David Churbuck’s Reel-Time FLog

My buddy Fred fished the Narrows in Cotuit yesterday afternoon near the top of the incoming tide. Nice day — in the sixties — but I sensed it was a tad early so I begged off to take a bike ride instead. Fred swung by the house to report "nary a bump."

April stripers are very hit or miss. I think I’ll start getting excited by the end of this week and need to do some prep work on my tackle before I head out and start practicing my casting.

I went clamming yesterday and didn’t see any fishermen on the water. Lots of boats on trailers with rods in the racks, so it is indeed becoming that time of year.

I launched this morning on the high tide, mooring and dinghy stacked inside the boat so I could get everything into the water at once.

The dependable Honda fired right up, stalled a couple times, but with a few flicks of the choke switch, settled down and ran just fine. Tossed the mooring in close to the beach, tied off the dinghy, did an open throttle lap of the bay, and brought it back in.

Two hours later, as low tide approached and I gathered the new clam license, rakes, waders and baskets, organized a party of would be spring cleaners and yard workers (it took very little convincing to get them to postpone their jobs) and off we went to Sampson’s Island for the first clamming expedition of the spring.

Since I was the only person with a set of waders, I worked the deep water up inside of Cupid’s Cove for big clams to make a chowder and stuffed quahogs with while the rest of the crew worked the shallow water in the throat of the cove for cherrystones.

Thirty minutes and we hit our limit, basked in the glorious spring sun for a little while and came back to the reality of cleaning garages and dethatching the lawn.

Here’s my stuffed quahog recipe:

Two doz. quahogs as big as your fist (makes 48 clams)
Two bags of Pepperidge Farm stuffing mix — seasoned is fine
Two green peppers
Two big yellow onions
three celery stalks
One linguica
4 garlic cloves

I steam the ‘hogs in a quarter inch of water. That releases their juice. Save the juice!
Leave the lid on until they gape open, then clean them out with a paring knife, tossing all the meat into a cuisinart fitted with the chopping blade. Couple pulses until they are chopped (not pulverized)
Take out the clams put in a mixing bowl.
Put the onions, celery and the peppers in the cuisinart and chop fine.
Put the vegetables in the bowl with the clams, add the stuffing mix, and the clam juice
Mix it all up.
Fill the clam shells then bake at 400 for 30 minutes until they are browned on top.
Serve with hot sauce and lemon. Drink beer and eat.

Shellfishermen fight to work in Monomoy (April 6, 2005)

Bixbyupdate032405

ORV permit sale opens smoothly (March 31, 2005)

I dug the leaves out of the Tashmoo yesterday, tied down the battery cover, pumped up the trailer’s tires, and dragged it all over to The Boat Guy in Bourne for the spring engine re-commissioning, a new Teleflex and throttle/shifter. Along with the first Claritin for the spring hayfever, boat prep is the surest sign that better things are on the horizon.

I’ll stake out my spot for the dinghy this weekend, call Peck’s to have the mooring dropped, and then go through the annual bureaucratic hell known as the Barnstable Mooring Permit renewal. A trip to the marine supply store for some bottom-paint, an afternoon under the trailer (and this is the year I fix the trailer lights and repack the bearings!) All of this, should, in theory, have me motoring around Greater Cotuit Bay within two or three weeks.

Snag-free permits targeted for ORVs (March 29, 2005) New plan for selling off-road permits for the National Seashore

Something’s fishy about cod stocks (March 28, 2005)

Two fishermen safe after fall through ice (March 23, 2005) Whoops.

Funds to study lobster disease harder to find (March 19, 2005)

State waters zoning sought (March 18, 2005)

Romney wants to zone Mass. waters

New system to offer ORV permits (March 10, 2005)

Federal court backs fishing rules (March 10, 2005)

Stormy seas (March 6, 2005)

Yahoo! News - Tiny eels netting higher prices than caviar as Asians snap them up

Large lobster dies after move to zoo (March 3, 2005)

State plan: Get bass on menus (March 3, 2005)

One of the big things that Mark is working on is a way to point all of the Reel-Time FLogs at a single page — sort of a built in RSS reader — that will allow a user of Reel-Time to quickly see all the new FLog postings across the Reel-Time universe. This is meant to provide a shortcut to the casual user who doesn’t want to download and configure an RSS feed reader — which can be a little hairy given that most readers require Microsoft’s .NET framework to be installed.

