They meet in the deep of winter and talk about summer fishing. Though the temperature outside is in the 20s on this Monday night and icicles hang from the eaves, the room inside the Martha’s Vineyard Rod and Gun Club in Edgartown is infused with the warmth of a July day on the water with the sun beating down and the false albacore running off the Menemsha jetty. This is fly-tying night, and it has been going on every Monday night here since January.

The local chapter of Ducks Unlimited, a conservation nonprofit dedicated to preserving habitat, hosted its 34th annual dinner last Saturday at the Harbor View Hotel in Edgartown. And though turnout may have been the smallest in the organization’s long Island history, the group felt good about the evening, according to chairman Cliff Meehan.

They are the perfect Valentine’s Day couple. Albert O. (Ozzie) Fischer Jr., 95, met his future bride, Rene S. McLaughlin, at the Chilmark Tavern in 1938. They danced.

And just a few weeks ago they celebrated their 70th wedding anniversary.

“When she first saw me, she was a little bit surprised. I either had a necktie or a piece of rope for a belt,” Mr. Fischer recalled while seated with his bride in the dining room of their house overlooking Beetlebung Corner.

On Monday, the U.S. Coast Guard shut down 24 of its American Loran-C transmitters around the country and afar. For many older commercial fishermen it marked the end of an era.

Fishermen today use the Global Positioning System (GPS), the same satellite system now used in automobiles and hand-held computer devices.

It is a cold January morning and inside the Massachusetts State Lobster Hatchery on Lagoon Pond in Oak Bluffs, all is quiet. It has been 14 years since lobsters swam in bubbling tanks and thousands of summer visitors were treated to tours of this place overlooking the Lagoon.

The Cape Cod Canal was still an idea. And it would be years before the advent of navigational tools that are taken for granted today such as radar and global positioning systems. Mariners could only communicate with each other and the shore by sight and sound, and they established their location in the huge expanse of ocean with the aid of a sextant, clock and compass if the sky was clear.