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Columnists

Fishing Report: The bite begins...

Capt. Chris Willi

Fri, Jun 22

Category:

Fishing Report

Unseasonable weather and cooler water has made the start of the 2018 season a little slower than normal. However, we can report the island fishing has turned the corner the week leading up to Father’s Day. This is the week fishermen can have nights of catching a dozen fish or more. That’s the case...
Edge of the Solstice

Martha Ball

Thu, Jun 21

Category:

Columnists, Island Notes

L ast night, I walked into my living room in the near darkness to be surprised by the lingering pink in the sky, not where it should be on the edge of the summer solstice, in the northwest, rather glowing brightly in a south-facing window. It disappeared, quickly, as I moved toward it and I...
The Canopy

Martha Ball

Fri, Jun 15

Category:

Island Notes

The lilacs down the lane behind my house, the ones which produced the best blooms this year, are holding their gone-by flowers, clumps of lifeless brown among the green. They do not seem to be in the best spot to flourish, on the north side of a wall, seemingly exposed to both the northeast wind...
‘Melville in love’

J.V. Houlihan, Jr.

Fri, Jun 8

Category:

The Ferry Dock Scribbler

Sometimes a great book will find us when we least expect it. A book can appear to us in bookstores, flea markets, lost and found bins, yard sales, and libraries. Or, a friend may flip us a book that they may think we might like when we least expect it. A friend of ours named Cindy — another Cindy...
The Price of Privilege

Martha Ball

Fri, Jun 8

Category:

Island Notes

Traveling the Neck Road can be an adventure in high summer, but it is early June. Yesterday, just south of Mansion Road, a truck was stopped, collecting cardboard which had fallen from a bed loaded with what appeared to be trash. At first I thought the driver had turned around to gather what had...
Make it fit: Redefine your comfort zone

Eileen Birk

Sat, Jun 2

Category:

Columnists

When I started on my weight loss journey, I thought the hardest part was the workouts. I would wake up the day after “leg day” and feel like my legs were made of Jello. The day after would leave me wincing just to lift my water bottle. I often questioned my sanity for returning day after day for...
Heading for the Light

Martha Ball

Fri, Jun 1

Category:

Island Notes

It was light when I walked outside after a meeting last night. It was light but while I had been inside fog had settled over the land, a complete surprise in this time of year when I pay little mind to forecasts other than those for heavy rain. The sky was pale and it was oddly disorienting. There...
Beyond the Lilacs

Martha Ball

Fri, May 25

Category:

Columnists, Island Notes

This is morning there were a few crashes of lightning and some rolls of thunder. I stumbled out of bed and went downstairs to close the back door through which rain falls no matter the direction of the wind, and went back to sleep. It was sunny not too long later, a lovely May morning, before the...
Down to the second

J.V. Houlihan Jr.

Fri, May 18

Category:

News, Columnists, The Ferry Dock Scribbler

As the Oldport launch was heading over to Fort Adams at 0800, we passed very close to the Volvo Open 65, Dongfeng Racing. In very poor visibility and light air she was the fourth boat in the fleet to finish in the Newport leg of the Volvo Ocean Race. The word around the Newport docks was...
Storm Skies

Martha Ball

Fri, May 18

Category:

Columnists, Island Notes

It was dark when I came home Friday the 11th of May. All the day's light was gone from the sky but night had not deepened and there was visible only one brightest star, or planet, or plane, I thought at first, then, as my eyes adjusted, I realized there were pinpoints across the whole heaven. Had I...
Heart of Springtime

Martha Ball

Fri, May 11

Category:

Columnists, Island Notes

Everyone lauds the fall, and the fall on Block Island is beautiful, with its sharply blue ocean and grass restored to green after even the driest and hottest Augusts; September can be stunning, between hurricane scares, but by its end already I am feeling the closing of the vise of approaching...
Senior projects presented at school

Cassius Shuman

Mon, May 7

Category:

News, Inactive Columns

The Block Island School’s senior class exhibited their senior projects to the public on May 2 at the school, demonstrating innovation, individualism, and intelligence. Music as a way of expressing emotion; art therapy as an alternative to medication; the importance of exercise; the filmmaking...
The Block Island Factor

J. V. Houlihan, Jr.

Fri, May 4

Category:

Columnists, The Ferry Dock Scribbler

“The Block Island Factor is a degree-of-difficulty figure by which one multiplies mainland estimates to achieve Block Island realities. The Factor is always greater than one and may go as high as five depending on one’s ability to adapt to weather, cost, transportation, and...
May Day

Martha Ball

Fri, May 4

Category:

Columnists, Island Notes

The spring is filled with times of contrast. The old adage “April showers bring May flowers” usually holds true in this part of the world, where it may be the “cruellest month, breeding lilacs out of the dead land, mixing memory and desire, stirring dull roots with spring rain.” That oft quoted...
The Chief

J.V. Houlihan, Jr.

