Two narrow columns of spinning spray swept across Pleasure Bay near Castle Island on Tuesday morning, catching the eye of a walker who says he was out on his usual route. His video shows a pair of slim vortices sliding over the water toward shore, with the nearer funnel rotating clockwise, a detail meteorologists called out as unusual. Experts are still debating whether the whirls were true waterspouts or shallower surface eddies kicked up in the bay.
As reported by WCVB, the videographer, Michael Bianculli of Walpole, told the station the closer spout “seemed to go a lot higher than a few feet,” though he could not tell if it actually connected to the cloud base. The station quoted StormTeam meteorologist A.J. Burnett noting that the near vortex’s clockwise spin ran opposite to what is typically seen in most funnels, and a National Weather Service representative in Norton told WCVB there were “definitely two eddies” that “perhaps both of them got caught in some very shallow instability.” WCVB also reported that Boston Logan was likely using runway 4R at the time, which would have arriving aircraft flying low over Castle Island and raises the possibility that exhaust or an aircraft wake helped produce the phenomenon.
How waterspouts form
Waterspouts generally fall into two main types: tornadic waterspouts that descend from thunderstorm clouds and fair-weather waterspouts that spin up at the surface and build upward. The National Weather Service notes that fair-weather spouts are more common in light-wind, locally unstable conditions, while NOAA’s Ocean Service explains that shallow surface eddies can whip up dramatic spray funnels without necessarily reaching a cloud base. Those distinctions make the Castle Island video tricky to classify and help explain why experts have floated eddies or aircraft wake as possible culprits.
Not the first time
WCVB previously highlighted similar fair-weather spouts in this same stretch of Boston Harbor in 2023, when viewers reported brief vortices off Castle Island. That recent history suggests the mix of local shoreline winds, relatively shallow harbor water, and occasional low-flying arrivals at Logan can combine to spin up short-lived whirlwinds that turn heads but rarely cause damage…