For some people, New Year's Eve offers one last shot at holiday glitz - a chance to deck yourself out in the best of 1997 and ignore all your resolutions until the next workday.

But why should the fun of dressing to the tens be confined to just a few choice days each year? We've got the whole winter ahead of us.

Open up those closets, get out a sewing machine, be fearless in your fashion choices. If this cold season doesn't beg a little imagination and a lot more pizzazz, what does?

There's certainly no shortage of options in the fashion department. The hottest of this season's garb is perfect for a glittery night out, and some of it is worthy of building an entire occasion around.

Wow The Party

This year has brought a grand resurgence of Chinese-inspired elegance, from embroidered silk tunics and luscious mandarin-collared dresses to quilted vests and jackets. A touch of the Far East is as good as gold and makes a regal addition to New Year's celebrations and any other winter affair on the calendar.

Calypso in East Hampton offers ultracool interpretations along this theme, while Obligato, also in East Hampton, presents some traditional, formfitting Chinese styles that will wow the party crowd.

At Havens House, a vintage boutique in Sag Harbor, delivers the genuine article - a 1920s-era embroidered silk formal tunic. D.J. Hart in Sag Harbor offers embroidered Chinese-style jackets.

Least Dressed

It should come as no surprise that some of the best dressed this year are also the least dressed. The slip dress, which to the untrained eye looks exactly like a lace-bordered slip, has been big with designers and fashion consumers in '97. They always did seem too pretty to hide.

Where once you could find a lovely slip for about $30, their outerwear equivalent might cost as much as $2,000, depending on who designed it.

More reasonably priced versions can be found at many of the hipper boutiques around town, but a little ingenuity and a needle and thread can turn a fantastic vintage slip into haute couture.

Moa Boas

Also tickling the fancies this season are boas, furs (fake preferred, please), and feathers of all sorts.

Locally, in this department, the prize goes to At Havens House, which has a unique marabou chubby with orange feathers on yellow satin, made by Tom Ford for Bendel's in the 1960s.

Shocking, yes, but oh-so-irresistible.

Calypso has a faux fur-lined Chinese vest, combining two big trends, and short feather boas.

Drama is absolutely in order this winter. Super-high heels and very short skirts - slit very high on the side (where appropriate, of course).

Boxy bags, a la Kate Spade, are very Now, but somehow of a bygone era, too.

These gray days call for deep royal colors and sweeping Transylvanian-style capes, for anything that will banish the doldrums. Transform your mood from the outside in. Think January ball. A midwinter night's dream. Chinese New Year in February. Carnival!

Sometimes it's hard, while driving down Montauk Highway or sitting on the beach at Accabonac Harbor, to imagine East Hampton as it was when fishing families used the sugar pine from fish boxes to add on to their houses and wagon wheels rolled along the roads instead of four-wheel-drives.

But those who have lived here a long time, whose childhood, adolescence, and middle years span times of sweeping change, have often heard firsthand, from parents or grandparents, of such things. These people are the town's living links to the past.

Two oral history projects now under way are preserving the stories and voices of some of East Hampton's older residents, whose recollections, whose very mannerisms and expressions, conjure up a different day.

On Videotape

The Autumn Project, whose name was inspired by a John Donne poem, is being conducted by Kyril Bromley of Springs, a professional photographer, and Julia Mead, news editor of The Star.

"Albie Cavagnaro was probably the real impetus," said Ms. Mead. "I've had a couple of older friends who died. I've thought probably a hundred times that somebody should have tape-recorded him - he had this idiosyncratic way about him."

Mr. Cavagnaro, the longtime proprietor of Cavagnaro's Bar in East Hampton Village, died in 1995.

"I see this as being a sort of homespun, old-fashioned oral history project, but using videotape," said Ms. Mead. "People telling their stories."

Storytellers

"What we want to preserve is not just what they're saying, but how they sound and look," she said.

"Hearing someone talk - it's a different impact than reading something in a book," said Mr. Bromley. "It's especially important for young people in the next century."

The project, whose costs are minimal, is being underwritten by East Hampton Town's 350th Anniversary Committee.

Tony Prohaska, a longtime East Hampton resident, has teamed up with Martha Kalser of Amagansett, a video producer, to form the History Project, a nonprofit corporation which has also begun to record the life stories of residents with long memories.

