b'C H A P T E R F I VECompass Course Toward ActionIn its time, the organization now called Friends of Chatham Waterways has been active and visible on many different fronts. It has undertaken at least twenty initiatives, projects it has originated on its own for the most part, or in some cases has shared an evolutionary role with others.A dozen times and more, it has offered public information sessions, such as its 2002 meeting on the risk to soil and water of nitrogen loading, or its 2001 program on bycatch and the alarming damage it brings to fishing stocks.Then, half a dozen times at least, FCW has put its public information machinery behind such issues as the Community Preservation Act, the Land Bank, and a proposed ban on PWCs, personal water craft. Not all Friends efforts have won a trophy.But the organization has established itself as one-of-a-kind in town, willing and able to start a project and take a stand, if those steps can help sustain the towns enviable quality of life.Of all FCWs ventures, none has taken longer to bring about than helping to make a reality of a Stage Harbor Management Plan.There had beenaudible talk of writing such a plan as far back as the mid-1980s; the final document was formally accepted by the Commonwealths Secretary of Environmental Affairs on August 19, 1994 in an official ceremonyfor which people received a printed invitationat the Old Mill Boat Yard. At the same time, FCW spent more of its own coin to bring the plan to life than it has on any other project.For the sailors of FCW who doubled as its board members, putting a set of harbor regulations in motion at long last had to be highly gratifying. And in the perspective of one director, Kurt Hellfach, who served as co- chairman of the plan-drafting committee,Richard Miller worked together it may well stand as the most important projectwith Kurt Hellfach for long, that FCW has undertaken in its short life. sometimes difficult, months to What were Stage Harbors problems thatdraft a management plan for needed curing? Richard Miller, environmentStage HarborHellfach as codefender and eventual chairman of the Townschair of the drafting committee, and Miller as head of the Waterways Committee, has his own view. Towns Waterways Committee60'