This Morning’s Bulletin — 2.16.22

Good Morning!

• It will be mostly sunny today, with a high temperature near 44 degrees but wind chill values between 10 and 20, with a light south wind increasing to 8 to 13 miles per hour in the morning. It will be mostly cloudy overnight, with a low around 38. Thursday will be mostly cloudy, with a high near 54 and a southwest wind 11 to 16 miles per hour, with gusts as high as 28 mph. There’s a 50 percent chance of rain before 9 a.m. Friday, with cloudy skies through mid morning, then gradual clearing, with the temperature falling to around 38 by 5 p.m.

• There’s new hope this month for a public-private partnership to turn Plum Island into a National Monument, as the Department of Homeland Security winds down its ownership of the island in anticipation of moving the animal disease lab there to Kansas by 2028. Read More.

• The Riverhead Town Board did not vote, as they had been expected to, last night on changes to a plan to change the mechanism of transfer of the EPCAL property to Triple Five. In a press release Tuesday afternoon, Town Supervisor Yvette Aguiar’s office said “efforts by Supervisor Aguiar, members of the Town Board, CDA, Town Attorney’s office and outside counsel along with attorneys for CAT to work through the many aspects of this proposed transfer are ongoing, and could not be completed in time to give reasonable notice to members of the public who may wish to review the proposed resolution, prior to tonight’s meeting.”

• East Hampton Town and the Quogue Wildlife Refuge announced this week that they have at-home rapid Covid-19 testing kits available for free for members of the community. In East Hampton, tests will be available at East Hampton Town Hall, 159 Pantigo Road, East Hampton, on Tuesday, Feb. 22 from 4 p.m. to 7:30 p.m., or until supplies run out. Tests will also be distributed at the East Hampton Town Senior Center administrative trailer at 128 Springs-Fireplace Road on Friday, Feb. 18, between 11 a.m. and 2 p.m, or as supplies last. The Quogue Wildlife Refuge has kits available for distribution at their nature center at 3 Old Country Road in Quogue weekdays from 9:30 a.m. to 4 p.m. and weekends from noon to 4 p.m. The wildlife refute reported the kits were provided by Long Island Cares, Inc. to Suffolk County nonprofit organizations and have an expiration date of March 2022. They will be distributed on a first come, first serve basis until they run out.

• Challenges come in all shapes and sizes; completely relative to each individual. What appears easy for one person to deal with may in fact be debilitating to another. Though there have been somewhat recent large-scale issues such as the collapse of the financial industry and various acts of nature that have affected scores of folks simultaneously, it took the current pandemic for nearly all of us to experience such an unprecedented “collective” adversity, albeit in our own personal ways, which we’d never before witnessed in our lifetime. Our columnist Dave Daves explores this idea further in this month’s installment of Dave’s Desk@Ditch.

• The Friends of the Long Pond Greenbelt and the South Fork Natural History Museum hold their monthly full moon hike tonight at 6 p.m. in Vineyard Field at the museum at 377 Bridgehampton-Sag Harbor Turnpike. Here’s more info.

The high tides on the East End for the next two days are as follows:

Feb. 16
Plum Gut Harbor: 9:42 a.m., 10:04 p.m.
Montauk Harbor: 8:50 a.m., 9:12 p.m.
Greenport: 10:19 a.m., 10:41 p.m.
Mattituck Inlet: 11:06 a.m., 11:32 p.m.
Sag Harbor: 10:14 a.m., 10:36 p.m.
New Suffolk: 11:41 a.m.
South Jamesport: 11:48 a.m.
Shinn. Bay Entrance: 8:39 a.m., 9:08 p.m.
Shinn. Inlet: 6:48 a.m., 7:17 p.m.

Feb. 17
Plum Gut Harbor: 10:19 a.m., 10:42 p.m.
Montauk Harbor: 9:27 a.m., 9:50 p.m.
Greenport: 10:56 a.m., 11:19 p.m.
Mattituck Inlet: 11:44 a.m.
Sag Harbor: 10:51 a.m., 11:14 p.m.
New Suffolk: 12:03 a.m., 12:18 p.m.
South Jamesport: 12:10 a.m., 12:25 p.m.
Shinn. Bay Entrance: 9:14 a.m., 9:45 p.m.
Shinn. Inlet: 7:23 a.m., 7:54 p.m.

And that’s the way things look at dawn’s light here today.