How Fire Island functions when Great South Bay freezes, ferries stop

Those who live and work on Fire Island cannot resume life and business as usual when ice covers the Great South Bay, said Alyssa Caravella, a real estate agent with Fire Island Sales & Rentals.

"I have a showing request [this week] and we're actually trying to figure out if we can do it," she said. "A lot of us rely on ferry service to get to and from work, and obviously residents as well, to get back and forth to their houses."

Frigid winter weather caused most of the Great South Bay to freeze over last week, cancelling all passenger ferry service until this week, according to the Fire Island Ferries website.

Fire Island year-rounders can apply for permits that allow them to drive to and from the South Shore via Robert Moses State Park.

To obtain a resident driving permit is "a bit of a process," Caravella said. "There's a waiting list, and there's a certain amount of permits that are distributed," she added.

The winter is also the busiest time of year for Fire Island contractors, said Sam Wood, who owns Sam Wood Inc., a residential and commercial construction company. Wood, 65, lives and works in Kismet year-round.

"You kind of know when the bay is going to freeze up, you have to stock up on material a little bit," Wood said.

Last week, freight service had been limited to select parts of Fire Island. Contractors like Wood, along with residents, rely on freight boats (which are bigger and therefore less impacted by ice), for deliveries.

"This time of year when the bay freezes, you're allowed by the National Park Service to go fetch your own material from the lumberyard, but it's very time-consuming," Wood added.

Freight service is the "better way" to collect materials for his business, Wood said, because by car he may have to take multiple trips for larger materials to yards in East Islip or Riverhead, back and forth, due to limited space in his vehicle.

"People will probably go to the mainland and fetch stuff that ordinarily you could just get delivered," Wood said. "So Amazon and overnight mail and things like that, people get that stuff delivered by the freight boat."

Wood has a contractor permit that allows him to drive to and from Fire Island. Lexi Cherveny, deputy treasurer for the village of Saltaire, has a resident driving permit, but has been impacted by the freeze in other ways.

"We are baymen, so we're on the water almost every day in the summer, and then throughout the winter maybe once or twice a week," said Cherveny, 31, who has lived in Atlantique with her husband for five years. "So we can't do stuff we like to do, like scalloping and clamming."

Sean Manning, broker and owner of Over South Real Estate in Sayville, said although there are positives and negatives to living on the water, proximity to the Great South Bay is still a big selling point for South Shore buyers.

"Living on or near Great South Bay has always been a huge plus," he said. "We're at such low inventory, if something were to pop up priced accordingly and it had bay views or on the bay, that's something that's going to be very much coveted."

With John Asbury

By Rachel Weiss

rachel.weiss@newsday.com@RachMWeiss

Rachel Weiss joined Newsday in 2016. As a real estate/living multimedia reporter, Rachel writes feature stories and contributes to and appears in on-camera video packages. She was the lead reporter on Newsday’s LI Acts of Kindness series.