Outdoors & Ocean Editor
Beat: Cape Cod National Seashore, Beaches, Things to Do
Silas crewed whale-watch boats out of Provincetown before he wrote about them, and still reads Massachusetts Bay by the wind rather than the calendar. He covers the National Seashore, the three coasts, the surf and the cold, and he treats the shark guidance and the federal approach distances as the law they are rather than as etiquette.
4 guides · 3 news posts
Last updatedSilas's most recent update to this site was .
Long-form
Reported guides to Cape Cod, each with its own publication and last-updated date.
Guide
Grey seals came back, and white sharks followed them. This is what the National Seashore and the shark researchers actually tell people to do, without the softening.
9 min read
Guide
The whales are five miles off Race Point because a glacier left a sandbank there. Which pier you sail from decides how much of your trip is spent looking at open water.
9 min read
Guide
Twenty-five and a half miles of old railbed through seven towns, flat enough that the gradient is the least interesting thing about it. The skill is choosing which stretch to ride.
7 min read
Guide
The Atlantic shore, Cape Cod Bay and Nantucket Sound are three different swims within twenty minutes of each other. Getting that wrong costs a day; getting the parking wrong costs a morning.
9 min read
News desk
Shorter, dated pieces about what is changing in Cape Cod.
How this was written. News published under Silas Crowell's byline was drafted by machine from primary sources — operator notices, government and municipal releases, published schedules — and every factual claim in it was matched to one of those sources before it published. A Cape Cod Guide editor can change or pull any of it. Our editorial standards.
Beach update
September has the warmest sea, the emptiest sand and nobody watching the water. The two calendars do not line up, and the gap catches people out every autumn.
Travel alert
A purple flag with a white shark silhouette is an instruction, not information. Here is the protocol behind it, stated the way the National Seashore states it.
Seasonal
Boats run from about April to late October out of Provincetown and Barnstable. One federal regulation shapes what the captain is allowed to do with them.