Villages

    Diggers and shapers, unite! The Clamshell Foundation’s sand castle contest starts at 9 a.m. on Saturday at Atlantic Avenue Beach in Amagansett. There will be five categories of competition: Sand Fleas, for children up to 8, Sand Hoppers, for 9 to 15-year-olds, Sand Tribes, for families, Sand Shapers, for adults, and Sand Pros, for veterans of the sand castle arts.

    The directors of the Montauk Playhouse Community Center Foundation announced this week that they have decided to change Phase 2 of the plan and separate the aquatic center from the rest of the project, which will eventually include a performing arts center.

    “The Playhouse has been revised and rebooted to turn the dream of a year-round indoor pool for the whole community into a reality,” a release said.

    The Department of the Treasury’s assistant secretary for financial institutions asserted at a forum at Guild Hall on Sunday that the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, which became law in July 2010, is making significant progress toward curtailing the excessive risk-taking that brought on the financial crisis of 2008.

    The flower garden at the Montauk Community Garden on the grounds of St. Therese of Lisieux Catholic Church was dedicated in the memory of Sally Martin at a ceremony on Saturday. A parishioner, Mrs. Martin, who died of pancreatic cancer at the age of 65 on Dec. 16, was an ardent supporter of the garden and an active volunteer, another volunteer, Bill Becker, said.

    Passers-by on Main Street have by now noticed that preparations for the Ladies Village Improvement Society’s annual lawn fair are well underway. Gates open at 10 a.m. on Saturday, with a suggested donation of $5 for admission.

    New at the fair this summer is a magic show, on-the-spot caricatures by Don Duga, a well-known cartoonist, and coloring books depicting East Hampton Village scenes, as drawn by Ernest Fox.

    Evelyn and Daniel Shields II of Amagansett have announced the engagement of their daughter, Allison Renee, to Michael Andrew Sauter, the son of Laura and Michael Sauter of Flanders.

    Ms. Shields graduated from Quinnipiac University in Connecticut in 2010 with a degree in accounting. She works as an accountant for Amagansett Square.                             

    On Tuesday evening outside at the Gin Beach Market in Montauk, a film titled “Salt of the Sea — How Politics, Economics, and Danger Push Fishermen to Their Limits, and Beyond” will be presented by Third Wave Films and hosted by the Long Island Commercial Fishing Association.

    Tom Garber, who wrote and produced “Salt of the Sea,” described it as the story of what happens when traditions of self-reliance and independence clash with federal bureaucracy and corruption.

    Danielle Marie Jack of East Hampton and Ryan Joseph Sutphin of Newport News, Va., were married on June 23 at Gurney’s Inn in Montauk. The ceremony took place on the Lido Deck overlooking the ocean. The Rev. Anthony Larson of Springs Community Presbyterian Church officiated.

    Tony Minardi has worn many hats, but the one he began wearing three years ago may well make him a hero of the gardening set, as well as those with tick phobia. It also has the potential of making the former science teacher, coach, and seafood entrepreneur a fair amount of jing. 

    It was the generous support of eastern Long Island residents, as well as private donations, that made it possible to have a school, medical clinic, community garden, livestock program, job development program, and the beginning of a productive, integrated community development program in Croix des Bouquet, Haiti, Jonathan Glynn of Sag Harbor said on Tuesday.

    The Hamptons Institute, a weekend-long symposium on national and global issues, will bring a number of heavy hitters from both sides of the political spectrum to Guild Hall on Saturday and Sunday to discuss politics, art, global women’s rights, urban development, and the economy.

    The participants include a 2011 Nobel Peace laureate, Leymah Gbowee, a Liberian activist and women’s rights leader; Emil Henry, who served as assistant secretary for financial institutions under President George W. Bush, and Cyrus Amir-Mokri, who holds that post now.

    JoAnne Lyles of this village has asked for support for Saturday’s Soldier Ride in honor of her son, Lance Cpl. Jordan Haerter, who was killed in action in Iraq in 2008. Placards, cheers, noisemakers, and all things red, white, and blue have been requested, and small American flags will be offered for those along the bike route.

    A crew from the Montauk Coast Guard station saved a large leatherback sea turtle that had become entangled in line from a lobster pot trawl off Montauk on July 11.

    “They did a great job. It was a pleasure to work with them,” said Kim Durham, a biologist with the Riverhead Foundation for Ocean Research and Preservation.

A Sag Harbor law covering special events on village waterways was unanimously amended after a public hearing on Tuesday by the village board.

    June weather was “very variable to say the least,” Richard G. Hendrickson, the United States Cooperative weather observer in Bridgehampton, wrote in his monthly weather report.

    In the first week of last month, on June 5, the high was just 63 degrees, and cool temps of 65 and 66 were recorded again on the 17th and 18th, but on June 20 and 21, Mr. Hendrickson recorded a sweltering 91 degrees, and on June 22 it was 92.

