Sunday, April 01, 2012


Talk about an April Fool's Day prank - we have about 2 inches of snow out there tonight. It's light and fluffy and melts when it hits the pavement - at least it did when it started this afternoon. Now the temperature may have cooled things down enough so it may begin to freeze over during the night, making the roads slick. I've had the scanner on, but haven't heard any problems yet.

It looks pretty wintery again, and although we probably won't get much precipitation for the rest of the week - after tonight - it's still going to stay fairly cold. Here is a very short slide show Fred took when he checked at 7 o'clock tonight.

There's still a chance we could beat our standing record of earliest Ice-Out date of April 5th set in 2010. A reporter from the Burlington Free Press is going to be at Hastings store on Tuesday to talk to people about global warming and whether we think it is real and has impacted our Ice-Out. That's kind of hard to answer - we haven't really seen that much change, but there could be a trend in the making. We need to remember that last year the ice wasn't out until April 27th.

Tomorrow is "wrap-up" day for those of us dealing with tickets. We'll have a few stragglers come in the mail for a couple of days, but then all tickets will be in the hands of Ros, our statistician, and she'll have a few days to get everything logged in. Perhaps she'll have some interesting stuff to report.

I just went back through my records kept by my father on when the ice was completely gone from the pond, which is a few days after the records we show of when the pallet goes down and the clock stops. I have only four years of overlapping records - my dads run from 1968 to 1991, and of course our contest was set up in 1988. Those four years indicate only a variance of 2-3 days. From 1968 to 1988, there were as many times the ice was out in May as in April - 10 each; however, from 1988 to 2011, there were 17 in April and only 7 in May. I guess that proves something has changed.

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