News
A new visitor to our solar system is high in Vineyard skies this week. Comet Lulin, despite being barely visible to those with even the keenest vision, has gained attention around the world.
Twelve years ago, Comet Hale-Bopp was the last newly discovered comet that anyone could see overhead. That comet was considerably brighter and easier to spot than our new visitor. In photographs, Comet Lulin has a distinct greenish color, while Hale-Bopp shone both white and blue.
The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court last week upheld the town of Aquinnah and the Martha’s Vineyard Commission in a key leg of a complicated and long-running property rights case that will ultimately decide whether a large swath of rare coastal heathland along Moshup Trail remains forever wild or is opened up to private development.
Though the national economy is tanking at a fevered clip, the pace of one industry remains unhurried: Vineyard agriculture.
But then much is timeless — or out of time — about these farm businesses, some fully commercial, others family-run, part-time and increasingly labors of love.
Jim Athearn counts heads of Polled Hereford cattle, Mitch Posen keeps burros to wrangle his ewes and Elizabeth Thompson runs teams of oxen, which help move the hefty stones that form the farm’s centuries-old ramparts.
A farmer and trucker from upstate New York bought the Islander this week for $23,600, placing bid 58 on Ebay Monday for the vessel that ferried Islanders to and from the rest of America for over fifty years.
The auction looked like it might be a humiliating episode with the old girl fetching a starting bid of just $10, with offers crawling to a few thousand in the first days.
But after a flurry of late offers from a total of 19 bidders it finally went to Donald Slovak of Valatie, N.Y.
The juggernaut Martha’s Vineyard Regional High School boys’ hockey team easily defeated two powerful opponents this week to advance to the quarterfinals of the division 2 south state tournament, setting up an epic showdown tonight against old rival Coyle-Cassidy, the team that has knocked the Vineyarders out of the playoffs for two out of the last three years.
Tonight’s game against Coyle-Cassidy faces-off at 5:15 p.m. at the Gallo Arena in Bourne.
The Island adoption center run by the Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (MSPCA) has operated with an average annual loss in excess of $100,000 for the past five years, according to an agency spokesman.
Breaking a silence of several weeks on the operational details of the Vineyard shelter scheduled for closure May 1 by the financially troubled charity, spokesman Brian Adams told the Gazette this week that more than 50 per cent of the operating budget comes over on the boat.