Crowds Return to the Hamptons After Earl Misses NY

Memories of hurricanes past kept gloating to a minimum after Hurricane Earl left Long Island mostly untouched. The old-timers in Montauk still recall the 1938 storm that virtually wiped out a budding tourist trade.

Earl is unlikely to be remembered for long. The storm swung well east of the island, and by Saturday, worries about wind and rain were replaced by bright sunshine and crowds celebrating the summer season's finale in the Hamptons.

Some rough surf related to the storm lingered through the day.

Big swells led some recreational fishing fleets on the eastern end of the Island to postpone or cancel their morning trips. And while beaches reopened along the coast, flooding closed a section of Jones Beach State Park and officials kept body-boarders out of the water at Robert Moses State Park because of rough conditions.

But the high winds some forecasters had worried about never happened. Newsday reported that the 1,600 extra linemen who had been hired by the Long Island Power Authority to combat predicted power outages wound up sitting idle.

Late Friday, Columbia University medical student Peter Einersen came to the eastern tip of Long Island and stood in a drizzle, complaining that he would have liked "to see something a little more ferocious."

Growing up in New York, he'd enjoyed watching tall waves before hurricanes, although he added that "post Katrina, it's hard to root for a hurricane anymore."