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Jamie came to plow early this morning, and that got me outside to clear the walkway and then, at 9 a.m. I did the deck and measured for CoCoRaHS. There were 5 inches of new snow, but it is very dry and light - easy to shovel as long as I work with the wind, not against it.
I heard from Bob Mackay on Friday and he said he measured 22 inches of ice on the pond and it seems to be pretty strong. I guess the persistent cold nights have tightened things up a bit - but it's still considerably less ice than we normally have this time of the year. We are sort of on the other side of winter now - days are getting longer and the sun is reaching us with more heat. It won't be long before we see open water - just a matter of perhaps 6-8 weeks. That will go by quickly and we look forward to a summer of great weather and good boating.
It will be interesting to see how the new boating regulations will work here at Joe's. Wake boat regulations will now be that wake boats must operate at least 500 ft. from shore and no less than 20 ft. of water. That narrows the available space here at Joe's Pond to the lower end of the big pond, directly off the state fishing access. Even if they go in a circle, it will be tight, and nearly impossible to have much of a "good" run, I would think. In case you haven't seen the latest report from Responsible Wakes for Vermont Lakes (RWVL) regarding these new regulations, here is a link. RWVL Newsletter.
February is an interesting month - we have Groundhog Day, Valentine's Day, World Cancer Day, Presidents Day, World Cancer Day, and Fat Tuesday; it's Black History Month, American Heart Month, Teen Dating Violence Awareness Month, and even more. February aksi marks the beginning of the Lunar New Year (Year of the Dragon). This year we have Leap Day on the 29th, which happens only every fourth year in order to adjust our calendar, according to an old Irish tradition, women are allowed to propose marriage.
I was interested in the reasoning about Leap Year, so I looked it up. I knew it had to do with leftover hours, and is normally every fourth year; but then I found an explanation on the website of the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C. Here is an excerpt from "The Science of Leap Year," written in 2020 by Bob Craddock:
A calendar year is typically 365 days long. These so called “common years” loosely define the number of days it takes the Earth to complete one orbit around the Sun. But 365 is actually a rounded number. It takes Earth 365.242190 days to orbit the Sun, or 365 days 5 hours 48 minutes and 56 seconds. This “sidereal” year is slightly longer than the calendar year, and that extra 5 hours 48 minutes and 56 seconds needs to be accounted for somehow. If we didn’t account for this extra time, the seasons would begin to drift. This would be annoying if not devastating, because over a period of about 700 years our summers, which we’ve come to expect in June in the northern hemisphere, would begin to occur in December!
By adding an extra day every four years, our calendar years stay adjusted to the sidereal year, but that’s not quite right either. Some simple math will show that over four years the difference between the calendar years and the sidereal year is not exactly 24 hours. Instead, it’s 23.262222 hours. Rounding strikes again! By adding a leap day every four years, we actually make the calendar longer by over 44 minutes. Over time, these extra 44+ minutes would also cause the seasons to drift in our calendar. For this reason, not every four years is a leap year. The rule is that if the year is divisible by 100 and not divisible by 400, leap year is skipped. The year 2000 was a leap year, for example, but the years 1700, 1800, and 1900 were not. The next time a leap year will be skipped is the year 2100.
Happy Presidents Day!
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