash collected in 20 bags from around the wrackline along nine and one-half miles of Pleasant Bay had a total weight of 112 pounds. In addition, two FOPB directors, Roy Terwilliger and Richard Thomas, along with a public volunteer, helped a couple living on Tar Kiln Road recover a heavy, two-wheeled cart that had been stolen from their property and dumped onto South Orleans Beach. Roy estimates the cart weighed over one hundred pounds, but we didn't count it as 'marine' trash.
 
     Unlike Nauset's open beach, much of Pleasant Bay's shore can only be accessed at low tide. Revetments, piers and salt marsh inlets prevent walking along extensive stretches of the shoreline at high tide. Lest we forget, also, most of this shoreline is private property, and public beach access is confined to three areas along Route 28: Chatham's Jackknife Beach, Harwich's Bay Road Beach, and the South Orleans Beach with parking along the causeway on Route 28. Parking is limited at all three.
 
     These so-called 'rural' beaches, without sanitary facilities, have seen marked increases in public use in recent summers. In spite of this, these beaches are remarkably clean. When the data cards were tabulated and the items recovered from 'public' beaches were compared to those from 'private' beach frontages, there were no obvious differences in the kinds or amounts of trash recovered.
 
     Many objects found along the wrackline throughout the bay came off boats. A life jacket, a fancy seat cushion, rubber gloves used by shellfishermen, boat brushes and oily bilge rags were obviously lost accidentally or negligently discarded (Shame!). In the latter category were numerous plastic-lined bags used to contain 50 pounds of

Cargill Top-Flow crystallized salt with yellow sodium prussiate (sodium ferrocyanide), which prevents salt from caking. Cargill's Top-Flow salt with ferrocyanide is used to harvest razor clams, which rise out of their holes when Top-Flow is poured on them. These salt bags were found primarily on the northern shore of big Pleasant Bay, but some were also found in North Chatham.
 
     Fishing lures, monofilament line and bait containers (41 items), and plastic shotgun shell casings (12 items), could be either from boat or shoreline activities. Two Chatham Town landings, Scatteree and Strong Island, had the most cigarette filters (81) littered around the narrow landings, followed by South Orleans Beach with 57 filters. Cigarette filters are biodegradable cellulose acetates. A total of 151 cigarette filters recorded for Pleasant Bay stands in contrast to the 3,560 filters recovered from Nauset Beach. It should be noted that the Lighthouse Charter School has been doing annual Coastsweeps of Nauset Beach for the past three years, while it has been many years since the Friends did a Coastsweep in Pleasant Bay.
 
     The bulk of the trash recovered around Pleasant Bay consisted of bits and pieces of plastic rope, unidentifiable plastic and rubber objects, plastic bags or sheeting, the remains of food containers, plastic and glass bottles, beverage cans, construction materials, fragments of buoys, bits of styrofoam, and lots of string and ribbons with the attached remains of rubber balloons. We did not recover any Mylar ballons, which are a concern for wildlife. Lost clothing, shoes, flipflops, toys, pails and dip nets speak to the forgetfulness of parents or the carelessness of children.
 
     All in all, however, 112 pounds of foreign objects that don't belong on pristine beaches is not a lot of trash for almost ten miles of shoreline. Especially since a thorough coastsweep of Pleasant Bay has not been conducted in years. The yield speaks to those folks who police their private beaches and, perhaps, to the awareness of the public using the 'rural' beaches that they have to clean up after themselves because there is no 'park' service to clean up after them.
 
     It will be of interest to compare next year's trash harvest with this year's. We hope to have more public participation in Coastsweep 2004! There are lots more areas of the bay that have never been 'swept'. The results of this year's effort will be tabulated and posted on the Ocean Conservancy website: www.coastalcleanup.org and www.state.ma.us/czm/coastsweep.htm.
 
     Last year, 3,389 people in Massachusetts participated in the cleanup of 191 miles of coastal shoreline. 40,124 pounds of trash were recovered, which averages out to 210 pounds of trash per mile. Recording individual items on data sheets allows the tracking of the types of marine debris being recovered by region and throughout the world. Comparative data for 2002 are available by consulting the International Coastal Cleanup website: www.coastalcleanup.org, click on Participation.
 
