By Mike Busch 7|3|18
Rick Zappia, a long time member and current president of the Bay Shore Tuna Club, reached out to me last month to see if I would be interested in getting some footage of the Fire Island Inlet. Many mariners have been complaining about shoaling at the inlet and calling for dredging. The original plan was to get some images and video showing how the inlet should be approached before the 57th annual Mako Tournament on June 23rd but the weather didn’t cooperate. We finally got together on Friday June 29th just as the weather pattern changed with some clear skies and calm winds.
We met at Rick’s marina in Bay Shore and jumped on his 25 foot Blackfin for a nice ride across the Bay, past Captree and the Fire Island Lighthouse and into the inlet.
Water clarity wasn’t great but as you will see in the attached video and images, the inlet has a lot of sand built up with breaking waves across some of the channel. There is also a boomerang effect happening where waves are bouncing back from the north side of the inlet and crashing into waves from the other direction creating some chaotic action.
We plan to try again when the water clarity is better.
Below I added three pages of drone photos and two pages of DSLR images of the wave action, Fire Island Lighthouse and some of the boats passing through the inlet and the bay.
More Images on Pages 2,3,4, and 5
