New England Boating TV: Boston Islands

Tom and Parker visit the Boston Harbor Islands
With deep channels and sheltering bays and islands, it’s no wonder the Puritans chose Boston Harbor as the place to build their “City on a Hill” in the 1630s. Two hundred years later, Oliver Wendell Holmes, one of their Yankee descendants, dubbed the city the “Hub of the Solar System,” and Boston has been called The Hub ever since.

While the downtown waterfront, revitalized after some very rough times in the 1960s and ‘70s, draws the lion’s share of attention, the “greater harbor” comprises outlying towns and cities such as Hingham, Quincy, Hull, Winthrop and Charlestown, as well as the Boston Harbor Islands National Recreation Area—an incredible and underappreciated public resource that offers camping, hiking, fishing and, yes, swimming. Indeed, the once-justly maligned waters of Boston Harbor are now cleaner than at any point in the last 200 years, thanks to the massive sewage-treatment facility on Deer Island, which purifies the effluent of some five million Boston-area residents so thoroughly that you could safely drink the end product.