     The Friends of Pleasant Bay wish to acknowledge the support of the Massachusetts Office of Coastal Zone Management and the Urban Harbors Institute of the University of Massachusetts, Boston in providing supplies and for coordinating Coastsweep 2003.

Heading Out

Photograph by Barry Donahue

School Grants 2004:
Windows On The Bay

By Paul Niles
 
     This year's Friends of Pleasant Bay educational grant gives eighth-grade students at the Cape Cod Lighthouse Charter School the opportunity to add a whole new dimension to their learning. As spring approaches, each student will choose a small piece of the Pleasant Bay ecosystem to research and write about. By late spring, each of the 60 eighth-graders will  produce an in-depth article on their topic. Together, the articles will constitute a mosaic, an array of pieces coming together to create a vision of the Bay. The best articles will be published in the teen magazine The Write Connection, and the entire collection will be bound and displayed at local libraries.

    Beyond underwriting the publication costs, the grant is being used to bring writing mentors into the classroom.  Writers and scientists share many skills, including the ability to make clear, precise observations. Writing mentors are working alongside science teachers to assist students in honing their observational skills.  Mentors will then guide students through the writing process, from initial observations and impressions through to the finished products. As inspiration, students will read from exemplary natural history writers, including  local writers Robert Finch and John Hay. Students are currently studying techniques that make for clear technical science writing and will soon write a small piece using atomic-level dynamics to explain an observable macroscopic phenomenon (Why is sugar easy to melt, salt hard to melt? Why do metals conduct electricity, but rubber does not?, for a few examples).

    This grant allows us to bring together educational strands that schools often do not have the time, or the resources and expertise, to unite.  The nexus of clear scientific explanation, high-level writing, and local environmental study is a pinnacle that students rarely have the training to mount.  Through the generosity of the Friends, students at the Charter School are gearing up for the climb, and soon will be only too happy to share the view.

A rare sighting: Tony Davis of Arey's Pond Boat Yard and the Friends of Pleasant Bay board actually taking time to enjoy sailing one of his creations himself. Every August, Arey's Pond catboats and other traditional craft from all over New England and beyond converge on Pleasant Bay for a Regatta that Tony and Robin Davis sponsor. It is a popular spectator event as well. The proceeds from the event are contributed to the Friends. The 2004 Regatta is scheduled for Sat., Aug. 14, with the race set to begin at 1:30 p.m.

Page 8

January Oasis,
In The River,
Orleans 2004

Photo by Barry Donahue

Treasurer's Report

Monomoy Surf Boat, Arey's Pond








Photo by

Barry Donahue

By Roy L. Terwilliger
 
     Not much has been said in past newsletters about the Friends' finances, and I thought as the new Treasurer I would give you an overview of our fiscal situation.  First, however, I would like to say thanks to Steve King for doing the Treasurer's job in an exemplary fashion for many years.
 
    The Friends' mission is to support projects that promote our understanding of the natural resources of Pleasant Bay. Greater knowledge will enhance the wise use of the resource as a whole. Over the years, the types of projects we've supported have been widely diverse.  One of the oldest is the School Grants Program.  Every year, one or two school projects are selected for funding from proposals submitted by school teachers from the Towns of Brewster, Chatham, Harwich and Orleans. Each funded project, focused on the Bay in some particular way, receives up to $4,000. Educating new generations about the need for stewardship of the Bay is an important aspect of our overall mission.  
 
     We also help support professional scientific inquiries into the Bay's current state and its future. One of our largest recent undertakings was the commissioning and underwriting of a two-year project, the Horseshoe Crab Study, conducted by biologists from the Boston University Marine Program. It resulted in publication of seven peer-reviewed scientific reports. The Friends raised over  $65,000 to fund those studies.
 
