Hurricane Bob on Martha's Vineyard: 35 Years Since the Storm of 1991

Thirty-five years ago today, on Monday, August 19, 1991, the busiest week of the Martha's Vineyard summer stopped cold. Hurricane Bob came up the coast so fast that the island went from a gray, breezy morning to hurricane-force wind by early afternoon, and by dinner it was over: hundreds of boats ashore, the harbors unrecognizable, the trees stripped, and the lights out. Edgartown's harbormaster at the time, Charlie Blair, summed the whole thing up in a phrase islanders still repeat: "40 minutes of terror."

Bob remains, as of this writing, the most recent hurricane to make landfall in New England. That is a remarkable streak of luck, thirty-five years and counting, and it is exactly why the storm is worth remembering. Here is what happened that day, told through the newspaper that covered it best, a copy of which we were lucky enough to find in a thrift shop on the island.

The Front Page We Found at Chicken Alley

A while back we picked up an original Vineyard Gazette storm edition at the Chicken Alley thrift shop in Vineyard Haven: the morning-after paper, dated August 21, 1991, with a wrecked fishing boat filling the front page under the headline "Hurricane Bob Bashes the Island." The scans throughout this article come from that copy. Newsprint from the week of the storm is getting hard to find, and holding it makes the whole event feel much less like history and much more like a Monday that could happen again.

A Storm in a Hurry

Bob formed east of the Bahamas on August 16 and was a hurricane by the 17th. At its peak early on August 19 it was a Category 3 with 115 mph winds off the Virginia coast. Then it did the thing New England storms do: it accelerated, racing northeast at around 25 mph and crossing the region before anyone had time to second-guess their preparations. The eye passed over Block Island around 1:30 PM and came ashore near Newport, Rhode Island just before 2 PM as a Category 2.

That track mattered enormously here. Martha's Vineyard sat just east of the eye, on the dangerous right-hand side where the storm's forward speed adds to its winds. The Gazette reported winds "officially clocked at 98 mph and reported in places as high as 110," and the Martha's Vineyard Times put gusts in Edgartown at 111 mph. Because Bob was moving at more than 30 mph, the worst of it was compressed into less than an hour, Blair's forty minutes. One of the strangest details: it barely rained. Edgartown recorded only about 0.15 inches. Bob was a wind and water event, not a rain event.

The Harborfront Took the Worst of It

In Edgartown Harbor alone, 84 vessels were beached, sunk or capsized. A 6,000-pound mooring anchor dragged more than 300 yards across the bottom. And in the storm's most retold image, the sloop Claire ended up in the Harborside Inn's swimming pool, lifted clean out of the harbor and set down among the deck chairs. In Vineyard Haven, about 30 boats went ashore and two sank; one was thrown clear over the jetty and somehow came away with little more than scratches. Island-wide, the Gazette put it simply at "hundreds of boats."

Up-island fared better on the water. Menemsha's fishing fleet was fully secured by 9:30 that morning, and the harbor came through largely intact, a quiet testament to what a working waterfront does when the forecast turns.

The Island Turned Brown Overnight

Away from the harbors, Bob's signature was trees. Roughly a million board feet of timber came down in Manuel Correllus State Forest, most of it white pine. About 2,400 power lines fell, four times the toll of Hurricane Gloria six years earlier, and some 15,000 customers lost power. West Tisbury had lights back in 23 hours; parts of Chilmark waited about eight days, with line crews arriving from as far away as Oklahoma.

Then came the effect people still describe with wonder: the "false autumn." Salt spray driven miles inland dried the leaves on every windward tree, and within days the north side of the island had turned, in the words of West Tisbury's Dan Waters, "brown as a grocery bag." In late August, the Vineyard looked like early November. The south-facing beaches lost up to 50 feet of shoreline, dunes from Squibnocket to Chappaquiddick were cut down, several great ponds were torn open to the sea, and along Gay Head the surf ran red from dissolving clay. At Five Corners in Vineyard Haven, the flood put two feet of water in the A&P.

Nobody Died Here, and the Islanders Kept Their Sense of Humor

Here is the number that matters most: no one on Martha's Vineyard died in the storm, and there were no serious storm injuries. About 1,500 people rode it out in shelters, ferries were halted, and Edgartown banned driving from midday until the evening. The hospital's biggest post-storm problem was bee stings, ten of them by Wednesday, from yellow jackets whose nests had been torn up along with everything else.

The graffiti told you everything about the island's mood once the wind died: "Kowabunga Bob" across a boarded storefront on Main Street in Vineyard Haven, and on another wall a mock movie marquee: Now Playing: 1. What About Bob? 2. Gone With the Wind.

The Gazette itself pulled off one of the great feats in its history that week. With the island dark, the paper flew its production to Nantucket and printed the storm edition on the Inquirer and Mirror's press, keeping a press run then approaching a century and a half unbroken. The edition sold out all 16,000 copies and needed a reprint, and the Gazette's storm coverage went on to be named a Pulitzer Prize finalist in Spot News Reporting.

The Bigger Picture

Across the region, Bob caused about $1.47 billion in damage in 1991 dollars and was blamed for 18 deaths per the National Hurricane Center, with roughly 2.1 million customers losing power. The storm surge reached 12 to 15 feet at the head of Buzzards Bay, and Cape Cod took gusts up to 125 mph. On the island, the damage totaled about $5.5 million by the Gazette's accounting, a fraction of the regional bill, thanks in part to how little rain fell and how fast the storm moved. The name Bob was retired in the spring of 1992; there will never be another Hurricane Bob.

What Bob Means for a Visitor in 2026

None of this is a reason to avoid the island in late summer. It is a reason to respect the calendar. New England's hurricane climatology peaks from late August through September, exactly when the Vineyard is at its best, and Bob's real lesson is speed: the storm went from a weather note to a landfall in about three days. If you are here when a storm threatens, the rhythm is well practiced now: the Steamship Authority posts service changes early, harbors haul and secure boats, and the island hunkers down for an afternoon. Keep an eye on the forecast during a late-summer visit, build a flexible day into ferry plans if you can, and know that the same island that took Bob head-on was serving chowder again by the weekend.

Our September guide covers what the shoulder season looks like now, and our month-by-month weather guide has the climate numbers if you are picking dates. And if you ever spot a 1991 Gazette in an island thrift shop, buy it. Some souvenirs are better than a T-shirt.