Martha’s Vineyard Preservation Trust executive director Chris Scott stood in his usual spot onstage with auctioneer Trip Barnes Saturday night, as Mr. Barnes kicked off the Taste of the Vineyard gala auction. With only five items up for bid, it was a light year for the trust. Bidders generally have some two dozen items to choose from.

It has been an unusual past 100 years for Noman’s Land, that half-forgotten rock off Chilmark and Aquinnah that has occasionally reasserted its presence to Vineyarders with wafting smoke clouds and distant bomb blasts. Shrouded in mystery and explosives, it has seen rumrunners, pirates, hurricanes, and even an accidental internecine gun battle between the Coast Guard and the Navy in 1967.

A top state fisheries official told a Vineyard gathering on Friday afternoon that it is not feasible to restore the 61-year-old state lobster hatchery — at least not for raising young lobsters for release.

“We have no evidence that we did enhance the wild population to any significant degree at all,” said Paul Diodati, director of the Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries. “That and the cost in the past 10 years of government has become a real concern. Funding has withered,” he added.

There were no vuvuzelas at Veterans Memorial Park in Vineyard Haven when the Island’s U-13 boys’ travel soccer team approached their playoff game on Saturday, but the lack of long plastic horns did not make it that much quieter than the World Cup games going on at the same time in South Africa.