Fri, Apr 27

Category:

The Ferry Dock Scribbler

“Hey, Joe, check out my new guitar,” said Chief Vin Carlone as he came into the car shack one February day a few years back. It was freezing outside and it was quiet at the docks. He cracked open his case and pulled out a pristine out-of-the-box Taylor guitar. Then he ran some scales up and down...
As close to happy as he can get

Martha Ball

Fri, Apr 27

Category:

Columnists, Island Notes

It was raining, again, on Wednesday, on Dump Day, the anchor of the winter week for the Pesky Pond Troll of Clay Head Swamp ( aka PPT). It was the day there was lots of traffic on Corn Neck Road, and it was especially easy to scamper out to the bank beside the pavement, hop on a truck and...
‘Passion for satisfaction’ at Ocean State Hearing

Michael Schroeder

Thu, Apr 26

Category:

Trips Abroad

Rapid changes in technology are making it easier, more economical and more effective to counter the effects of hearing loss — and a firm right off the boat is committed to delivering those results to their clients. “Over the next two decades the hearing aid industry will bring about dramatic...
Saving Block Island one blade of grass at a time

Kim Gaffett

Sat, Apr 21

Category:

Ocean Views

“A steady sea wind sweeping across the beach carries grains of sand inland. When its motion is interrupted by a log or grass clump, the wind drops its burden of sand. Slowly, a mound builds up. Growing higher, broader, merging with other mounds, it becomes a hillock, a ridge — a dune. Rolling up...
Snake On The Grass

Martha Ball

Fri, Apr 20

Category:

Columnists, Island Notes

Saturday the sun came out, the wind died in the middle of the day, and I went out for a few minutes to rake a few weeds from a long-ignored flower bed. Years ago, when I paid more attention to such things, a bonus pack of some odd iris arrived with an order of baby plants. They all thrived as long...
Waiting For Spring

Martha Ball

Fri, Apr 13

Category:

Island Notes

The geese are moving from noisy flight to noisy landing to noisy swimming. They are the big Canadas, singularly beautiful when they were few, with their softly brown bodies and black velvet necks and spots of perfect white. That was a long, long time ago, before their numbers grew exponentially and...
The stages of Geezer-hood

J.V. Houlihan, Jr.

Fri, Apr 6

Category:

The Ferry Dock Scribbler

I just finished my 68th trip around the sun, and I’m barreling on the quick step toward the next one. There is no denying that life goes by very fast as we get on in years—it’s non-negotiable. Moreover, we pay more attention as to how we want to spend our time — we can’t flinch — so we need to go...
Crack of Dawn

Martha Ball

Fri, Apr 6

Category:

Island Notes

It is one of those damp, dreary days that has no beginning and no end, it merely rises like a long ocean swell between the darks troughs of morning and night. Only Wednesday it is and it feels we've been through whole seasons since last week. The forecast for Easter Sunday held little promise but I...
At April’s Doorstep

Martha Ball

Fri, Mar 30

Category:

Island Notes

It does not matter the temperature or the wind direction, the sun continues its annual march from one side of the horizon to the other, along the even seam of the sea and sky to the east or the jagged tree line to the west. Turning onto Mansion Road from my house, heading west, just before seven...
Remembering a mentor and friend

J.V. Houlihan, Jr.

Fri, Mar 23

Category:

The Ferry Dock Scribbler

“Get on that house, Houlihan, you missed a spot under the gutter.” “That grass isn’t raked enough. Keep at it.” “Tune your guitar, that E string is flat.” “Did you do your geometry? Did you study your French verbs?” The above and many more assertive suggestions were said to me by my childhood next-...
Site of the Old Mill

Martha Ball

Fri, Mar 23

Category:

Columnists, Island Notes

We are having yet another lousy Wednesday/Dump Day. My plans to discard a container of papers tossed aside in a scratching-the-surface bit of cleaning have been thwarted. However, in the course of sorting, I found a copy of a 1948 document in which the Historical Society monument on the east side...
Winter

J.V. Houlihan, Jr.

Fri, Mar 16

Category:

The Ferry Dock Scribbler

We’ve had some cold and inclement — ice, snow, wind, slush — weather this winter. However, other than the “Bomb Cyclone,” it’s been an uneventful season. On the day I write this, it’s a balmy 48 degrees aboard my sailboat in Newport Harbor. There is no snow to be seen of any consequence, and the...
Odd Storm

Martha Ball

Fri, Mar 16

Category:

Columnists, Island Notes

Autumn fussed and fussed until I let her out into the snowy Tuesday afternoon. She took a few steps into the windy damp then seemed to hesitate. Having no desire to stand in the doorway, waiting, I asked, “Do you want to come back in?” In reply, she turned from me and dove, nose first, into the...
Ocean Views: A picture is worth a thousand words

Kim Gaffett

Sat, Mar 10

Category:

Ocean Views

The recent storm had a fierce erosive effect on the island’s outer shorelines. The same storm surges, coupled with full moon high tides, produced unusually high water in the largely protected Great Salt Pond, and associated inner harbors. The level of water that we witnessed on March 3 is...
Sometimes, life is a beach

J.V. Houlihan, Jr.

