Hammerhead
I sail into a triangular lagoon where the low-slung shorelines of North and South Monomoy compete in a beauty contest of sorts. I have the urge to make landfall and drop a line, but ignore the Sirens Song and haul in instead. What’s the point when there’s not much to catch? But there was a time when the fish here were so plentiful they’d literally jump into your boat. And that’s just what happened when Captain Bartholomew Gosnold first visited in 1602, naming the windswept dune-scape Cape Cod after the great migrating schools that inhabited these very waters.
Originally the land was known simply as “Cape James,” after the Spanish king, so named by Captain Estevan Gomez, who was the first to touch shore in the spring of 1552, but it was Gosnold’s name that took. Times change an
