Looks like our January thaw is about to end.  The thermometer has been slipping downward all morning, and is at the 40 degree mark after being close to 50.  It remained warm last night - around 38 or so, and came up for a while this morning when the sun was out, but now the clouds are closing in and the wind has picked up a bit from the northwest.  We lost a lot of our snow cover.  I measured at one point last week 18 inches at my back yard stake, and this morning it's showing just under 11 inches.

When we walked this morning, the road was very wet and the main road has plenty of sand or gravel on it; but underneath is ice.  There could be some icy spots as the temperature continues to drop, but actually the road by us doesn't seem bad at all.  Jamie and Marie's driveway is still snow covered, and will probably be pretty slick when it freezes.  I guess it depends on whether we get snow with the colder temperatures or not. Snow sometimes helps if it falls on the still moist ice.  And sometimes it just adds to the problem.  You can see that our driveway is clear and fairly dry, and the road below is shiny wet in spots.

I spoke with Diane Rossi this morning and she's wondering about the ice, but said yesterday there were fishermen out as usual, and some snowmobiles.  There's water on top of the ice in spots, and I expect most of the snow has melted, but perhaps there hasn't been too much loss of ice depth.   Jack and Sue LaGue reported around Christmas time they measured 6 inches in front of their house on Sandy Beach Road, and we had lots of below-zero nights after that, so there probably was a good base of ice when this thaw started.

We will be meeting with Larry Rossi this week to discuss the new placement of the Ice-Out Contest flag.  I'll have more to report on that probably this weekend.  The flag won't go out until sometime mid or late March, depending on the weather.  It's hard to tell at this point if there what to expect, and we may be rushing to get things set up before the ice is too dangerously thin to be on; or we may have some nasty March weather that will keep us from getting the flag set up, maybe even until after the contest closes on April 1st.  That has happened in the past.  Nobody wants to be out on the ice fiddling with ropes and wires in a blizzard.  We'll begin having regular ice reports soon - Fred will post them on home page, and I'll mention any developments here, too.

Speaking of home page - if you've noticed our web site is loading infuriatingly slowly recently, we have, too, and Fred is trying to get it corrected.  We don't know if it is a problem with our present host or with our internet service.  Either way, it's frustrating and Fred has been working on it since last Thursday, trying to get answers from GoDaddy or Fairpoint.  So far he hasn't made much headway, but will keep after it until the problem is solved.