Fri, Mar 9

Category:

The Ferry Dock Scribbler

I first heard of Jimmy Buffett in the winter of 1975 while living on Daytona Beach, Florida, in my shanty Irish camper, and raising standard issue hell on said beach and in the local saloons. Buffett’s name would pop up with some of the — ahem, characters — I played my guitar with at...
Faux Lamb

Martha Ball

Fri, Mar 9

Category:

Island Notes

Mar ch came in gently, only to shed its soft lamb's wool coat and reveal itself to be a mangy, angry lion. There are very few days I do not leave my house at all; last Friday was one of those rarities. I, literally, did not step outside, remaining in the doorway, blessedly on the west and lee side...
A new Rockwell classic

J.V. Houlihan Jr.

Fri, Mar 2

Category:

Columnists, The Ferry Dock Scribbler

“There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.” — W. Somerset Maugham The above quote could also pertain to writing a screenplay. Irish/British writer Martin McDonagh penned a script that became the movie, “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri...
The End of February

Martha Ball

Fri, Mar 2

Category:

Island Notes

“W in ter won’t come until the ponds are full” the old-timers always said, an adage haunting me through the ceaseless rains of February. “But we had winter!” was my silent protest every wet, gray, day, citing the already long-ago deep cold of January. “Real but short” I would concede, hoping to...
SNOWstorm

Kim Gaffett

Fri, Feb 23

Category:

Ocean Views

From Elizabeth Dickens’ 1926 bird journal: “In Nov. and Dec. the greatest flight of Snow Owls ever recorded.” That entry goes on to identify sightings of 23 individual snowy owls on Block Island that winter. Since 1926 there have been several irruptions of snowy owls into our region, and well...
Gray and White and Foggy

Martha Ball

Fri, Feb 23

Category:

Island Notes

Clouds of white roll across the field beyond the kitchen windows, the dog comes back in from her morning jaunt around the yard not quite wet but damp all over. I cannot see from the yard but I know there is a tree out in the field, newly solitary, cleared of the brush and vines in which it was...
Walking on Sunshine

Martha Ball

Fri, Feb 16

Category:

Island Notes

There is sometimes a disconnect between the way I remember months and the way they are, in reality. February is cold, the month the snows we hoped we had evaded arrive, last year cloaking the vines climbing up the old shed, creating a scene momentarily magical. A photo of it brings to mind one of...
Great Backyard Bird Count, Block Island-style

Kim Gaffett

Thu, Feb 15

Category:

Ocean Views

The Great Backyard Bird Count (GBBC) is this weekend: Feb. 16 – 19. This is a global effort to observe and report which bird species are where during the winter — between migration times. "The 2018 GBBC again promises to provide an important snapshot of bird occurrence in February," says the...
Waiting for the Wind

Martha Ball

Fri, Feb 9

Category:

Island Notes

In the late 1970s, we were often surrounded by blizzard conditions. Forty-one years ago yesterday my mother wrote: “Heavy snow. Drifts. John (Littlefield, Sr,) plowed the gate 3 times. Huge drift in barnyard.” Forty years ago yesterday her neat hand recorded: “Everyone at the store at 10 a.m. Power...
Charting your own course

J.V. Houlihan, Jr.

Fri, Feb 2

Category:

Columnists, The Ferry Dock Scribbler

“I frisked him; he’s clean,” says a guy eating a plate of food with authority and certainty. “I’ve frisked a thousand young punks.” A guy gets up from the table where there are three men sitting, and heads to the men’s room. The camera tracks back — twice — to the guy who frisked him. The guy keeps...
Going to the Registry

Martha Ball

Fri, Feb 2

Category:

Island Notes

Rhode Islanders think they are unique in their nightmare tales of Going to the Registry — after ascertaining the hours which mainland office is open. We are not. Neither does one have to travel to the other side of the water and enter a building to have a Registry Encounter. This year, when I...
Rivers in the Roads

Martha Ball

Fri, Jan 26

Category:

Columnists, Island Notes

Old maps of Block Island, drawn with great precision in the latter part of the nineteenth century, show single, unsteady lines interconnecting many of the ponds. Some are visible, dark streaks, on aerial photographs taken in the early 1950s, before the land surrendered to overgrowth. Collectively,...
Don’t lie to me, ma’am

Martha Ball

Fri, Jan 19

Category:

Columnists, Island Notes

We all get them, those annoying calls, be they robo or live, from bogus or legitimate companies, all ready to solve problems we do not have and/or to take our money. They come more on my landline, which I maintain for internet connection — and because it has the same number that was assigned this...
Bomb cyclone — help!

