It was a great white, dorsal-finned, swimming, toothy people-eater...... [View all]

[DFW]

With apologies to Sheb Wooley.

So, now great white sharks have been spotted not only south of here in Chatham, but also north of here at Race Point, and even on the Bay side of Cape Cod. The oceans are warmer, the seals are plentiful, and so are their main predators, great white sharks. Ferocious though their reputation is, great whites seldom attack people. But swim in an area where there are lots of seals (which our favorite beaches now are), and your chances of a close encounter of the amputative kind go up.

It used to be that the water on the Bay side was warmer and the water on the ocean side was cold. No longer. The water on the ocean side is so warm, no one needs a wet suit any more to go in. On the bay side, the starfish, the carpets of hermit crabs and the horseshoe "crabs" are gone.

I love the fact that I can now spend hours in the water without freezing, but the price the region is paying is high, and the sharks are the least of it (unless one bites me, that is). I love my down time here, but I would have been perfectly happy with the Cape as it was ten or twenty years ago.