History Project

Two who are already on tape are Carl Jennett, who was in command of the Amagansett Coast Guard Station off Atlantic Avenue during World War II when Nazi saboteurs landed within a mile of headquarters, and Barbara Lester DiSunno, who shared her recollections of Amagansett's Poseyville Lesters.

The History Project aims to conduct and film up to 50 90-minute interviews. The tapes will wind up eventually in the Pennypacker Collection of the East Hampton Library.

Computer Database

Historic photographs and print materials will be collected and donated as well. Early interviews recorded on audiotape will be transcribed.

The project intends to cover, among other things, farming and fishing, the Springs art colony, and the days of Prohibition.

Carleton Kelsey, the longtime Amagansett librarian and former East Hampton Town historian, who was one of those interviewed, sits on its board, as do a number of other prominent local historians.

Long-term goals of the History Project include the creation of a computer database with an index to subjects and topics. The project has been awarded a $2,000 grant from the East Hampton Town Board, and will seek Federal and state funding.

Milton Miller

For the Autumn Project's first video, Capt. Milton C. Miller of Springs, 82, sat down at his kitchen table to talk about his life and times.

Including trips to the Atlantic Avenue beach in Amagansett and to the boat he fishes from now, the interview lasts an hour and a half - longer, Ms. Mead said, than most of the others will be.

"Milt was such a good storyteller that we couldn't bear to edit it out," she said.

An interview with four siblings in the Walker family of Wainscott, Roger, Henry, Mattie, and Clara, was the next to be filmed.

A Family's Eyes

The format, which will be followed throughout the series, focuses on the storyteller, with cutaways to relevant photographs and visits to significant locations.

"What I'm hoping is that [the interviews] will give the history of a place, but give it through the eyes of a certain family," Ms. Mead said.

Many of those asked to participate react with surprise, she said. "They don't realize that they've seen history . . . they just think it's been their own lives."

When the camera goes on, however, "It's almost as if they've waited to tell the story."

Each interview was filmed and edited with LTV equipment and will be aired on the public access channel. Mr. Miller's was recently shown.

After several have been produced, Ms. Mead hopes to make them available to the public, perhaps through libraries.

Both the History Project and the Autumn Project seek to cover the gamut of the East Hampton community, both both its hamlets and its residents. Ms. Mead said she was particularly interested in obtaining interviews from black residents, "who have an interesting history that isn't told very often outside itself."

Sense Of "Urgency"

The Autumn Project has about 50 people on its list to talk with.

"Every once in a while I have to take a name off because somebody's gone," Ms. Mead said. "There are a lot of people born and raised here who are in their 60s, 70s, 80s, and 90s who have a lot to say. Once that generation is gone, East Hampton becomes something completely different. I feel a sort of urgency about it."

Plans are to continue the venture beyond the town's anniversary year, she said.

Both series of tapes will form an archive that will help viewers to recognize and maintain, as Mr. Bromley said, "the presence of the past in the present."

Last week, Karl Grossman, who covers county government for The Star and The Southampton Press, found himself invited to sit in on a private meeting of the group called Standing for Truth About Radiation with Brookhaven National Laboratory officials. To Alec Baldwin, the actor and activist who spoke at the session, Mr. Grossman appeared to be a member. A few others reportedly thought he was there in an advisory capacity. In his own words, however, he was there "as a journalist," having been invited because he had complained that he wasn't being kept up to date on the organization's activities and because he was anxious to learn as much as he could about what Brookhaven representatives had to say. Later, in his own words, he clarified his position, writing, "I have no membership or involvement in any political group. . . . I would not even join the Sierra Club."

That was not enough to satisfy Newsday, whose own reporter was barred from the meeting and whose James Klurfeld editorialized on it Sunday, referring to Mr. Grossman as among "phony journalists who can't separate themselves from a pet cause. . . ."

Karl Grossman is not only not phony he is about as real and independent a journalist as you can find. To be sure, Mr. Grossman combines activism and journalism in a way more common to the alternative press than to large corporate newspapers. As a stringer for several weeklies on county affairs, he always tries to include "the other side" in his coverage and he accepts our editing for comprehensiveness or balance without question. His own opinions, which often are strong, are expressed in a signed column, "Suffolk Closeup."

Mr. Grossman augments the little money he receives as a reporter and columnist with teaching, both at Southampton College and the State University at Old Westbury, and by writing and lecturing on the issues he considers most serious - nuclear issues. Aren't they?

