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A Cape Cod Notebook can be heard every Tuesday morning at 8:45am and afternoon at 5:45pm.It's commentary on the unique people, wildlife, and environment of our coastal region.A Cape Cod Notebook commentators include:Robert Finch, a nature writer living in Wellfleet who created, 'A Cape Cod Notebook.' It won the 2006 New England Edward R. Murrow Award for Best Radio Writing.

Surfers Come as Time Reshapes Coast Guard Beach

Cape Cod Squad
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youtu.be/B38OOEhNM98

A few weeks ago, on an unusually warm, sunny afternoon in late February, I drove down to Coast Guard Beach in Eastham, where there seemed to be a convention of surfers, some coming off the beach, some coming on. In the past such a crowd at this time of year would have signaled a shipwreck, a whale stranding, or at least a good northeaster.

But these surfers have now become the winter regulars on the beach - replacing the beachcombers and the fishermen, seeking only the wind and the waves.

A tall, lean man in a wetsuit passed me, carrying a surfboard down the ramp to the beach. “Couldn’t ask for more than a day like this, eh?” he said. When I asked him why this beach seems to be such a favorite spot with surfers, he said it was because “the waves break further out here,” whereas, “further north, in Wellfleet or Truro, say, they break right up on the beach.” His was a surfer’s view of the beach, different from mine, and it pleased me to think that knowledge of this beach runs in so many different forms.

I counted about twenty people out in the surf. Most were surfboarders, though there were a couple of paddle boarders as well and two windsurfers, zipping and turning across the waves and wrestling with their colorful, sun-glinted sails. Occasionally they paid for their speed, since when windsurfers wipe out, they really wipe out.

I hadn’t walked the length of this barrier beach for some time, and what struck me most was the restoration of a continuous dune line. Only a few years ago these dunes had still not completely recovered from the devastation wreaked upon them over thirty years ago by the Great Blizzard of 1978.

Granted, the present dunes, which once towered up to thirty feet, were only moderate in height, and there were still stretches that showed raw, recent erosion. But gaps in the dune line, kept open for so long by continuous storm breaches, had finally closed up. Behind their crests an unbroken blanket of pale brown marsh grass stretched over a mile from the Coast Guard station south to the Inlet into Nauset Harbor.

As the dune line trickled out, the sand plain at the end of the beach had the look of an unfinished world. Large blackened tree stumps, clumps of dark marsh peat, long snakelike roots,and bits of wreckage were splayed out on a boundless sand plain at low tide. The Inlet itself, forming a break between Coast Guard Beach to the north and Nauset Spit to the south, was much wider than I remembered.

At low tide it’s now at least 1000 feet wide, twice as wide as the Cape Cod Canal. The tide was flowing forcefully out, its braided tributaries coming together at the Inlet so that it had the appearance of a mighty river at flood stage. I half-expected to see a line of barges, or an old steam paddle-wheeler, making their way downstream. It didn’t seem possible that an estuary as modest in size as Nauset Harbor could contain enough water to produce such a mighty flow.

How many thousands of gallons of water per second were rushing by me? When I turned around, the wide, undulating, grass-covered dunes to the north seemed even more like a prairie, and the Inlet its Platte River. And those black, rushing forms to the east - were they surfers in their wetsuits or wild buffalo galloping towards shore?

Robert Finch is a nature writer living in Wellfleet. 'A Cape Cod Notebook' won the 2006 New England Edward R. Murrow Award for Best Radio Writing.