The Long Island Blog

Remember that vineyard I showed you last week? Well, bud break is in full swing there now. The leaves are small, but they’ll grow like mad until the vines flower and produce fruit.

The warm weather not only stirs activity in the vines, but in the vineyards as well. There’s work to be done from now until harvest and beyond.

This is also the time of year when people end their winter hibernation and start exploring Long Island wine country. If you’ve never been to a tasting room before and feel a little intimidated, no bother, just read this bit about Long Island wine tasting and relax. If you already know the drill, then consider taking a chauffer driven Long Island wine tour.

WLIW21 needs your Huntington memories for a new documentary

In the tradition of WLIW21’s award-winning New York the Way it Was series, WLIW21 is getting ready to explore the story of one of Long Island’s most interesting communities – Huntington.

Following the tremendous success of New York War Stories, which featured viewer-contributed videos and letters, WLIW21’s production team turns to viewers like you once again for stories, photos and home movies of family celebrations, sporting events, carnivals, parades and other Huntington activities.

If you lived in Huntington Village, Cold Spring Harbor, Huntington Station, Northport, Greenlawn, Dix Hills and Lloyd Neck between 1950 and 1990, please share with us your memories of the places and people that will always remind you of your hometown, Huntington.

Our cameras can capture Huntington today; we need your help to tell the story of yesterday.

Send your photos or movies (any format) to:

Stephanie Marsh
WLIW21
P.O. Box 21
Plainview, NY 11803

Please include a self-addressed, stamped envelope if you want your submission returned.

All photo submissions will also be considered for the film’s DVD cover.

Email your stories of life in Huntington as you knew it to Hometown@wliw.org.

Call 516.367.2100 x8461 with any questions.

On a trip to Southold to visit my mom on this very warm weekend past, I saw this small, recently pruned Long Island vineyard waiting to bloom.

This is the same vineyard I saw in January covered with snow. The difference between then and now is amazing.

This is how it looked in January. Cold and gnarly.

And now in April at least the grass is green and the vines are pruned.

Buds, but no leaves yet

Give it a week or so and I’ll bet there’ll be leaves on these vines.

Here’s to the warm weather!

Here’s three quick shots of Long Island’s beautiful sunrises taken last Thursday, Friday, and Sunday. (I missed Saturday because I was sick.)

On Thursday I was lucky enough to catch a sun dog. That’s the bright little rainbow to the left of the sun near the seagull. Sun dogs are caused by ice crystals in the clouds reflecting the sun’s light and are fairly common during the winter.

Friday’s sunrise was brilliant red with a beautiful reflection of the sun over the frozen Great South Bay. The reflection shows where the bay is frozen and where it’s not, and I thought that was pretty cool.

This last picture, taken on Sunday morning, reminds me of something you might see in the arctic. There was ice everywhere and hardly any sun. In spite of what you might feel by looking at this picture, it was a relatively warm 40+ degrees F and I was quite comfortable without my gloves and hat.

So that’s three pictures of Long Island sunrises all taken in the same place, at the same time, within a few days of each other. It’s amazing how quickly the sky and the bay change isn’t it?

Edit: 02-11-2009

In reviewing the pictures I took on Sunday morning I found this one, taken with my back toward the sun. This is what the sun was looking at as it was rising.

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

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.

Hey Long Island Guy,

I just wanted to say I love the site. I watch all your clips on YouTube as well. Nice to see someone take so much pride in their home. I am the same way.

I was wondering if you guys are local to Islip? I think I recognize the boat behind you in the scallop shucking film. Are you guys down by Whitecap?

I love your son’s boat too, I used to have an 17 foot Garvey pilothouse but I recently purchased an old down east pilot with a small cuddy.

Just wanted to say I love your work. Thanks so much for the effort.

Take care,
Tom Costello – 24 Bay Shore

Tom,

Thanks for the kind words. It nice to know that all my hard work on this site is appreciated.

Here is another shot of my son’s boat, a 23′ Thomas Marine. It’s all aluminum and very heavy. It used to be at Whitecap, but now it’s elsewhere, and this weekend we’re hauling it for maintenance. Won’t launch again until spring.

-Bill

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.

I took a ride to the Fire Island Lighthouse over the weekend and was surprised to see how much beach we lost already this winter.

Staff at the lighthouse reported that 2 unbroken lighthouse bulbs from the 1940’s were exposed from the eroding dune face and donated to the museum by the finder. I think that’s pretty darn cool and have wonder if I would have been so generous as to donate both bulbs.

Here are some photos of the beach showing the loss of sand and some of the interesting things that appear when the sand is washed away.

This boardwalk used to extend over the dune and onto the beach. Here we can see that about half of the primary dune is gone.

Here is an aerial view of the same boardwalk before the washout. there used to be over 200 feet of beach. Now there’s only about 100 feet left.

Here an old push mower is seen along with some other things that I could not identify.

Look closely at this picture and you see a piece of dune fence sticking out of the dune like the ribs of some giant monster.

An old piling from a pier or maybe even a house.

A family examines a deposit of surf clams near the top of the dune.

Loss of sand is pretty common on Fire Island during the winter, and in many cases the sand comes back during the spring. I do think however, that it is going to take a long time to rebuild that dune.

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 on Long Island in 2009.