Tag Archives: Long Island
‘Do I need life insurance?’ A morning as a Peconic fisherman
Rain is the forecast as Tom Gariepy arrives at the Peconic River just before 5 a.m. for one of the last bunker hauls of the season. He backs his trailered sharpie bait boat into the still, 68-degree water, parks his pickup on the road and waits for veteran fishermen Lenny Nilson and Kenny Anderson before the three push off in two boats for the waters around Indian Island, in Riverhead. On the way out, Gariepy sees a giant school of bunker just beyond the launch point, but Nilson has a feeling about the waters to the north and east. >click to read<14:17
On the waterfront, a special breed of Long Islanders toils in winter
Working on the water sounds like such a great idea. After all, you’ll have a bay or ocean for your daily view, a fresh sea breeze and plenty of sunshine throughout the year. Many watery jobs will also keep you in shape. Imagine lifting crates of oysters, hauling fishing nets, building bulkheads or working as a party-boat mate. For those who love to be outdoors, these jobs hold special allure. Then winter rolls around. And sunny skies, warm weather and inviting breezes morph into roiling waves, sleet, snow and ice, and bone-chilling winds that roar day after day. >click to read<16:10
On the water with bayman Sawyer Clark
When Sawyer Clark turned 16, he bought a boat and went into the family business: fishing. In the four years since, he has graduated from high school, given college a try and returned to the profession he was born for, despite having a pretty good idea of how dangerous and unpredictable the life of a bayman is. “I tried to stay out, but I fell in love with it,” he said. The Clark family has been fishing on the East End for so long, Clark’s great-great-grandfather took scallops in Peconic Bay with a sailboat before motors were used. >click to read<09:38
Life on the Bays – Stories of beauty and heartache
Once numbering in the thousands, independent baymen have worked in the public waters off Long Island for centuries. Now these clammers and fishermen, many in their 60s or 70s, go mostly unnoticed. So do their daily struggles. Whether in Peconic Bay, Hempstead Bay, The Great South Bay, or others, the baymen share common pains: declining clam and fish populations, lack of affordable docking, increased regulations and catch limits. They cite pollution, fertilizers, global warming and governmental disinterest as culprits. Of course, there is also the literal pain they endure from the repetitive physical stress of their jobs. And then there’s Oyster Bay. 40 minute video, >click to read<10:55
Montauk Trying To Save Long Island Shore From Wind Farms – Residents are against it and need more support.
July 11, at the Montauk Playhouse just beneath the Montauk Manor there was an open town hall meeting featuring representatives of the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management concerning a project to produce 2,400 megawatts of power by 2030 (12 years from now.) The plan is to construct “eventually” clusters of wind farms along the 100-mile south shore of Long Island from 3 to 200 miles out. The project is to start off Montauk. The large hedge fund putting up a reported $560M has tried to frame the debate as “commercial fishermen worried about their fishing grounds versus clean wind power energy,” but that just is not the case. >click to read<07:53
Long Island: Wind farm meetings scheduled – Politicians and fishermen have doubts about visibility and impediments to fishing
New York State on Monday will hold a public meeting in Southampton to discuss its blueprint for wind energy and the recently released federal government call for wind-energy projects along the shore of practically all of Long Island, including the East End.,, The South Fork is also home to the single greatest force in opposition to offshore wind: hundreds of fishermen who see the turbine structures and undersea cables as impediments to fishing. The Long Island Commercial Fishing Association has already joined a lawsuit contesting the federal government’s auction>click to read< 09:41
Clam War – Claims Over Shellfish Fuel a Battle in the Bay
The bounteous shellfish here in this hamlet on the North Shore of Long Island are so iconic, they were extolled by Cole Porter in his song “Let’s Do It,’’ with its line about oysters down in Oyster Bay doing it. While the lyric connotes cozy relations between the famously fertile shellfish of this bivalve capital, feelings among shellfishermen themselves are decidedly less friendly. Locals describe them as the clam wars, with two sides waging a public battle for decades over rights and practices in Oyster Bay Harbor, which remains the most productive shellfishing habitat in New York State. The dispute pits the baymen who hand-rake for clams against the Frank M. Flower & Sons shellfish company, which uses dredge boats to mechanically harvest the clams and oysters it farms on a swath of 1,800 acres leased from the Town of Oyster Bay. click here to read the story 10:51
Peconic Bay scallop season off to a slow on Long Island
Long Island fishermen are saying that it’s a challenging year for Peconic Bay scallops, with the first day’s harvest “less than half” of what it was last year, said manager Keith Reda at Braun Seafood Co. in Cutchogue. The season begins on the first Monday of November and runs through the end of March. By late afternoon Monday, Reda hadn’t seen a Peconic Bay scallop yet. “They’re still out there, looking,” he said of the shop’s fisherman suppliers. The Seafood Shop in Wainscott was preparing on Monday to sell its first three bushels, the harvest from the first of the shop’s five fishing boats that left docks around sunrise. The Seafood Shop will sell bay scallops for about $29 a pound if the supply is slim and $25 if it’s plentiful — or as demand falls after the New Year and the water gets especially cold. Read the rest here 14:44
A massive coastal wind farm off Long Island will please pretty much no one
Election year is the season to channel more money into renewable energy resources because it tends to carry some significant sway with the liberal base. With that in mind, the green light has been given (yet again) to plans for a truly massive “wind farm” in the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Long Island. But the usual liberal caveat of NIMBY (“Not in my back yard”) is always in play when such plans come close to fruition and this one is no exception. Some of the chief opponents to this forest of turbine towers are the fishermen who make their living in the targeted waters. Read the rest here 11:05
Long Island a Possible ‘Breeding Ground’ For Great White Sharks
Ever since the blood-curdling screams of an ill-fated skinny dipper, who met her famous demise in the opening scene of “Jaws,” generations of beach-goers have approached the water with bone-chilling trepidation. Now, a leading shark research team has said it suspects Long Island might be a breeding ground for great whites and has launched a tagging expedition to be able to determine potential birthing sites. According to OCEARCH Chief Operating Officer Fernanda Ubatuba — OCEARCH is a nonprofit organization dedicated to shark research — if you look at a global shark tracker, five mature female great white sharks have been tagged in the past three to four years, and it seems that “there is certain activity in that region.” Great white sharks, she said, travel from Florida to Canada, “and you can see their activity sometimes overlaps around Long Island.” Read the rest here 17:35
