Sorry I didn't get to post the awards ceremony pictures last night, but I think having such nice weather made everything begin moving at warp speed and I've been on the go until now. I had a Fall Foliage meeting this morning (!!) - our chairperson, Blanche Lamore needed me to fill in for her co-chair, Tara Rogerson, last minute. Now that's taken care of, here's the report on yesterday's presentation.

The weather was absolutely unbelievably beautiful yesterday, as predicted, so meeting at the fishing access was perfect. Tom and Camilla Dente were here to open camp, so Tom was on hand to make the presentation of an award certificate and the check. Ice-Out Contest reliables, iceologest Don Walker and keeper of the clock, Homer Fitts, were here, along with a nice number of Association members and friends, plus a few families who came to fish, but probably found so many people milling about distracting, so they watched us for a while and then left.

We were pleased that Cheryl and Bill Hamilton came to see Ash get his check. Cheryl sold him the winning ticket. Ash and Cheryl work together, and he said he actually had three entries in the contest. His choice of date and time on the winning ticket was made based on random associations with friends, he said. He told us he hadn't thought about how he'd spend the nearly $5,000, but said he'd probably take his girlfriend out for a really nice dinner, then pay some bills and perhaps student loans.

Channel 7 News will air their follow-up piece Monday evening at 5:30. If you don't receive Channel 7, the Lyndon State College news station, you can go to their web site, News 7 and find it there (left panel shows newscasts by date.) You can also see there the piece that ran on April 22 about our contest, if you haven't seen it on our link on home page. We will put a link to Monday's on our home page, as well.

Fred took lots of pictures, and I've made a slide show of them. We're using a new camera, so they may not look quite the same as usual. Here is my slide show:
Award Ceremony, Ice-Out 2009

On our way home, Fred and I stopped at Nate Drown's camp on W. Shore Rd. to see if any of the ice that piled onto his waterfront Monday night was still there. Here's how it looked. The pond is now free of ice except for a small skimming right at the fishing access. You can see it, I think, in a couple of the pictures in the slide show.


As we were finishing up at Nate's, a couple of loons swam by - obviously unimpressed with all the activity, but happy to be back at Joe's Pond.

We've had several people question us about exactly what happened to stop the clock but left the flag still up. We have had this situation in years past, so it is not unheard of, but here's what happened: Over last weekend, we'd had cold weather and winds out of the north that worked all the ice into the cove at the fishing access where the pallet and flag were. There was very little water showing and not much apparent melting going on. Every morning during the Ice-Out Contest, Homer looks out his window and observes whether the flag is there.

On Monday, the wind changed and was coming from the south and southeast most of the day, but still nothing seemed to be moving - the ice on the pond was white, and since it had been below freezing at night, nothing was melting. Things looked normal when Homer did his check just before dark.

Come Tuesday morning, when Homer looked out, he saw the flag, but it was not where it usually was - it was a lot further out that it had been, so he immediately checked the clock on his deck and found it had stopped at 10:21 p.m. The wind had blown hard enough to move the ice away from the shore, taking the pallet and flag with it, pulling the connection hard enough to disconnect and stop the clock. Evidence of how strong the wind was is the ice that piled up on Nate Drown's waterfront. I have posted pictures of that earlier here on the blog. It's fairly unusual to get wind out of that direction this time of year, but we've had south winds move the ice far enough down the shore to disconnect the clock.

The pallet and flag went down on Thursday, and on Friday all that was visible were the markers on the rope that's attached to the pallet so Ray Richer can haul everything out of the pond once he gets his boat in the water. It's not an easy chore, pulling that contraption up and getting it to shore for storage until the next contest, but Ray gets it done.

That's the story on how the clock got stopped this year.