Wonders of Wellfleet

Kettle ponds, ocean beaches, Wellfleet harbor, Uncle Tim's Bridge & more..

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Kettle Ponds – Duck Pond

A kettle pond (or kettle hole) occurs as the result of blocks of ice breaking off from the front of a receding glacier and becoming partially to wholly buried by glacial outwash. When the ice blocks melt, holes are left. Most kettle holes are usually no larger than 2 kilometers and the general depth of most kettles are less than 10 meters. In most cases kettle holes eventually fill with water, sediment, or vegetation. Kettle holes are not fed by rivers or streams, so they rely on precipitation, the groundwater table, or a combination of the two. Kettles that are full of water year-round are called kettle lakes or ponds. Inside the boundary of the Cape Cod National Seashore there are many established fire roads, pond-side trails, and ancient ways which provided access across Wellfleet from the bay to the ocean. See if you can find your way into these trail systems by first accessing one of the kettle ponds. Be very careful to stay off the fragile faces of the kettle ponds. You may want to bring a compass, a fishing rod, and a bathing suit. The ponds have secrets.

Ocean Beaches – Ocean View Drive

Ocean View Drive in Wellfleet might not have the shear length of the Pacific Coast Highway or the 17 mile drive through Pebble Beach; but it certainly has its own breathtaking beauty. Ocean View Drive should rank in anyone’s top three vistas.

Wellfleet Harbor - Oysters, Oysters, Oysters

Even before the first settlers arrived, Wellfleet Harbor was known for it abundance of fish and oysters, and by 1707, whaling had become a thriving industry with a fleet of ships which cruised as far as the coast of Africa. This brought great wealth to the Town. All of this prosperity was brought to a sudden halt during the Revolution when the British blockade condemned ships of the fleet to rot at their moorings. After the war, lack of capital to replace the great whaling fleet ended Wellfleet’s glory as a whaling port.

However, fishing began to flourish and by the nineteenth century Wellfleet became one of the leading fishing ports in Massachusetts. At the same time the local shell fishermen were shipping in oysters from Buzzards Bay, Connecticut and the Chesapeake, planting them in the harbor to pick up the famous Wellfleet flavor and re-harvesting them for the Boston market.

The harvests of oyster, quahogs, soft-shelled clams, bay scallops and sea clams have fluctuated widely from year to year but on the average have remained an important part of the Wellfleet’s Town’s economy.

Uncle Tim’s Bridge

Uncle Tim's Bridge is painted and photographed by numerous artists’ and crosses Duck Creek and the inner harbor, leading to a small island.  It’s connected with the old railroad bed that in historic times started the shipment of oysters and fish to markets across Massachusetts and beyond. Access this boardwalk from Commercial Street in Wellfleet.

Great Island – Sunset at the “Gut”

Great Island and Great Island trail at the western boundary of Wellfleet Harbor features beaches, isolated marsh, tidal flats, upland and dune topologies. In some sense Great Island is the physical guardian of the oyster habitat. There is a memorial to a Wampanoag woman at the head of the trail, and a memorial to Governor Bradford several miles inland.
       
   

Congregational Church with ships time

This is the Congregational Church, the only one in America which rings ship's bells rather than landlubber time. In the sailing ship era before the development of mechanical clocks the passage of each 4-hour watch was marked with an hourglass which ran 30 minutes.  Each half hour, when the glass was turned over, the ship’s bell was struck.  Over time a traditional pattern of striking the bell in couplets, or pairs of strikes, developed which added a strike each half hour, thus:

          *Using an example of a watch beginning at noon.*

A person standing watch could tell by listening to the bells where he was in his watch and how long it would be before the next watch came on deck.  Also, if the strike as an even number of bells, it was on the hour.  If an odd number of bells that it was the half hour and which half hour it was.  As mechanical clocks were developed this bell pattern was transferred into ship’s bell clocks.

Marconi Beach and wireless site

On 18 January 1903, a Marconi station built near Wellfleet, Massachusetts in 1901 sent a message of greetings from Theodore Roosevelt, the President of the United States, to King Edward VII of the United Kingdom, marking the first transatlantic radio transmission originating in the United States. However, consistent transatlantic signalling turned out to be very difficult to establish.
Marconi hereabout began to build high-powered stations on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean, in order to communicate with ships at sea in competition with other inventors. In 1904, a commercial service was established to transmit nightly news summaries to subscribing ocean-going ships, which could incorporate them into their on-board newspapers. A regular transatlantic radiotelegraph service was finally announced in 1907, but even after this the company struggled for many years to provide reliable communication. Most of the commercial communication migrated to a station in Chatham.

Wellfleet Oyster Festival

The seventh annual Wellfleet Oysterfest will take place the weekend after Columbus Day, Saturday and Sunday, October 13th and 14th, 2007 in Wellfleet.
http://www.wellfleetoysterfest.org/

Sundays at The Beachcomber

Original Rock and Roll in its purest form overlooking the vastness of the Atlantic Ocean on a summer day. Chandler Travis, an honorary Wellfleetian leads The Incredible Casuals at five o’clock on Sunday afternoons. The happiness meter reaches 100 on the first downbeat.