If Mr. Grossman made a mistake last week, it was in his failure to leave the STAR-B.N.L. meeting when another reporter was being barred. His sense of Newsday's own biases and his concern about the seriousness of the issues at hand got the best of any expression of journalistic solidarity. That was unfortunate. In the end, the public will only be able to respond correctly to the Brookhaven saga if as many lenses as possible focus on it.

Although the facts are in regarding the addictiveness of nicotine, the lethal consequences of tobacco, and the cigarette industry's decades-long cover-up, American teens - many of them presumably rational in other respects - continue to think it cool to light up.

In 1998, however, East Hampton High School students and administrators, joining in a national project promoted by the American Cancer Society, the American Lung Association, and the American Heart Association, plan to fight fire with fire.

School officials have begun organizing large numbers of older students who, later this winter, will begin talking to younger teens here about the very real dangers of smoking. They will use "smoking machines" to demonstrate the deleterious effects on the lungs and circulatory system of inhaling cigarette smoke, filtered or no. The goal of the project, called Teens Against Tobacco Use, is to attain a "smoke-free" high school class of 2000 across the country.

Locally, tobacco use is reportedly high among this year's sophomores. If those in their early teens could be persuaded by their peers not only of tobacco's toxicity but also of the blithe unconcern that prompts the suggestion to smoke, they might well be able to resist. "If you are my friend," the response might be, "why is it that you want me to take up an addictive habit that in all likelihood will kill me and perhaps even some of those I'm close to?" And further: "Why are you hurting yourself?" And further: "Let me help you."

Teens Against Tobacco Use also suggests that high-schoolers, besides arming younger students with the facts and means to resist tobacco, lobby for "increases in excise taxes on tobacco products," demand the "enforcement of laws prohibiting tobacco sales to anyone under the age of 18," and work to "eliminate cigarette vending machines" among other things.

Eliminating vending machines - which provide minors with easy access to cigarettes - and monitoring compliance with I.D. requirements by convenience stores and gas stations would further attest to the effectiveness of East Hampton's new group.

At the start of a yearlong celebration of East Hampton Town's 350th anniversary, the importance of honoring the past has never been clearer. In history lies wisdom, or at the least knowledge, for anyone willing to learn the lessons of the past.

East Hampton is, as this still-young country goes, an elderly community, with roots, traditions, and a firm sense of people and place that is unusual today except in parts of New England and the South. Farmers and fishermen, light and landscape, Lion Gardiner, Chief Wyandanch, Fishhooks Mulford, John Howard Payne, founding families whose names still crowd the telephone books - East Hampton thrives today because of its past, in fact in many ways it depends on it.

As the celebratory festivities get under way, The Star, which is beginning its 113th year as the town's newspaper of record, will publish a special page each week of related news and features. It will be a place for old-timers to reminisce, for scholars of history to show off their knowledge, for photographs of forgotten places, news of upcoming anniversary events, and recipes of yesteryear, for insight into the significance of local street and place names, for interviews with people working on celebratory events, for synopses of commemorative lectures, and for a calendar of late-breaking events as well as those already cast.

East Hampton is changing rapidly. Much of what we most prize is in danger of disappearing under the demands of an ever-increasing population. But each child who moves in and enrolls in a local school represents another chance for the future, if only he or she can be taught about the past.

Fifty years from now, today's schoolchildren will be planning East Hampton's 400th anniversary celebration. Their teachers have a golden opportunity this year to use the resources that the 350th-anniversary will summon, but also to continue to emphasize that history when 1998 comes to an end.

The State Court of Appeals this week refused to hear a request by representatives of Dunehampton, a proposed village comprising the oceanfront land of three eastern hamlets in Southampton Town. The decision, which Dunehampton's opponents had expected, effectively stops the case from being considered any further.

In February, a State Appellate Division panel unanimously upheld a determination by Southampton Town Supervisor Patrick A. Heaney that a petition calling for a referendum on Dunehampton was not legitimate. Dunehampton's proponents then asked the State Court of Appeals to consider the case.

Thomas Butler, a partner in the law firm Chadbourne and Park, who represents the Dunehampton proponents, said they were very disappointed and "collectively considering our options." He also said he planned to review the impact of the lower courts' decisions on the case as a whole.

Such decisions could be instructive for the Dunehampton supporters, who have also filed a petition with the town to incorporate Southampton Beach, which would absorb more land in Sagaponack and farther inland along the coast.

