The autumn equinox will be here on Tuesday at 6:37 am, making this the last report of the summer season of 2003, but not for the year.

Summer ended yesterday with me pulling my boat in the morning. I powerwashed the slime off the bottom and will break out the hull cleaner today to get rid of the brown waterline shadow. I'll relaunch on Saturday when the wind returns to the south and clear skies resume. There hasn't been a lot of people fishing around Cotuit during this past week. Jobs and schools have taken away the crowds of boats and shore casters, but the fish are still around, ripping around the harbor in the morning, attracting clouds of birds in the channel.

The terns seemed to have left, but the ospreys are back in numbers I never recall, fact is, I never really saw an osprey around here when I was a kid. DDT had done them in. Now a pair circle over my yard more often than not, looking down a couple hundred feet at the edges of mudflats in front of Lowell Point. They perch in the dead tree branches behind the tin garage. A fat one sits there in the late afternoon, pooped from a day of cruising the shoreline around Hooper's Landing, and squeals and vrys for an hour. And the grapes are getting ripe, the crickets make a racket, and the lawn is soaked with cold dew every morning.

Tropical Storm Isabel has yet to arrive -- 2 pm Friday according to the hourly forecast -- in the form of some 30 mph gusts out of the east. Hurricanes make me love the Internet. The first hurricane tracking technology I ever saw was when my grandmother mailed a S.A.S.E. to Channel Six in New Bedford for a blank tracking map. She thumbtacked a clear piece of acetate over it into a piece of plywood and marked the position and track with a red grease pencil. Photo books of past hurricanes and her own albums -- she was the daughter of a professional photographer -- freaked me and my brother out. The seriousness and scope of the damage of the 1938 hurricane, the dead count, and the fact that it just arrived out of nowhere had me convinced that we could get hit at any second. I got worried on windy days. To this day, nothing comes close the dread and unease I feel when a hurricane is on the way and I have boats in the water. I start obsessing when they're off the Lesser Antilles and first get their names.

I'm a hurricane geek but have only experienced two real ones, Bob, on August 19, 1991 and Gloria on September 27, 1985. I covered Gloria as a newspaper reporter and was shocked while interviewing the patron of a Seabrook beach bar when a wave blew over the sea wall and landed in the street, rolling through the doors and flooding the beer cooler which sparked and lit up the flooded floor. The crowd cheered when more waves blew through the door. It didn't do much damage on the Cape,

The morning of Bob I helped the yacht club pull boats and store them in the Ropes Field on Putnam Avenue. Four people would lift the boats out of the water, spars still rigged, and place it on a trailer. More than two dozen boats were pulled in two hours. I stripped the sail off my boat, loaded the car with anything that could blow away, and ran out the little danforth anchor into the dirt. It was getting seriously windy and some windsurfers pulled up in a van to announce their intentions to plane off into the frothy spume and their certain deaths. I heard from someone that Gorbachev had dissolved the Soviet Union.

My wife suggested removing ourselves and our two young children to shelter at the elementary school. I reminded her of the round brick cellar below us, and that the house had been standing in the same spot for 161 years. The first rain bands arrived like hailstones. The trees were tossing and the gusts started building in power and frequency.

I went out to the semi-shelter of the porch. In a quarter of an hour the weather went from the worst I'd experienced up to then to the most amazing special effect show I've ever seen. The movies can never do a hurricane justice. The sound is like freight trains driven by elephants banging on volkswagens. The sky turns green and purple like a bruise. Water is everywhere. And the winds....

At the peak a series of escalating gusts from the southeast crossed the Sound, passed over Sampson's Island, ripped through the anchorage, and hit the woods between my house and the water, pushing down a 1/4 mile wide rank of trees until their heads were on the ground. Suddenly I had a water view that I didn't want to keep. The gust eased and the trees snapped back upright so hard that some of them snapped and others pushed up the ground with their roots. A second gust vaporized the leaves into a choppy green cloud that make a smack when it hit the houses. A tree came down on my sister's car. The transformer on the pole across the library went bang and caught on fire.

The third gust was a semi-tornado that took down most of the remaining trees. It went through the yard, missed the house, crossed the street, took down the powerlines, and kept going through my cousin's yard and into the woods behind the fire station, then they too were destroyed. It kept going. It made it all the way to Otis. For years you could see where it had been. I have grown to hate the sound of chainsaws.

Today I looked through a dozen surfcams at the ocean, viewed a wave height hockey stick chart from a buoy off the Carolinas, checked the tides here in Cotuit, visited the National Hurricane Center/Tropical Prediction Center two or three times, watched a video of flooding, and checked the hourly forecasts in six harbors west to New York City to see where and when the bands of rain and wind would cross the coast. I instant messengered a friend in Geneva and sent him the link to the Wellfleet Beachcomber surfcam. In all, I'd say the web is the best thing that could happen to a hurricane addict except a hurricane.

Here's the fix:

For watching hurricanes and determining their strength,
The National Hurricane Center/Tropical Prediction Center
http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/
This is the horse's mouth for hurricanes. The reports are biblical but the charts and strike projections are the best feature.

The National Hurricane center also has a great FTP archive of official hurricane reports for every hurricane back to 1958, and good historical background on hurricanes back to the Spanish Armada.

Everything you wanted to know about hurricanes is at this site.

For real time and historical readings of data buoys, the National Data Buoy center: http://www.ndbc.noaa.gov/
The address for a map of the Northeast is http://www.ndbc.noaa.gov/Maps/Northeast.shtml
The link to the Buzzard's Bay buoy is a good one to put in your favorites.
http://www.ndbc.noaa.gov/station_page.phtml?station=BUZM3

It's essential to know what the tide will be doing when a hurricane is predicted to hit your location. Hurricanes surge a lot of water in front of themselves. Pray it doesn't strike at the top of a moon tide!
This summer I become a fan of CapeTides.com, in part because it is one of the few tide sites to list Cotuit, and also because it has a good look forward into the future feature, and a clean, nice design.
http://www.capetides.com/

Some thoughts on what to do if you can't get your boat out of the water: http://reel-time.com/forum/showthread.php?s=&threadid=33411&perpage=15&pagenumber=1

And in memory of grandmother -- she'd approve of the saved stamp -- a blank tracking map: http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/AT_Track_chart2.pdf

Note: Reports are harder to come by these days. Our tireless guides continue to file, and I can scrape your postings out of the forum, but if you fish, successful for not, drop a line and tell me about it.