Happy / sad to say I have sold my home at Gilgo Beach. Hence the end of live images of the ocean and the weather station on gilgo.com. Will be shutting down cam and weather station the middle of December. I hope the site helped you find some bumps. Shutdown on January 2nd, 2022.
Good Run; 1996 – 2022
Every day a gift, make the best of every session. waves, peter
Update 1/4; updated tide tables so site serves a small purpose! Check the tides and click thru to the buoys… can’t help myself, so used to looking at it for conditions.
Parking Barriers Installed May 11th at Gilgo Beach
Not sure what and why this is happening. Guess it is about coronavirus control. Someone has decided that the beach is a problem and so I guess this is their answer. Open the beach but limit the parking. Estimate they blocked off 50% of the parking lot, about 175 parking spaces.
Concrete blocks to prevent approx 200 cars from parking at Gilgo Beach July, 2020
As of today, the Town of Babylon has blocked out all the parking spots east of the entrance. Not sure why they would use concrete barriers unless they are planning to limit the parking for a long time.
Would guess it cost at least 15 thousand dollars to do what they have done thus far. Had the Excavator towed here approximately 30 miles. Then 4 dump trucks hauled the barriers with 4 pickup trucks to assist. Total 10 trucks and men for the day plus whomever where on the other end loading the barriers.
Cuomo says June 6th latest date, have heard June 25th also. That is in a couple of weeks, so whats with the town installing barriers? Heard happening at Cedar Beach also. The state ocean beach parks are open, Tobay Beach is open. Guess we will find out in the coming weeks.
UPDATE JULY 1st, 2020
The town came couple weeks ago and moved all the cement blocks to a corner of the parking lot so that the lot is back to capacity. Note; thus far, the town is closing the lot when it is around 50% capacity.
UPDATE JULY 12th, 2020
The traffic coming over the Robert Moses Bridge hit the ridiculous stage this morning. By 9 am traffic was backed up to Montauk Hwy!
This afternoon around 2 pm, for as far as I could see in both directions on Eastbound Ocean Parkway, hundreds of cars were parked up on the dunes with people going over the dunes to get to the beach.
Empty side of Gilgo Parking Lot due to capacity reductions with cars parked along Ocean Parkway instead .
The number of vehicles on Ocean Parkway West that are airing down and up at Coast Guard entrance to Gilgo State Park has increased. Maybe people are thinking it is OK to park after driving by.
Maybe this is happening due to frustration of driving for hours in traffic and not being able to get into any of the town or state beach parks. There has to be a better way.
We have had a fly box at the east end of the Gilgo Marina for years where it helps control the green fly invasions each summer. A surprise this spring has been a young Osprey couple decided to build their nest there.
Ospreys have made a real comeback here on Long Island and guess that nesting areas are getting scarce. The nest was started the 1st week in April with the build going smoothly when a spring storm came up with gusty west winds and blew it away. They started a rebuild right away, but within days, another 30 mph west wind coming thru and shredded it again!
On April 12th, they came back for a third try. A determined couple of birds for sure. Decided to change the Gilgo Bay Cam to an Osprey Nest Cam on the 16th and got it running that day.
An unintended consequence of the Osprey Nest Cam is because the camera is at maximum zoom to get on the nest was not happy with the image quality so looked into software settings. The image quality and size was set up last decade when 20 kb meant something.
Decided to try full image and movie files uploads with no compression. Jpegs uploads went from 20 kb to 300 kb with the image not that much better. So reset sizing so image is bigger. Thought it looked better so reset image settings for the Ocean Surf Cam too. Will see if my ISP complains. So the birds brought a better picture of the waves for the gilgo beach surf cam, you never know.
Hope you enjoy, watch the live Osprey Cam of their nest here
Seems like Swellinfo ongoing forecast issue is lingering. Looked around for alternative, found stormsurf.com.
Graphics are last decade, but the surf forecast and weather information is extensive. Mark Sponsier created the site back in 1998. He packed the site with information on how waves are created, tracked and forecasted.
The 5 day forecast for Gilgo is part of a broader New Jersey to New York forecast, but serves up some good info.
There is also a buoy forecast looking out 5 days that has couple of different reporting screens, here is Buoy 440025, 30 miles south of Islip.
Check out their Tutorial Page for some in depth explanations. Last, one odd situation is that the site is not https, site is still running in the clear.
Put up link on gilgo.com to mobile page with jpeg and the mov files.
The mov file actually works on iphones very well.
am working on weather and tide display.
Let me know if mov works on other phones please; email peter@gilgo.com
mov file does not seem to work on some computers and or browsers, just like on main gilgo in the last year or so, apple stopped support of quicktime mov files. on my mac, sometimes you do not even see the video frame, most just says not supported.
update 12/17, upgraded cam software to mp4 format, seems to work on many more computers.