J.V. Houlihan, Jr.

Fri, Jan 12

Category:

Columnists, The Ferry Dock Scribbler

Any young dogs want to shovel old man Houlihan’s cars out and make some scoots? A blown shoulder just shut me down, and Cindy’s bull goring injury has slowed her down a little. Otherwise, we’d be on this… If interested, PM me, stat! I posted this note on Facebook on Jan. 3 and got a few...
Road to Eldorado

Martha Ball

Fri, Jan 12

Category:

Columnists, Island Notes

We are riding the roller coaster that is January, moving from deep, deep cold to seemingly mild upper twenties to ground-thawing, muck-threatening days of sunny, above freezing, temperatures. It is a time of staying oil deliveries, trying to dance around that seasonal trifecta of drifted snow, its...
2017 bird census

Sat, Jan 6

Category:

Ocean Views

Q. What do Ross’s goose, Virginia rail, Common raven, Ruby-crowned kinglet, Palm warbler, Field sparrow, and Fox sparrow have in common? A. They were all seen on Block Island, on Dec. 26, 2017, for the first time during the 17th annual Community Bird Census. Not since the first two years have we...
Spinning stories of winter

Martha Ball

Fri, Jan 5

Category:

Island Notes

Jan. 1, 1976 my mother wrote in her little diary “sunny above freezing,” which would have been an item of note only if the days preceding had been below 32. She was a teacher and five days into the new year vacation ended — or not — as her inscription reads “1st day of school. No oil, no heat,...
A glimpse of Island birdlife

Kim Gaffett

Sat, Dec 30

Category:

Ocean Views

Starting in January 2009, the Crazy-as-a-Coot bird walkers (co-led by Maggie Komosinski) meet twice a month (October through June) to survey bird presence and activity, and to take pleasure in our surroundings. We meet at different locations around the Island, depending on weather, mostly wind...
Keep it fit... One day at a time works for food, too

Eileen Birk

Fri, Dec 29

Category:

Columnists

Ah, it’s the new year... As the craziness of the holiday season winds down and the year comes to an end, I find myself reflecting back on the last twelve months — what was good about 2017, what challenged me, what would I do differently, and what would I love to do again? The often-heard “what are...
Words

J.V. Houlihan Jr.

Fri, Dec 29

Category:

Columnists, The Ferry Dock Scribbler

I got wind of a blow. While writing some fiction one day the aforementioned pun came out of my head, through my fingers, and onto the page. The context was just two guys discussing a nasty weather system coming up the East Coast. These six words flew out of my head and blew me...
Another year

Martha Ball

Fri, Dec 29

Category:

Columnists, Island Notes

Twenty-four and sunny” is the status of the moment. The “feels like” is considerably lower, but I do not believe that number; I have been outside and the sun is shining and the wind is light for late December. And, I remind myself, the onset of the cold is the price we are expected to pay for the...
Dove and Disttaff

Michael Schroeder

Thu, Dec 28

Category:

Trips Abroad

Alpaca—stylish, soft and warm—has a home in Wakefield at Dove and Distaff, Visitors can conveniently see and feel quality yarns, fibers and goods right here—all of the alpaca products come off their own farm in Matunuck. It’s one of seven showrooms within Dove and Distaff, which was born of an...

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Island Buzz

Antique Maps and Vintage Photographs

Posted By

Block Island Historical Society

1/25

The Block Island Historical Society has a great selection of antique maps; vintage photographs; unique posters & prints...
This weeks Nature Conservancy Schedule

Posted By

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1/25

Check out this weeks Nature Conservancy Schedule at https:// www.natureblockisland.org
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Posted By

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1/25

New year. New hope. New you! Embrace your life to the fullest this year at Solstice Senior Living at Groton. Visit our...
History Happening Here

Posted By

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1/24

*** Annual Meeting September 20th 11am Program 11:30 am Please join us on zoom ** Thank you for your interest in the Block...
In the Heart of Block Island https://liladelman.com/listing/1501-beacon-hill-rd-block-island/

Posted By

Lila Delman Real Estate

1/23

In the heart of Block Island, this captivating estate is nestled on almost 12 acres of rolling hills, pastures, stone walls...

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Island Religion

PART 4 HAVE TO? WANT TO?

Posted By

Block Island Christian Fellowship

1/21

PART 4 HAVE TO? WANT TO? What should be the basis for financial giving? CHAPTER 5 THE CHURCH AGE Now we come to the current...
Sunday Worship - in house and Virtually

Posted By

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PART 3 HAVE TO? WANT TO?

Posted By

Block Island Christian Fellowship

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