Greater Babylon coverage is funded in part by The Argyle Theatre, where Broadway comes to Babylon. Click here for tickets to ‘A Christmas Carol,’ Nov. 7 – Jan. 5.
Ever wanted to check the surf before heading to Fire Island?
Or how about seeing the sunrise? Or the choppy waters during a storm?
Thanks to companies FireIslandandBeyond.com and Surfline there are now three 24-hour, live cameras mounted along the shoreline at Fire Island’s Davis Park.
Surfline operates a global network of surf cameras, with 375 worldwide cams and 3.6 million viewers per month.
Their newest cameras are positioned atop the Casino Bar and Casino Café and offer three different angles: the beach, marina, and surf.
All videos pan back and forth to catch different shots throughout the day.
They also have recording capabilities to capture notable events, says FireIslandandBeyond’s publisher, Mike Busch.
“I expect we see some whales, surfers, winter storms,” said Busch. “Whatever happens we’ll be on it.”
The cams went active over the July 4 weekend.
Here is video from this past Fourth of July; scroll down to learn about the timeouts.
[vimeo 224501949 w=640 h=360]
The thought of bringing the cameras to Fire Island was an idea Busch has been tossing around for a while.
“I was very close to pulling the trigger on my own,” he explained. “But, then I looked into it more and I found it isn’t as simple as plugging into the Internet.”
Busch then took to Facebook to try and gauge the interest of adding these live cameras on world-famous Fire Island.
That’s when Dennis Murphy of Bellport, who works for Surfline as a camera operations manager, connected with Busch to bring the venture to life.
“I had a breakfast meeting with [Murphy] and he was thrilled to work with me,” said Busch.
“We [Surfline] have been looking for new camera locations to fill in geographical gaps that we have in our coverage,” reads an e-mail from Murphy to Busch.
Together, with permission from Kristin Downs, general manager of the Casino Bar and Casino Café, they received permission to set up the HD cams.
The video content will also be used by various regional and national media outlets like News 12 Long Island, Weather Channel, WCBSTV, and Weathernation.
TIMEOUTS:
The beach and marina cams run for two minutes, and the surf runs for 30 seconds on fireislandandbeyond.com.
Reload the page to keep the streaming or subscribe to Surfline to access all of their feeds worldwide that don’t time out.
Top: Live snapshot from a cam on Fire Island taken on July 18 (courtesy)
