North Fork Polar Bears Making A Difference
Under clear October skies on a sunny Sunday the North Fork Polar Bears gathered at Truman’s Beach to kick off their cold weather plunge season. Before heading into the water for their community dip, they were committed to helping us give back to the bays in the first of many stewardship sessions we will be having in partnership with this amazing group.
How did this North Fork Polar Bear x Back to the Bays partnership begin you may be wondering? Well, almost exactly one year ago we were asked to present on the Back to the Bays Initiative to the committee of Polar Bears who were organizing their annual North Fork Polar Plunge event that challenges hundreds of participants to raise funds for local causes by jumping into the frigid bay in the middle of winter-as year round water people we were definitely into that! We’re grateful that the committee loved the Back to the Bays model of restoration and stewardship, and chose to include us as co-beneficiaries of this event- alongside CAST a fellow local non-profit doing great things for our community. The “Splash for CAST + Back to the Bays” was held in January 2024, and resulted in over $100,000 being raised for our organizations. With the share of proceeds directed to us, we were able to work with the North Fork Polar Bears over the past year to identify a new “Back to the Bays Stewardship Site” that they would be the proud sponsors of.
A lot of work by the Back to the Bays team has been conducted over the past year to conduct site suitability studies, and navigate the complex multi-entity permit process needed to enable us to establish a new receiving area for long-term shellfish and habitat restoration efforts to be conducted and officially welcome a new Stewardship Site into our network. Permits are still pending, and an official announcement will be forthcoming as to our new North Fork Polar Bear sponsored site, but we’ll give you a hint-there is a high level of certainty it will be located in our own backyard of our flagship facility in Southold!
If all goes well, a new spat-on-shell oyster reef, along with a multitude of habitat restoration efforts and shellfish seeding will be conducted here in 2025 and beyond but in order to get some real “on the ground” restoration work happening in this current planning year, we utilized a portion of the funds raised by the Polar Bears to conduct a Marine Meadows Workshop at Truman’s Beach in Orient on October 20th.
The Polar Bears made quick work of processing the 1,500 shoots of eelgrass we harvested from a healthy donor meadow into the biodegradable burlap planting discs (or “tortillas”) that we plant underwater to establish and expand local eelgrass meadows. These particular plants were deployed off Greenport Village, near the breakwater where there is already some thriving eelgrass. We are confident the plantings will do well here, and we can’t thank the North Fork Polar Bears enough for their time, energy and funding provided to make this effort possible.
We are so grateful we were able to conduct this restoration planting while we await the official establishment of our new Stewardship Site next year. You can help ensure to the continuation and expansion of this important work by contributing to our ongoing campaign, and participating in this year’s North Fork Polar Plunge event that is scheduled to be held at Veterans Beach in Mattituck on January 26, 2025. More details to come, and registration will be open soon. For now, if you’d like to help us restore eelgrass like the Polar Bears did, we encourage you to check out the two remaining Marine Meadows Workshops we will be offering: November 5th at our Tiana Bayside Facility in Hampton Bays, and November 8th with our partners Kidd Squid in Sag Harbor who will be hosting our final workshop of the season at their brewery!
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