Beautiful spring day here. I think we may have reached 50 degrees around high noon; but there was a chill to the wind. The snow is melting, the ground is drying out, our roads are far from being terrible mud holes (so far), the pond is gradually turning blue.

I had a call from son Bill late this afternoon to let me know Stiles Pond in St. Johnsbury was clear of ice. He said when he went to work this morning there was still ice on it but when his wife, Monika, went by around 2 o'clock, the ice was gone. Bill said that in past years Joe's has gone out about 10 days after Stiles.

Fred and I took pictures today from the fishing access. As you can see, there is still good white ice in the southern section of the big pond where the flag is set out. We can see a difference in the color of the ice in spots, and both the smaller ponds are nearly clear of ice. We haven't seen anyone out on the ice in the last two days.

The picture on the left above is where the brook comes into the pond by the fishing access. We were parked on the ramp looking directly out at the flag for the photo next to it above.

All pictures were taken at about 12:30 p.m. We had stopped at Bill and Diane Rossi's earlier and Diane pointed out that their sailboat mooring was showing about six inches above the ice. There is a little water showing along the west shore, too. I'm hoping to get over to the east shore perhaps tomorrow to see how things are looking.

Karl Couillard, our ticket logger, let us know today he has logged in 11,388 tickets. I don't know how many are still in the running, but by tomorrow he may have that information for us.
That number is a little short of what we sold last year (12,039), but in this economy, we think we did pretty darn well. Thanks to so many of you who bought tickets, cajoled family and friends to buy them, and prevailed on total strangers! Now we wait to find out who will win well over $4,000 again this year.