CHATHAM – The sighting of an injured and bleeding seal, apparently a recent victim of a shark attack, prompted the closure of Lighthouse Beach to swimming on Sunday. The beach was closed for about two hours while harbor patrol and park department staff searched the waters immediately adjacent to the popular beach. Harbormaster Stuart Smith said the seal was later seen along the shore, apparently alive but with...

Twenty-five years ago tomorrow, Hurricane Bob sped across Southeast Massachusetts, causing hundreds of millions of dollars in damage and shattering a peaceful Cape Cod summer. Winds gusted to 98 mph in Harwich and 115 mph at Stage Harbor from the Category 3 storm, trashing the boats in area harbors, downing countless trees and leaving more than 300,000 Cape and Islands residents without power. Still, owing ...

CHATHAM — Any recent wet weather aside, the town's water system is being taxed to its limits by this summer's drought. But even more importantly, it's feeling the pressure of increased demand year after year. Last week, selectmen had an update from Water and Sewer Advisory Committee Chairman Larry Sampson, and heard again that the amount of water being pumped from the aquifer is increasing year to year. Board ...

HARWICH — The proposed $7 million Saquatucket Harbor waterside renovation project will be put on hold for a year while the town works through additional permitting issues required by the Army Corps of Engineers. There are two issues the town will need to address. One is the need for additional biological testing of dredge material in the harbor, while the other relates to a 408 permit, requiring the Corps to a...

NORTH HARWICH — Each year, more people visit the Family Pantry's headquarters for help with food, clothing and other necessities. Thanks to generous supporters and a partnership with the Chatham Council on Aging, the Pantry will be taking their work to the streets next month. With donations from the Simon Foundation, the Greater Boston Food Bank and TD Bank, the Pantry has purchased a second-hand refrigerate...

EAST HARWICH — There were two motor vehicle accidents in less than 48 hours last week at one of the worst intersections to travel on Cape Cod, Route 39/ Pleasant Bay Road. One of the accidents was a three-car collision which occurred when a vehicle stopped at the southbound stop sign on Pleasant Bay Road observed a vehicle heading east on Route 39, which stopped to take a left onto Pleasant Bay Road and anothe...

HARWICH — The town's building commissioner over the past two years, David Riquinha, has announced his resignation. Riquinha, who lives in Dartmouth, will be taking a similar position closer to home and family in the town of Wareham. Riquinha said it takes him an hour and 10 minutes to get from Dartmouth to Harwich, and it will only take him 20 minutes to go from Dartmouth to Wareham. The new position he will t...

HARWICH ─ Monomoy jiu jitsu teacher John Herring won't do anything he wouldn't expect his students to do, which is why on Saturday Herring, a brown belt, took to the mats of the Sapateiro Invitational against black belt opponent Matt Arroyo in Herring's first-ever pay-per-view event. Though Herring fell to Arroyo during a transition in which Arroyo seized an opportunity to put him in a choke hold, he learned...

CHATHAM ─ The music has stopped at Veterans Field. While some neighbors of the ballpark might feel a sense of relief, true baseball fans know what the silence means: another summer season of the Chatham Anglers has come to a close. Fans knew it was baseball time when the tunes started playing through the sound system beginning in June, peppered with the announcements of players at bat, the on-field action, h...

HARWICH ─ After a whirlwind summer in which the mantra was pretty much eat, sleep and breathe baseball, the players that comprised the 2016 Harwich Mariners have headed home. Save for a handful of local club team games, Whitehouse Field is quiet, the lights that glowed almost nightly now dimmed. But the whispers of another standout summer still echo in the dugouts, the outfield, and in the countless memories ma...

CHATHAM ─ The Monomoy Theatre's season finale is a play that is known as much for its ribald humor as its fugacious nature, but director MichaelJohn McGann is optimistic that the country's current political climate will propel “Johnny On A Spot” into side-splitting success. The show, which McGann describes as being “about a Yankee, a fixer, an amanuensis who comes to a Southern governor, gets to be his frien...

As with other aspects of life in Chatham, sharks have worked their way into the 45 th Festival of the Arts sponsored by the Creative Arts Center (CAC) in Chatham. “I have always loved sharks,” said Rich Benson of Harwich, a woodcarver, one of 120 artists and craftsmen participating in the show which begins on Friday. “I began carving whales, stripers, tuna and all kinds of fish back in the ‘80s,” Benson ex...

Ben instructs his wannabe comedy writer grandsons, Eugene and Stanley Jerome, in Simon's "Broadway Bound" now at the Monomoy Theatre: "If you make it funny enough, CBS won't even notice!"   Grandpa, who hasn't laughed since the stock market crashed, is an avowed socialist.  Ben is disappointed that his daughter Blanche has married the richest man in the garment district, thereby "starving half the country." Be...

It’s tough being a teenager, it’s tough living with a teenager. Teenagers in both mind and body are on the brink of adulthood and torn between that and their childhood. In the latest production at the Cape Cod Theatre Company, Home of the Harwich Junior Theatre, the usual angst of being a teenager is even more complicated. In “Selkie, Between Land and Sea” written by award-winning playwright and young adult...

HARWICH – Go figure. She’s the only person in her family who doesn’t wear glasses, and now Dr. Ashley Jadene Stevens is an optometrist. Having graduated in May from the New England College of Optometry in Boston, Stevens is now in practice with Sheinkopf and Tomasik Eye Care Associates in South Yarmouth. Dr. Sheinkopf has recently retired, which leaves plenty of work for his newly-minted colleague. This is ...

Twenty five years and a day ago, at around 4 p.m., a Category 3 hurricane barreled over Cape Cod, leaving a swath of destruction that's been unmatched in the quarter century that followed. Everyone has their Hurricane Bob stories. We remember the piles of splintered boats in Allen Harbor and the countless trees and limbs left on the ground. Then there was the smell: a distinctive odor from the downed trees, mi...