The petition for Southampton Beach is in line behind yet another one, for a Sagaponack village. But if Sagaponack incorporates, Southampton Beach will lose all its Sagaponack territory, as well as the Sagaponack residents that Southampton Beach now claims on the petition that it has.

That, Mr. Heaney has said previously, will make the task of assembling 500 regular residents for Southampton Beach nearly impossible. He could not be reached for comment this week.

The Dunehampton village petition came in response to the Coastal Erosion Hazard Law adopted by Southampton in 2003. The law set limits on how much and what types of protection homeowners could use against erosion and limited how much they could rebuild.

Oceanfront property owners from Water Mill to Sagaponack signed on to form an incorporated village and devise their own laws.

Their petition was deemed "insufficient" by Mr. Heaney, who found that the list included names of people who were deceased as well as those who maintained another residence for voting purposes. The state requires those petitioning for incorporation to have as their primary residence the area that will form the proposed village. Voter registration at the time the petition is signed is one way to confirm such residence.

The Appeals Court decision will allow Sagaponack residents to have their own petition on forming an incorporated village proceed. Mr. Heaney had been asked by a previous appellate court not to consider the Sagaponack decision until the Dunehampton case had been definitively decided.

A hearing on the Sagaponack village petition was held last May, before the court's request was issued. Mr. Heaney would now be compelled to proceed.

Sagaponack's petition has been classified by residents and town officials as a mostly defensive measure to protect their beachfront from being co-opted by a third party - that is, Dunehampton.

This month the Sagaponack Citizens Advisory Committee started to prepare a response in case Sagaponack's petition is challenged by Dunehampton representatives. They were concerned about people who may have moved or died since the Sagaponack petition was signed. Even though its progress was thwarted pending a decision on Dunehampton, the petition has to be considered as it was originally submitted and cannot be updated by those who are behind it.

"We're looking at every and all options regarding Dunehampton and Sagaponack, but I don't have anything I can tell you yet," said Mr. Butler, the Dunehampton lawyer.

If Dunehampton challenges the Sagaponack petition, it is likely to take the same route through the state courts and appeals process. If, after this process, Sagaponack can get a referendum passed determining the boundaries that would be incorporated, there will be two years in which to decide whether to go ahead.

A Southampton man charged with sexually assaulting a 61-year-old woman on the beach in front of the Maidstone Club in East Hampton on Tuesday is also being charged in connection with incidents of sexual abuse and public lewdness going back three years, East Hampton Village police said.

Yesterday they charged John J. Giraldo, 30, of Montauk Highway with felony counts of attempted rape, assault, and unlawful imprisonment as well as public lewdness, a misdemeanor, and exposure, a violation. All charges were connected to Tuesday's assault.

Mr. Giraldo was taken to the Suffolk County jail in Riverside after arraignment yesterday before East Hampton Town Justice Catherine A. Cahill, who set cash bail at $100,000.

Police said the woman was walking alone on the beach near the Maidstone Club on Old Beach Lane at 8:45 a.m. when she was accosted by a naked man wearing a ski mask. He grabbed her from behind, pushed her to the ground, pushed her head into the sand, and then sexually assaulted her, according to police.

A 15-year-old cabana boy working for the Maidstone Club saw the struggle and cried out, causing the assailant to flee on foot across the dunes. Workers at the club called the police.

The woman was taken to Southampton Hospital, where she was checked for injuries and then released. She reportedly had cuts and bruises on her face.

After the assault, police set up road blocks leading to and from the East Hampton Village beaches and searched nearby dunes with two dogs from the Southampton Village K-9 Unit.

"He's been a thorn in our side," Chief Gerard Larsen of the village police said at a press conference yesterday afternoon at the East Hampton Village Emergency Services Building. Fourteen cases of public lewdness were reported in the village last year, and Chief Larsen said Mr. Giraldo has been tied to at least two of them. Charges have not yet been filed in the two cases.

Village Mayor Paul F. Rickenbach Jr. and police from Southampton Town and Village and the Village of Quogue attended the press conference, as did several East Hampton Village detectives, television crews, and reporters.

Detective Sgt. Herman Lamison of the Southampton Village Police said Mr. Giraldo would be charged later that day with felony counts of sexual abuse, assault, and unlawful imprisonment, as well as with public lewdness. These charges stem from an incident on May 12, 2004, in which a woman was sexually assaulted on the beach near Old Town Road in Southampton.

