Jump in to the Peconic Bathtub

Today, Beacon Publications is launching a sister ship, The Peconic Bathtub. While the East End Beacon focuses on what’s shaping these twin forks that jut out into the Peconic Estuary, the Peconic Bathtub is all about the water body in between the forks, a water body that connects us all.

I’ve been looking out at the Peconic Bathtub my whole life. I never thought this was an unusual thing until I became an adult, and everyone who met me seemed to know I was a Peconic Bay girl by the way I always stared out across the water, and by the faraway look in my eye every time the Peconic Bay was far away.

I was raised on the North Fork side of this bay, in a little apartment above a restaurant where you could look across the bay and see Camp Quinipet’s gazebo over on the Shelter Island shore. We didn’t have a boat when I was a kid, but we built our own rafts out of driftwood, and salvaged rotten shells from creeks that might have been better left to decompose along the muddy water banks.

When I left the nursery of the North Fork shore, I only made as far as Sag Harbor, an easy place to walk to the end of Long Wharf and get back to the business of staring out across the Peconic Bay.

These bays nurture everything that we try to do on the land of the East End. They are dependent on our good stewardship, and we are dependent on their shores for recreation, fishing, transportation and solace.

I was in the middle of the Peconic Bay in a little kayak with The Peconic Bathtub’s kayaking correspondent about a decade ago when I first decided to launch the East End Beacon.

At the time, I thought the Beacon was going to be a broadsheet newspaper, with ideas that would span both forks, printed monthly and distributed for free from one shore to the next. It was a ridiculously ambitious idea. Then, the bottom fell out of the newspaper business, and no broadsheet could span such a mental distance in the age of the internet.

But the Peconic Bay has always spanned that distance, and here we are, in the middle of it all.

In the upcoming months, we’ll be rolling out stories from the middle of the Peconic Bathtub — of the people who rely on its shores, of the natural life that calls it home, and of the businesses whose futures depend on the health of the Peconic Estuary.

We’re also planning to roll out several interactive features, including crew finding tools, sailboat race results, improved weather tools and message boards to help you find or sell gear.

We’re starting today with The Bay Today, a rolling photographic journal of what the bay looks like now, wherever it is you are looking at it from. You can join in the conversation by submitting your photos to baytoday@peconicbathtub.com.

We’re also highlighting goings-on at marinas throughout the East End. If you have any information you’d like to share, please email the details to marinas@peconicbathtub.com.

If you have any ideas for what you’d like to see in the Peconic Bathtub, please email me at beth@peconicbathtub.com.

Jump Right In! The Peconic Bathtub is online here.