By Mike Busch
The Fire Island most of us know includes ferries and beach houses for the beach communities and parking lots and bridges for the for the eastern and western ends. What most don’t get a chance to see is some of the uninhabited stretches of beach that today resemble what the first settlers first laid eyes on hundreds of years ago.
One of those areas is Long Cove. This stretch of beach, situated about 1.5 east of Watch Hill, has some of the largest dunes left on Fire Island.
Long Cove was originally a fishing community built with the salvage of shipwrecks in the 1800’s. Families of the original squatters built summer homes that remained until the establishment of Fire Island National Seashore in 1964. The last of the homes were taken down in the early 90’s to allow the area to return to a pristine state.