     In addition, during each year we also contribute to the Cape Cod Compact of Conservation Trusts, and provide grants to the Namequoit Sailing Association for a scholarship in their junior sailing school and to the Chatham-based rowing/sailing program of the Atlantic Challenge Foundation. We have provided funds to the Pleasant Bay Resource Management Alliance to support water testing in Pleasant Bay, and to help underwrite a study of the Bay's Intertidal Habitats. Our largest contribution recently has been $21,644 to the Harwich Conservation Trust to help complete the purchase of the Shea property on Muddy Creek.
 
    Publications are also one of our biggest financial investments and potential revenue streams, and a prime means of keeping Pleasant Bay in the forefront of area residents' consciousness.  Publishing two books, "Pleasant Bay: Stories from a Cape Cod Place" by Marcia Monbleau, in 1999, and "Rowing Forward Looking Back" by Sandy Macfarlane, in 2002, required considerable initial investments. In the case of "Pleasant Bay", we have only recently recouped our initial investment and though Rowing Forward continues to sell regularly, it will be some time before we break even.  In addition to these significant and influential new books, we are keeping Sears Nickerson's "The Bay As I See It" in print, as it has sold steadily for many years, as does the aerial-view poster of Pleasant Bay.  Finally, we also produce and distribute for free the Recreational Resource Guide for all who use the Bay. It cost us $1674 to publish the Guide last year. We also publish yearly a tide chart for Pleasant Bay which is distributed to the Friends by mail.
 
     All of these financial activities are supported by you in one of two ways, by your Annual Contributions and by Memorial Gifts.

Already in 2004, we have received over $1000 in memorials to two FOPB members, Philip Suter and David Foster, who passed away recently.
 
     In the past few years, we have become financially stable, with over $50,000 in the bank.  These funds will be used to support future projects, one of which is already in progress.  In 2004, the Friends bought a computer which will be used by Mark Borrelli, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Rhode Island, to conduct his study of the geology of Pleasant Bay. He will be using radar technology and core sampling of the bay's bottom to map the benthic character of the bay. He is also interested in changes in the bay's shoreline features and will be digitizing aerial photographs of the bay going back as far as 1938 up to the present. This digital information will be made available directly to the three towns in the Pleasant Bay Alliance.
 
     I hope the above information will give you a better look at how we get and how we spend our money.  Your contributions and gifts are the lifeblood of our financial success which allows us to undertake a wide variety of projects to carry out our mandate as stewards of Pleasant Bay.

Dock Policy:     Continued  from page 8

we can say, "We're sorry".  For those who enjoy looking at a more natural shoreline than a man-made shoreline, I guess we can say, "You're welcome."  For those who aren't sure, I guess we can say, "Take a ride on Lower County Road or drive by Falmouth's finger ponds and decide for yourself."
 
    But keep in mind that the motive force in the new approach is not just the visual aspect of docks.  It's the loss of shellfish habitat, often the degradation of fringe marsh or loss of eelgrass, the increase in soft sediments, the loss of tacking room, the necessity of small craft to be in the same place as larger boats and causing potential dangerous situations. We now know that Pleasant Bay was ahead of the curve nationally.  From an environmental perspective, that's not a bad place to be.

OFFICERS: 
                       George W. Cooper, President, Chathamport
                       Judith Bruce, Vice President, South Orleans
                       Carol Odell, Secretary, Chatham
                       Roy L. Terwilliger, Treasurer, East Harwich

DIRECTORS:
                           Patricia Anthony, Brewster
                           Anthony Davis, South Orleans
                           John Dickson, Brewster
                           Betsy Evans, Chatham
                           Richard Houston, Harwich
                           Richard Lovis, Orleans
                           Sandy Macfarlane, Orleans
                           Alan McClennen Jr., South Orleans
                           Jeff McLaughlin, Brewster
                           Jeff Norgeot, South Orleans
                           Pat Patterson, Brewster
                           Ken Simpson, Brewster
                           Bev Singleton, South Orleans
                           Dick Thomas, Harwich
                           Kathleen Wesp, Harwich

EMERITUS:
                           Alan McClennen, Brewster
                           Stephen King, Chathamport