Southampton Town police also filed charges against Mr. Giraldo yesterday, Southampton Town Detective Sgt. Randy Hintze said at the press conference. Mr. Giraldo faces felony charges of sexual abuse and unlawful imprisonment in connection with a June 8 incident at Mecox Beach in Water Mill in which a woman was grabbed, pushed to the ground, and sexually assaulted. He was also charged with public lewdness as a result of another incident on May 6.

Detective Jason McMunn of the Quogue Village Police said Mr. Giraldo would be charged with public lewdness there as well.

The Southampton and East Hampton Village Police Departments tried using female officers as "decoys" with no success. Chief Larsen said the suspect was at first caught in several lies while being questioned, then "made admissions" related to Tuesday's crime as well as those leading back to January 2002. Southampton Village police said they had a D.N.A. sample that had not yet been analyzed.

"It was good old-fashioned gumshoe police work," said Mayor Rickenbach, a former police officer, adding that East Hampton was known for its beaches and that "the police have restored our ability to enjoy them."

"We feel that this arrest has removed a dangerous individual from our community," Chief Larsen said in a press release. "Mr. Giraldo has been a person of interest in several other prior cases where investigations are continuing."

Mr. Giraldo was apprehended within hours of the alleged attack. East Hampton Village Police Lt. Michael Tracey and Chief Larsen would not elaborate on how they tracked him down, except to say that he was arrested at a construction site. Mr. Giraldo is a house painter with a Hampton Bays company.

The suspect, who is married and has a child in Colombia, has lived on the East End for six years. The county district attorney's office said a Legal Aid Society lawyer would be appointed to represent him.

East Hampton Town police said what appears to be an unrelated rape was reported in Montauk at 5:40 a.m. on Monday. They were still investigating and said they had no further information at press time.

An official document showing potential improvement projects at the East Hampton Town Airport, submitted by the town to the Federal Aviation Administration in 2001, will no longer be considered valid, according to an agreement reached recently in a civil action by the East Hampton Committee to Stop Airport Expansion against the federal agency, and decided in Eastern District Court.

The Committee to Stop Airport Expansion asserted, in its challenge to the F.A.A., and in a lawsuit against the town that was dismissed by the Supreme Court last year, that the layout plan was not properly adopted.

An approved layout plan must be on file with the F.A.A. before federal grants for airport projects can be issued. The plan submitted in 2001 allowed the town to receive a $1.35 million F.A.A. grant to repave an aircraft parking area at the airport.

In 2001, the East Hampton Town Board, under Supervisor Jay Schneiderman, agreed to resubmit to the F.A.A. a layout plan from 1989, when the agency, responding to another action by the Committee to Stop Airport Expansion, nullified a 1994 layout plan that was in effect, saying it had not been officially adopted by a resolution of the town board.

The 1989 plan that the board submitted designated the Gulfstream II, which can have a gross weight of 62,500 pounds, as the airport's "critical design" aircraft. Airport improvements are supposed to accommodate aircraft at least as large as the "critical design" plane.

The Committee to Stop Airport Expansion, including Pat Trunzo III of Wainscott, who was a town councilman in 1989, and Edward Gorman of East Hampton, its chair, said that the layout plan actually approved in that year instead designated a smaller plane, the Havilland Twin Otter, as the "critical design" craft, and said that runways and other paved areas at the airport should be built to accommodate only 40,000 pounds.

Mr. Trunzo accused the town board and town attorney of submitting a falsified document to the F.A.A., repeating the allegations to the United States Attorney's office and in the lawsuit against the town. A federal investigation found no wrongdoing.

In the settlement agreement between the committee and the F.A.A., drafted in January and finalized in April, the F.A.A. agreed that it will not consider valid any layout plan other than the 1989 version showing the 40,000-pound plane as the critical design craft, unless a certified copy of a town board resolution adopting another plan is submitted.

It also says, however, that the 1989 layout plan will no longer be considered a "current" layout plan and cannot be used as a basis for federal grants.

The current town board, which has a consultant working to develop a new airport master plan and layout plan, has said that no airport projects would be pursued until that process has been completed.

The F.A.A. also agreed, in the settlement, that it will not enforce, after 2014, certain "grant assurances," or agreements binding the town, that are usually placed in effect for 20 years when federal grants for airport projects are accepted.

