The Shovel and the Sea

The breach at Sesachacha Pond last week was a masterpiece of municipal precision. Under a clear, salt-dusted sky, the Town of Nantucket’s Natural Resources Department watched as excavators finished their work, carving a narrow vein through the barrier beach. Within the hour, the brackish, nitrogen-heavy water of the pond roared out to meet the Atlantic.

 

It was, by all accounts, a textbook success. Massive eels were spotted caught in the rush, making their instinctive migration toward the Sargasso Sea. Blue crabs and herring surged through the new gateway. For the town, it was a "scheduled breaching" — a routine line item in a sophisticated estuarine management plan.

 

But forty years ago, this scene wasn’t a policy. It was a crime. And the man often found at the center of that crime, holding a hand shovel and waiting for the police to arrive, was Steve Scannell.

 

The Outlaw Architect

To understand why last week’s opening matters, one must look back to the late 1980s. At the time, Nantucket’s Great Ponds — Sesachacha and Hummock — were locked in a suffocating ecological stalemate. A tangled "paperwork jam" between state bureaucracy and local hesitation meant that while the ponds were choking on nitrogen and the shellfish were dying, the official response was stalled by a lack of Environmental Impact Statements.

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While the town debated, a local scalloper named Steve Scannell decided he had seen enough.

Scannell became the face of the “Pond Opening Committee,” a band of activists who believed the health of the island’s water was more important than a state-issued permit.

 

According to Peter Brace’s Nantucket: A Natural History and archived town records from the 1980s and ’90s, Scannell was the tip of a spear backed by the island’s maritime backbone. The committee was heavily supported by the Nantucket Shellfish Association, with veteran watermen like Bill Blount and Jack Gardner serving as outspoken advocates. To them, the stagnant water wasn't just an environmental data point, it was a direct threat to the commercial scalloping industry that sustained their families.

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The lore of Scannell’s “guerrilla openings” has since become part of the island’s salt-crusted DNA. He didn’t just dig in the dark; he famously called the local Environmental Police Officer, Don “Clambo” LaHaye, to announce exactly when and where he’d be digging. He wasn’t trying to hide — he was trying to force a test case in court. He wanted a judge to tell the Commonwealth of Massachusetts that the people of Nantucket had a sovereign right to save their own ponds.

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This defiant, hands-on approach left a lasting impression on the next generation of island leaders. Current and former town officials, including former Selectman Bob DeCosta, grew up in the shadow of these debates. DeCosta, who invoked Scannell’s name in recent years to vent frustration over modern bureaucratic delays, remains a bridge to that era, championing the same practical, results-oriented philosophy the committee fought for decades ago.

 

The Price of a Breach

The archives of the Inquirer and Mirror from that time tell the story of a man “busting his head against a brick wall.” In 1988, Scannell was arrested for trespassing on the very beaches where the town now operates heavy machinery. By 1989, the fight had escalated; reports indicate he was sentenced to 30 days in the Barnstable House of Correction for his defiance.

 

For a month, a Nantucket man sat in a jail cell because he believed a pond needed to breathe.

 

"I feel like Steve Scannell with a shovel,” DeCosta quipped during a 2022 public meeting, venting frustration over modern bureaucratic delays. The fact that Scannell’s name is still used as shorthand for "getting it done" decades after his activism speaks to his enduring impact. He became the island’s patron saint of productive impatience.

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From Protest to Procedure

The irony of history is that the outlaw eventually won. By the early 1990s, the science caught up to Scannell’s shovel. The Massachusetts Estuary Plan eventually reiterated exactly what the scallopers had been saying all along: without periodic tidal exchange, these systems would collapse.

 

The transition from Scannell’s hand-dug trenches to the NRD’s managed breaches didn't happen overnight, but it is his legacy. He eventually moved from the fringes of the beach into a formal role within the Natural Resources Department, helping to institutionalize the very process he once went to jail for starting. He helped turn a radical act of civil disobedience into a biannual ritual that is now celebrated as a victory for environmental stewardship.

 

The Relocated Legacy

Today, Steve Scannell has largely stepped back from the Nantucket public eye. But he hasn’t disappeared.​ Public records trace a path from Nantucket, to Harwich Port, and eventually to a permanent residence in Inglis — along the river systems of Florida’s Nature Coast.

 

What’s less visible is how much of the old approach he may have carried with him. Public traces in Florida suggest continued engagement with local environmental and water-related issues — the same kind of friction between regulation and action that defined his years on Nantucket. Whether formally or informally, the pattern is familiar: a bias toward intervention, and a skepticism of process when the resource itself is at risk.

 

Back on the island, his fingerprints were all over the sand last week. When the Natural Resources Department monitors salinity levels, they are working within a management framework shaped by years of persistence, pressure, and eventual institutional acceptance. Much of that framework didn't begin as policy, it was forced into existence over time.

 

When the eels moved through Sesachacha last week, they were moving through a system that began as something else entirely — a contested act, repeated enough times that it became part of how the island now manages its ponds.

 

Nantucket is an island of rules. It is also a place that, over time, absorbs the people who challenge them, especially when those challenges reshape the outcome.

 

As the Atlantic water continues to move through the pond, it carries more than just salinity. It carries the imprint of a period when the line between violation and stewardship was not always clear — and when the people willing to cross it helped define what the rules would eventually become.

 

Scannell may have moved more than a thousand miles south. But the system he pushed into motion is still here: opening, closing, and moving with the tide.