Chappy’s own Edwina Rissland has been busy with her camera at the Gannon & Benjamin shipyard. She has been taking shots there for many years and is now ready to share her photography with a showing at the Martha’s Vineyard Film Center in Vineyard Haven. The exhibit is called Hull Studies. Edwina presents some of her favorite images of hulls and other finds taken at the busy wooden boat yard on the Vineyard Haven waterfront.

The film center is home to the Feldman Family Artspace, managed by Featherstone Center for the Arts. Exhibits can be seen a half hour before the start of movies.

Forty eight years ago this month, Jerry Grant hired me to drive the Chappy Ferry. The original On Time was still the backup to the five-year old On Time II.

Ferry captains like to point out, often with dismay, that the On Time II has a mind of its own. The original On Time was ornery. It had only a steel band around its midriff, which had no cushioning effect as the current rubber bumpers on its successors do.

When I took over operation of the ferry service in 2008, it occurred to me that the history of the ferry needed to be recorded before the folks who knew the details of that history were gone. I hired the iconic team of writer Tom Dunlop, photographer Alison Shaw and publisher Jan Pogue of Vineyard Stories to create The Chappy Ferry Book. I paid for it by cashing in my IRA accumulated from two decades at Vineyard Land Surveying. I concluded that I didn’t need a retirement account because I planned on owning the ferry for the rest of my life. I have given away more copies of the book as gifts than I have sold.

As I have said before, I would think that a person would want to understand the past of the ferry service in order to determine its destiny. I strongly recommend that those who are involved in planning the future of the Chappy Ferry should read or reread the book. As I have also said before, one of the reasons that Chappy has that special timeless feel, valued by so many, is the damn ferry.

Captain Nelson Smith liked to remind complaining people to get mad at the water rather than the ferry. The water was the problem. The ferry resolved that problem.

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