Those assurances include agreements to make the airport available for public use "without unjust discrimination to all types, kinds, and classes of aeronautical activities," to allow the F.A.A. to establish conditions at the airport necessary for its safe and efficient operation, and to keep up to date an airport layout plan, subject to F.A.A. approval, as well as an agreement allowing F.A.A. officials to require the elimination of changes that are not in compliance with the layout plan. The F.A.A. will, however, maintain the power to override or correct any town action that would adversely affect airport safety.

The settlement requires the Committee to Stop Airport Expansion to drop its lawsuit and sets the terms of how the F.A.A. will respond to the group's requests for information under the Freedom of Information Act.

The matter was "settled in terms favorable to my clients," said Sheila Jones of Akin, Gump, Strauss, Hauer, and Feld, a Washington, D.C., law firm that represented the Committee to Stop Airport Expansion. "Through this settlement, we negotiated an early expiration to those grant assurances," Ms. Jones said.

However, she added, when the agreements expire, the town will still not have "unfettered discretion" on airport matters, but "will have more flexibility to address those issues." Additional federal regulations will remain in place.

Laura Molinari, the East Hampton Town Attorney, declined to comment.

Charlie Niggles spent Friday night tied to a wave-battered trap in 25-knot winds, his sunken boat beneath him, off the north end of Gardiner's Island.

After five cold, exhausting hours, a Suffolk County Police helicopter finally spotted him, and at 4 a.m. a Coast Guard boat plucked the bayman from his trap. Since then, his family and fellow baymen have expressed anger and disappointment at what they say was the failure of the East Hampton Town Marine Patrol to respond.

None of the town's three patrol boats was launched after Ed Michels, senior harbormaster, was informed that a boater was overdue.

Mr. Niggles had left home to lift his pound trap, which extends from Bostwick's Point at the very north point of Gardiner's Island, late on Friday. Normally he would have waited until Saturday morning, but that was when his son, Steven, was going to graduate from East Hampton High School, an event he did not want to miss (and did not).

"He went to lift the trap at 7 p.m.," Mr. Niggles's wife, Lisa, said yesterday. "My son knew it would take him about two hours. When he didn't come home, he went down to Folkstone, where his father launches his boat. He saw the truck, but his dad was not in.

"I said, 'We'll give it till midnight.' It was blowing about 25 knots and we knew it was worse on the island."

Ms. Niggles said her husband later told her that his skiff had taken three waves over the stern. "Everything shifted, the waves lifted the top of the fish box, and with the weight of the fish" the boat sank, soaking the fisherman's cellphone and the engine battery in the process.

The bow remained above water, which is where Mr. Niggles perched, tying himself to the trap for safety.

"He's a licensed captain, a bayman, I knew something's not right," Ms. Niggles said. "He's not out with buddies drinking a six-pack."

She said her son and her father, Harold Snyder, spent most of the night at the Gann Road headquarters of the town marine patrol. "They showed the two harbormasters on duty maps of where the trap was. [The harbormasters] told them they don't go out until first light," Ms. Niggles said.

She said the officers called their superior, Mr. Michels, and were told to call the Coast Guard.

Mr. Michels said yesterday that he received the call from his office at about 1 a.m. He insisted that "the Coast Guard had the case," and that a longstanding protocol had been followed.

At about the same time, Ms. Niggles called East Hampton Town police. The police relayed the message that a boat was overdue to the Coast Guard, which happened to have a patrol boat returning from a routine boating safety patrol in Sag Harbor. By 2 a.m. the Coast Guard vessel was searching for the missing fisherman.

Joseph Billotto, an officer with the State Department of Environmental Conservation police, was on board and called for a helicopter, which the Suffolk County Police Department launched at 3:20 a.m.

"The Coast Guard called me at 3:30 and said they hadn't found him. I was frantic," Ms. Niggles said. "I talked throughout the whole night with the Coast Guard, to the Montauk station, and to the Coast Guard boat. They said they looked in the trap and didn't see him, but they must have been looking in the wrong one."

Pound traps, which are used to catch finfish, are made of netting hung from wooden stakes that extend into the water from shore like a fence.

While the Coast Guard was looking for Mr. Niggles, Donald Mackay, the captain of the boat that runs between Three Mile Harbor and Gardiner's Island for the island's owners, the Goelets, joined the search. He and members of the island's security staff trained their headlights on Mr. Niggles's trap.

