The Long Island Blog

Yesterday was haul out day for my son’s boat. The procedure is simple: drive the boat to the ramp, wait for the hauler to show up, put the boat on the trailer, and go. Not so easy this time…

It’s been cold on Long Island! We’ve had a few days above freezing, but the nights have all been below the freezing point. For the most part the Great South Bay is free of ice, but the canals still have ice in them.

To get to the ramp my son had to break through over 100′ of ice several inches thick. Breaking ice with your boat is usually not recommend unless you know what you’re doing and have a boat that will take it.

The trick is to push your boat on top of the ice and let the boat’s weight crush the ice underneath it. You don’t want to speed into the ice and risk puncturing your hull. It also helps if the shape of your boat allows it to climb the ice.

If you have a deep forefoot and a plumb cutwater, you’re out of luck. In that case you’ll need someone on the bow with a pole to puncture and clear the ice before you go through it.

Also, don’t be fooled by thin ice. When I was a kid I saw a wooden boat sink because the captain thought he could cut through the thin ice in the marina. He was driving his boat around from his slip to the haulout slip where the Travelift was waiting.

Well, he cut through the ice no trouble at all, but at the same time the sharp ice was tearing through his wooden hull. The boat sank before he was even close.

If you do manage to break ice without sinking your boat, you’ll have a nice clean bottom as a bonus. The crushed ice scrapes everything off, even barnacles.

Here’s the video:

Okay, so breaking ice with your boat is not something everyone on Long Island is doing this winter, but that’s why I thought this might be interesting.

Click here for more Long Island videos from Loving-Long-Island.com

Loving-Long-Island.com readers Pete and Nicole sent in this picture of Corey Beach in Bluepoint. You can actually feel the cold just by looking at it.

Corey Beach is the small beach just down the road from Flo’s Famous Luncheonette. Too bad that place isn’t open during the winter. It’d be great to grab a burger and sit by the water to watch the ice ebb and flow with the tide…

If anyone has a great picture of something on Long Island that they’d like to share, please send it in via this special page that I call Scene on Long Island.

Yes, there’s double meaning in that name. Self explanatory I think. Click the link or the picture above for more information.

If you live on Long Island you’ve no doubt noticed the cold weather, so this is for all of my readers who’ve moved away and miss it here.

With daily highs in the teens and twenties and nighttime lows in the single digits, it’s been pretty darn cold. As dangerous and expensive as the cold weather can be there’s something about extreme weather conditions that excites me.

I know, all you folks in the Midwest are laughing, but for those of us here on The Island, single digit temperatures are not all that common.

The first thing I do when it’s been cold like this for a while is check to see if the bay is frozen, sure enough…

Here are some pictures taken yesterday morning on my way to the barber shop:

In the cold steaming chimneys like this one are a common sight.

Looking west: A half moon hovers over the frozen Great South Bay.

On her way to the Atlantic to fish for clams the dragger Susan H slowly cuts through the ice. Visible on the right is the Ocean Beach water tower.

I was tooling around in wine country yesterday afternoon and got to enjoy a little snowy scenery in Southold.

This little vineyard is right around the block from my mom’s house. Passing it on my way home in the snowstorm, I snapped this picture in the blue light of dusk.

While some people were afraid it might be too cold out or that there’d be too much sand on the beach   yours truly braved the sand, sea and bitter cold to bring you this beautiful Long Island sunrise.

Way off in the distance you can just make out Fire Island as a dark band on the horizon.

While I was wandering the beach I came across this horseshoe crab frozen to the eelgrass that’s been washed ashore.

Horseshoe crabs are one of my favorite sea creatures. They’re perfectly harmless in spite of the way they look, have great medical potential, and have been around for millions of years.

The morning was finger-numbing cold, clear, and absolutely beautiful. Hope we have much more of the same in 2009.

The town of Cold Spring Harbor really does the holidays well. I was there last weekend and had a great time shopping, eating, and hanging around with pirates, actors, horses… I almost felt like a Charles Dickens story.

Here are some pictures and a flyer detailing the events for this weekend and next. If you like Christmas, don’t miss it.

Read more about cold Spring Harbor here.

Grasso’s Restaurant is one of my favs and right on Main Street. Read my review here.

There are a lot of things I like about winter. The long nights give me a chance to hibernate. The cold, dry air makes sleeping so easy (and rising so difficult). And the dramatic grey, stormy skies bring anticipation to the day—will it snow? Sure looks like it will. Sure hope it does…

There’s nothing like a good snowstorm.

February, typically Long Island’s most snowy month, is almost over. As we move into March the odds of having a good one decrease with each passing day.

But last Friday, just in time for the morning rush hour, February gave us a teaser. About 4 inches of snow fell by daybreak and it continued to snow lightly throughout the day.

As much as I love the snow, I can’t stand when Mother Nature drops a small one on us. Sure, it pretties everything up for a few days, but driving in it can be a nightmare. It’s not the snow itself that makes conditions dangerous, but the bonehead drivers who don’t clean their windows and speed down the road like it’s a beautiful spring day. I can’t stand that.

On second thought, maybe driving with a camera in your hand is not too smart either. Here are 2 views from a snap taken in my little corner of Long Island during my drive into work.

The snow is still falling and you can barely see the trees beyond the bridge. Pretty cool if you ask me.

I love the panoramic view

But this is closer to what one actually sees when driving in the snow