South Chatham beach cut

[JohnHuth]

I had a chance to take a look at the South Beach cut south of Chatham yesterday, paddling with Karen Gladstone.

The cut itself is close to the north end of North Monomoy. North and south of the cut itself, there are now protrusions of sand bars into the channel that runs between South Beach and North Monomoy, and there's a fair amount of sand that's creates some shallows around it. At low tide, a kayak can kind of nudge through some shallows into a deeper channel. At high tide, motorboats can get through.

Some more - we left the Outer Harbor (= Morris Island Causeway) around 11:20, this was just past low tide. There was current flooding the Harbor (note - none of these currents were big, just interesting to check out). We got to the cut around noon. There appeared to be some multiple channels leading through to the cut, but only one significant one. The current floods east, which seems to be a surprise to a lot of people, but that's the general trend around Chatham and Monomoy - so the current was going out to sea on the flood through the cut.

At low tide, at the outer side of the cut, swells were breaking pretty solidly at the entrance to the cut. I didn't get close enough to the breakers to see if you could nudge out under those conditions.

We paddled south to the region of the old gap between South Monomoy and South Beach, which is now closed in, had lunch and paddled back north. We passed the cut again around 2:30. At this time, the water was a lot deeper in the cut. There were a truck-load of people who had motored over and were hanging out on the beach. A bunch of motorboats had gone through the cut.

A few tidbits - the extra sand deposited from the cut on between N. Monomoy and South Beach created some shoals where you could see the current pick up flooding south, south of the cut. Some swell snuck through the cut and broke on the shoals of N. Monomoy - nothing significant, but just an interesting observation.

The breaking swells on the ocean side of the cut seemed to have calmed down with higher water, although there still were some breakers. I reckon that if you were interested in doing a circumnavigation of the Monomoys, you could get out of the cut around this point in the tide, and reach the southern tip of Monomoy by slack tide turning to ebb, which is a good time to hit the southern tip.

It's interesting - the cut makes for a lot of motor traffic if you're in the upper half of the tide cycle, as it eliminates the long haul around Monomoy. It'll be interesting to see what happens with the seals and this cut. There seemed to be a large concentration of seals there. I'm guessing they were chasing stripers.