Walking the Beaches of Long Island in the New Year 2012

Even in the winter months, the beaches on Long Island are wonderful places to walk, think, and spend some alone time.

A walk on the beach, late afternoon, December 31.

Some views of a Town of Huntington beach,  Fleets Cove Beach, in Huntington Bay, near to the Jarvis House.

 People walk with their children and dogs.

 During the winter the water is crystal clear.

 Sea Gulls float by.

 I walked with a girlfriend. 

Phragmites reach for a very cold blue sky.

 January 1, another view of Long Island beaches, this time from a beach just east of the Jarvis House.

 This is a beach where private homes pop up from the shoreline.

 In order to keep the sand from washing away in storms, and helping with erosion of the coastline,  large stones have been brought in by barges.

 Some of these stones have curious perfectly round holes and other markings.

The stone wave break.

 This is a Jetty, which is covered with algae and barnacles.  It keeps the beach from eroding.

A brave sailor, who kept his boat in the water at this late date, hoping for a day like this!

 Another strange hole. A friend, recently sent me a message about the holes and explains that, "those round holes were probably drilled in the rocks to take the blasting caps.  How else do you think that they got those small pieces of rock." Sue Historian GSSC.  (The rocks are huge.)

 This stone had a series of long machined markings.

 Some stones on the Long Island shoreline were deposited there during Ice Ages, by glaciers.  Other stones were brought in from other places by man.

 This sea wall, beautifully constructed, must have been quite costly.

 Another sea gull.

 This stone looked like a muffin, a very large muffin.

 While on this walk, we noticed more of the plastic wagon wheel shapes that spilled out of a waste water treatment plant in Mamaroneck, NY last March.

 We collected 29 plastic debris shapes in  minutes, covering just a few feet of the high tide line.

Some looked like they had been around for a while, and some looked rather clean.  We wondered how many were under the sand.