I suggest you add a link to this to your FLog links. As soon as we debug it and make it pretty, we’ll link this off of the homepage. This is pretty central to RT’s strategy for blogs.
 

S. Beach Washover Won’t Be Permanent - March 3, 2005

This is the season for a lot of tenth anniversaries on the World Wide Web. Yahoo is building a micro-site to look back at the last decade, and for sometime Mark Cahill and Thorne Sparkman and I have been discussing how to best mark this milestone in Reel-Time history.

So, I thought I’d start putting down some memories and add to them as time goes by. We’ll probably do something on the site around April when we opened our doors.

I kick myself for not saving the earliest files that comprised Reel-Time. Here’s my memory of how it transpired.

In the beginning was the name Real-Time. It was to be the name of an online news project to be run by me and funded by Mitch Kapor, the founder of Lotus. Mitch was my Internet mentor in the early 90s when I was a technology reporter for Forbes Magazine. He had the first commercial net connection in the state — a T1 line from his Cambridgeport office to Software Tool and Die, the first commercial ISP which was based in Brookline. Mitch invited me to his office and showed me some of the pre-Web Internet technologies such as WAIS, Veronica, Archie, Gopher and USENET. I had been an online community geek beginning in the mid-80s, had really first experienced the first community at a Grateful Dead BBS called "Brokedown Palace" where Deadheads posted lists of their bootleg collections and arranged trades of 90-minute Maxell tapes. That led to the WELL, the first big online community based in Sausalito, California.

Well, in the summer of 94, when the first Mozilla browsers were making their appearance — this is pre-Netscape — Mitch thought it would be cool to re-invent journalism with a real-time news service. So we named it Real Time — an engineering term used to describe things that take place now, as you observe them.

In late 94 MCI launched one of the first attempts to build a Yahoo-like portal, a long-dead thing called InternetMCI. They hired a guy I knew from my reporting named Chris Locke to edit a series of columns on the future of media in an interconnected world. I wrote about the likely effects of the Internet on journalism and predicted that it would be a triumph of niches — focused little sites that addressed the passions and needs of people into stuff like fishing, but even more focused, saltwater fishing, and even more focused than that …

Saltwater fly fishing.

So I talked about a hypothetical website for saltwater fly fishermen — and borrowing from Mitch Kapor — changed the name Real Time to Reel Time. I fired up my scanner and actually made a logo for this theoretical site by scanning a fly reel, not a picture of a fly reel, but an actual fly reel.

For eight weeks I described the building and model behind this niche site. People would post reports of their fishing exploits wirelessly, exchange reviews of tackle and flies, and the editors would provide great feature articles all about fly fishing.

In early 1995, while I was working in New York City, a friend who was working at CNET — www.news.com — told me to get in touch with a guy I had gone albie fishing for the previous summer. Thorne Sparkman. Thorne was also working in New York at Time Warner Electronic Publishing, hosting chats on CompuServe with authors. I called him, invited him out to dinner — raw fish appropriately enough — and over inagi and uni, told him I wanted to build a website based on the concept I developed at InternetMCI.

Thorne was into it. In March he came to the Cape and together, in my house in Cotuit, we started building the site. It was totally focused on Cape Cod and emphasized the FishWire — a weekly report of fishing activity around the Cape and Islands.


Thorne knew a programmer who installed a primitive bulletin board system for discussions called HyperMail. It was designed to archive email discussions into threads sorted by date and subject. We never could figure out how to sort them by date.


We threw our doors open in April, just in time for the arrival of the first schoolies. Reel-Time was born.

I don’t know why we put a hyphen in between Reel and Time, but boy did we regret it later on. Somebody selling alarm clocks that looked like fly reels registered it and siphoned off a lot of our traffic. I also regret that we didn’t spend the bucks and register obvious domains like Striped Bass and Bluefish and stuff like that, but once Reel-Time was launched, there was no looking back.

to be continued ……