b"C H A P T E R N I N EAs Chatham Water Watchers slides into a fifth season, the testing goes on without incident. Well, almost without incident.Now and then, an essential outboard takes an inopportune holiday. Maybe a team finds it has to row out to its station. Or the Niskin cylinder balks at admittingPat Tarnow, at right, and Lew Kimball, both FCW testable samples of water. board members and both Chatham Water Watchers during the summer.FCW has lined up as many as 140 Or the anchor wont set, sowomen and men to volunteer for C.W.W. duty, but is a crew suddenly realizesusually looking for more to keep a full complement.their craft has drifted a hundred yards off-station.But those incidents rarely cancel a testing. And the C.WW track record has turned out to be so strong that George Olmsted hesitates not at all in calling it one of FCWs greatest triumphs.On Shifting SandsOn a November morning in 2001, the phone rang in the George Ryder Road office of Ted Keon, Chathams director of Coastal Resources. It was Jim 0 Connell, a man often in touch with Keon about shared concerns. O'Connell, who works for both Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute and Cape Cod Cooperative Extension, had a proposal. It captured Ted Keons fancy right away.For months, O'Connell had been putting together local projects to measure coastal beaches to see how much they changed at regular intervals and before and after major storms. Teams had already started to monitor stretches of beach in Marshfield, Duxbury, Sandwich, East Dennis, Eastham, Truro and Falmouth. Now he was wondering if Chatham would join up, to give him yet another set of site-specific data. What cinched the deal for Ted Keon was that all these other communities used volunteers as monitors. Intrigued by the proposal but too busy to be a manpower recruiter himself, he spotted an immediate solution: hed call on Friends of Chatham Waterways. Hadnt it assembled that company of 140 to measure the health of local bays and harbors, rivers and ponds?Following up, Keon got in touch with FCWs hierarchy. They had an obvious interest in matters like this, he recalled. They jumped all over it. They163"