    Rock the Farm, an annual concert and fund-raiser for the Wounded Warrior Project, will take place under a tent at Ocean View Farm in Amagansett on July 21 starting at 6 p.m., rain or shine. Steel Pulse, Grammy winners, will play reggae, and Chris Campion, indie rocker and frontman of Knockout Drops, will open the show, backed by Billy Ryan, the guitarist for the Bogmen.

    The Great Bonac Fireworks Show Fireworks show, with pyrotechnics by the Grucci company and sponsored by the Clamshell Foundation, will go off over Three Mile Harbor on July 21.

    The show is supported solely by donations, which are still being sought. They can be pledged through the Clamshell Foundation Web site, clamshellfoundation.org, or sent to the organization at P.O. Box 2725, East Hampton 11937.

    Consistency ruled the day at the East Hampton Village Board’s organizational meeting on Monday.

Turtle Rescue of the Hamptons, a nonprofit based in Jamesport on the North Fork, is doing its best to help save the local animals, rehabilitating and releasing as many as 100 turtles a year.

    The Montauk Coast Guard station’s 47-foot motor lifeboat rescued a man with a serious head injury sustained while sailing 22 miles southeast of Block Island on Tuesday morning. The injury occurred when the master of the 42-foot sailboat Barley Corn slipped on the deck.

    Petty Officer First Class Tom Twomley of the Montauk station, who commanded the motor lifeboat, said it took an hour to reach the Barley Corn. The five people on board had kept pressure on the wound but estimated that their captain had lost as much as two pints of blood.

    On the night of June 20, Jack Dougherty of Clearwater Beach went to bed early, figuring his beagle, Willie, would bed down under the deck as he usually did in the heat. The next morning, Willie did not turn up for breakfast.

    Mr. Dougherty walked  around his neighborhood on Ayrshire Place looking for the dog, but no one had seen him, not even the neighbors across the street whom Willie visits regularly.

    With death threats a part of her weekly routine at the clinic she runs in New York City, Merle Hoffman has been fighting a passionate, perilous battle since the early 1970s. “The only woman who owns a licensed ambulatory surgery center specializing in abortion and reproductive care in New York State” — as she has described herself — will share stories from her book, “Intimate Wars: The Life and Times of the Woman Who Brought Abortion From the Back Alley to the Boardroom,” at BookHampton on East Hampton’s Main Street on Saturday evening at 5.

    The Suffolk County Legislature approved the licensing of a trial Sag Harbor to Greenport passenger ferry service on Tuesday. It was the final hurdle to clear for Geoffrey Lynch of Hampton Jitney and Jim Ryan of Response Marine in Greenport to initiate the pilot program. Trips by the 53-passenger boat are expected to begin just prior to the July Fourth weekend and run through Labor Day weekend.

    He was definitely in Montauk and definitely visited the Montauk Lighthouse, where he signed a logbook, and may have even had an office at Third House, but Theodore Roosevelt never slept at Third House, said Dick White, a member of the Montauk Historical Society’s board of directors. He did, however, sleep in a house on Ditch Plain road, and his men, the Rough Riders, camped nearby, Mr. White said.

    A pair of ospreys that live high above the salt flats of Napeague State Park have been keeping a wary eye for about a week now on a loop of loose cable that swings only a few feet above their hatchlings.

    The fish hawks live midway up the 300-foot-tall Mackay Radio Tower, originally erected in 1927 to transmit messages to ships at sea.

    A section of heavy wire has fallen, a loop of it  catching up three or four feet above the osprey nest. When the wind blows, the loop swings, like a threatening pendulum.

    As the clock neared 8 p.m. and Rona Klopman’s call for a leash law met with polite silence, it looked as if Monday’s meeting of the Amagansett Citizens Advisory Committee would be ending an hour earlier than usual.

    Proceedings that night had been brisk. The Pledge of Allegiance was recited, the May minutes were approved, and John Ryan, chief of the town lifeguards, gave an informative rundown on water safety and the new numbered-beach system, all within 15 minutes.

    Mare Dianora said on Tuesday morning that she wanted chickens to be “available to everybody” in the Village of Sag Harbor, which is why she helped write an amendment to the Sag Harbor Village Code that took effect on July 12 of last year allowing the keeping of chickens as a “special exception accessory use.”

    Before the amendment, village code specified that “the keeping of any horses, farm animals, or fowl shall not be permitted as accessory uses.”

Pranksters placed a tall, plastic giraffe deep in Napeague State Park at some point in the past weeks.

    An ongoing difference of opinion between Sag Harbor Village and the Sag Harbor Yacht Club over ownership of a boat ramp on Bay Street came to the fore again last month when Mayor Brian Gilbride called village police after a locked chain was strung across the floating dock adjacent to the ramp.

Weekends are drawing huge crowds to Ruschmeyer’s Inn on Second House Road. Some guests have reportedly been urinating on neighbors’ lawns.