According to a spokeswoman for the Goelets, this helped the helicopter locate him and radio his position to the Coast Guard vessel, which picked him up at about 4 a.m.

"His boat was pretty much sunk and caught in the fish trap. There were heavy seas and he was about 200 yards off Bostwick Point," Officer Billotto said. The fisherman was brought him to the town dock at Gann Road on Three Mile Harbor.

"He's okay, but it could have been a whole different scenario. It was not handled right. Steven and my father pointed out where the trap was. He could have been home three hours earlier, but there was nothing from out of East Hampton. Maybe Michels should have come down to coordinate," Ms. Niggles said.

Mr. Michels said the criticism leveled at him and his department was not justified. He said harbormasters did launch at night. "We respond when we have to. We have the ability. In this situation, the search was turned over to the Coast Guard because they had a boat in the area. I kicked it up to them."

The senior harbormaster said that longstanding search-and-rescue protocol dictated that, when the Coast Guard takes charge of a case, it is up to the guard to call for further help if needed.

"I trained the entire Island on this issue," he said. "Their boat was at Gardiner's Island when the call came in. I was told, 'When this boat is exhausted, we'll use [the town's] Marine One to pick up the search. Save the boat for first light," Mr. Michels said, relating his conversation with Coast Guard officials.

The senior harbormaster also questioned why the police, Coast Guard, or his office had not been contacted before 1 on Saturday morning, when Mr. Niggles was expected at 9 p.m. Friday night. He said he had not been told who was missing.

"I didn't know it was a bayman. That's important because we get five or six overdues every week," meaning recreational boaters who are more likely not to arrive on time.

"If [one] is due at 11 p.m., and he's not back at 1 a.m., I'm not sure that's a Mayday status. If I knew it was a bayman, it would be different. I didn't get that information. I did the best I could with the information I had," Mr. Michels said.

"This is a screw-up of major proportions," said Brad Loewen, speaking, he said, as the East Hampton Town Baymen's Association, not as a Democratic candidate for town board in the November election. "Ed Michels did not do his job, and by not doing his job, he imperiled the life of a fisherman. That's it in a nutshell."

"I'm very angry at that. He is the person responsible for search and rescue in this town. The boss. He should have had the boats leave the dock. Three-quarters of a million-dollars worth of search and rescue boats built for such an operation."

"I can't find fault if there isn't a happy outcome, but not to make the search is unbelievable. Thank God it was June. If it had been May, he would have been dead," Mr. Loewen said.

Ms. Niggles said that, while her husband might have made his way to shore by hand-over-handing his way along the trap's twine, "he had his rain gear on, and figured someone would be sent for him."

"He knew he was alive. It was a lot harder for us."

The East Hampton Village Design Review Board on Dec. 17 approved two houses already under construction in the Hedgerow subdivision on Sarah's Way.

The properties, numbers 6 and 14, are within the village's Main Street Historic District, created in 1986. Review Board approval, required before ground was broken, was overlooked by both the building code enforcement officer and the developer.

Robert Hefner, the village's consultant on historic preservation, told the board the development, barely visible from Main Street except for the rooftops, would "not detract" from the historic district.

Spacious "Cottages"

The houses, one at 9,000 square feet, the other 6,500 square feet, are both two-story, multi-gabled, "traditional" shingled structures.

Their size is not part of the Review Board's purview, Mr. Hefner said.

"This will be precedent-setting," announced Ina Garten, a board member.

Barnett Brown, Hedgerow's developer, who will live in 6 Sarah's Way and is building number 14, said none of the houses in the 10-lot subdivision would be less than 4,000 square feet.

All, he said, will have an "East Hampton cottage look."

Mr. Brown apologized to the board for overlooking the necessity to obtain a Review Board certificate of appropriateness. "My mind's overloaded," he said.

In other action, the Review Board approved a joint application from the East Hampton Historical Society and the East Hampton Garden Club to install a split-rail fence and plant several apple trees behind Rachel's Garden on the Mulford Farm, recreating a "remnant apple orchard."

The board also reviewed, but did not approve, an application by Power Test Realty Company, which owns the Getty station at the intersection of Montauk Highway and Toilsome Lane. The station's owners want to remove existing pumps, lighting, and signs, and replace them with new ones.

Board members were reluctant to approve the proposed lights, which would shine twice as brightly as the current ones, because the station is a pre-existing, nonconforming business in a residential neighborhood.