Category Archives: Video Multimedia

A Watershed Moment [Video]

I happened across this video the other day and thought it worth sharing with our readers. It makes me think of how Clary Lake fits into a bigger picture, a picture we tend not to think about very often. “A Watershed Moment” tells the story of an all-hands effort involving fishermen, three coastal Maine communities, non-profit organizations, and state and federal management agencies to restore fish passage throughout the entire Bagaduce River Watershed in Maine. These grassroots efforts to bring back alewife, a keystone species that has allowed fishing communities to thrive have been remarkably successful. An unlikely group of partners, the story of this partnership is rooted in collaboration and can act as a beacon of hope for other communities and watersheds involved in fish passage restoration and community-driven science and stewardship. A Watershed Moment is a story about people, fish, and the water that connects them.

Ice Out Imminent (Video)

Ice out is imminent. It is hard to imagine the ice remaining on the south shore of the lake lasting another 24 hours, however we will not call it until we see it. This picture (complete with duck!) shows the condition of the ice along the south shore in Whitefield as of this afternoon. The east end of the lake down to the boat launch is already ice-free and if the wind keeps up this afternoon it will grind the remaining ice up in a hurry. This is the earliest we’ve ever recorded ice-out on Clary Lake. The previous record was March 13, 2016.

Here are couple of short videos:

04 December 2023: First Snow at Clary Lake

I woke up this morning to the first snow this fall on Clary Lake, and a short power outage, offering me an opportunity to test my generator (it worked fine). It sure looks like winter out there, but it’s pretty warm out. I expect this 2+” of new snow will not last. The lake is still open but there has been ice in the coves off and on this past week so it’s clearly getting ready. We’re just waiting for some sustained cold weather for it to freeze up once and for all. It’s going down into the low teens for a few days this week so there’s a good chance the lake will skim over if it remains calm overnight, but I think a solid freeze up is still a few weeks off. Now is the time to think about getting your skates sharpened and the ice boat ready! When there is ice suitable for skating or ice boating, you best be ready to go because it usually doesn’t last long before snow makes an appearance. Continue reading →

Live Streaming Cameras All Working Again

Live Stream Clary_cam3

A couple of our webcams were not accepting connections for live streaming for a while, but all 3 are working just fine now. Wondering what the conditions are on the lake right now? Take a look! When live streaming a camera, you can zoom in, go full screen, or take a picture and save it to your phone or computer. The picture above was taken while live streaming Clary_cam3. The webcam pictures update on the site every 20 minutes, but pictures are actually uploaded to the server every 4 minutes and they’re kept available for 3 days. You’ll find links to the archives on the Webcams page and on the individual camera pages.

Clary_cam3 On the Blink

Some of you may have noticed that Clary_cam3 stopped updating a couple of days ago. I try to remember to check them daily but a few days went by before I noticed #3 was not working. I think some water managed to seep into it. I’ve got a few used cameras laying around and I’ve been testing two of them for possible replacements. This one shows promise; if it’s still uploading and accepting connections by tomorrow afternoon I’ll install it. In the meantime, enjoy the view out my computer room window!

7 April 2023: Spring Turnover and More!

I stopped at the boat launch the other day to check out the waves, and I was not disappointed! It’s windy days like this in the early Spring that churn up the lake water, mixing it together from top to bottom in a process known as Spring Turnover. The water column ends up with a uniform (and cold) temperature and the oxygen profile is similarly homogenous. Then throughout the course of the summer, the lake water stratifies with the surface warming up while remaining cold down below the thermocline. Then same turnover thing happens in the Fall, mixing the water once again. It’s an endless cycle: Spring turnover, Summer Stratification, and Fall turnover. 

This video not only shows this turnover process taking place, you can also see the lines of white froth resulting from Langmuir Rotation.

Live! From Clary Lake!

Image taken using Live View of ClaryCam-3

How many of you ever click on the “Live Stream in your browser” link on the Webcams page? I know the webcams themselves are very popular (22 people have looked at Clarycam-1 today alone), but I have no metrics on use of the live-view offered. My old visitor stats plugin used to show exterior links that people clicked on, but the plugin I’m currently using only shows local pages. I’m just curious! I could go grep through the weblogs to find that information, but that’s pretty tedious.

I check all three live feeds every day just to make sure they’re working OK. The level of service we’re using is free, but I have to periodically reactivate the cameras every once in a while. I’m just curious how many of our visitors check them out. Leave a comment!

19 November 2021: Live Stream the Clary Cams!

You’ve always been able to live stream the Clary cams IF you were technically savvy enough to install the right plugin in your browser or conversant with a program like VLC. It certainly wasn’t easy and I suspect most people have been content to simply look at the pictures that are updated every 2 minutes rather than deal with trying to get a live feed working. I’ve recently added all 3 Clary Cams to the IP Cam Live website which takes the H.264 compressed video stream from a  camera and converts it to MPEG format which most modern browsers can display without special plugins. Yay!!

The pictures that are displayed on the website are beautiful 1920 x 1080 pixel images (like the one above). The live video feed uses a HD stream with a resolution of 720p and a bit rate of 512K. Not the highest resolution and not as nice as the still pictures, but certainly pleasant to look at. One reason for choosing this live stream format is the bandwidth requirement is lower. Two of these cameras (1 & 3) feed through my internet connection and I don’t want it to bog down. You may still see “buffering” message from time to time, depending on how many people are viewing the stream.

You’ll now find “Live stream in your browser” links for each camera on the Webcam page. Here are the links:

Clary_cam1: Live Stream in your browser

Clary_cam2: Live stream in your browser

Clary_cam3: Live stream in your browser

I’m interested in your feedback! Send me an email (or use our Contact Form) and let me know what you think of the streams, and if you’re having any issues.

 

25 May 2021: Rough Water on Clary Lake

Early Sunday afternoon on May 23, 2021, a strong cold front blew in from the north. Behind it were high winds that lasted all afternoon and into the night. We took it on the nose on our location on the south shore of Clary Lake. For a while I thought my boat would ride it out OK but it was taking a beating and I decided to move it over into a protected cove… It made for a pretty hairy ride, I wish I’d had the foresight to do it sooner!

Here are a couple of webcam pictures from that afternoon. Continue reading →

29 March 2021: Clary Lake Ice Out Videos

Some years, ice out on Clary Lake can be pretty dramatic and I like to put together videos using photos from our webcams. Here are two such videos from this year. The first one, from Clary_cam3 includes pictures from one day, March 27th. The second from Clary_cam1 includes pictures from 3 consecutive days starting March 25th and ending at nightfall on the 28th. You can watch them on the website, but I recommend you view them full screen on YouTube. Enjoy.

Lots of ducks in this one, they come for the corn my wife feeds them.

Ironically, the “official” ice out date for Clary Lake this year occurred a day after these two videos, on March 29th.

08 March 2021: A Year In Pictures Revisited

One of the gotchas from going to SSL was that a number of images associated with website posts were broken. Having a little time on my hands this morning, I set about going back through old posts and editing the URL’s to fix the broken images. In the process of doing that, I came across this post from 4 years ago with a video composed of Clary webcam pictures, and I decided to repost it.

The video covers 365 days from March 9, 2016 through March 9, 2017. There are a few days missing (including 3-13-16 through 3-15-16 which coincided with ice out last spring for some reason, and a couple of other days in the fall). I also decided to delete all the night-time photos, ending up with 4,651 pictures covering Clary Lake in all its glory, compiled into a video at a frame rate of 10/second. It is 7:45 long. Best viewed full screen with the sound on:

Clary Lake: Fun For All Ages

Dave Knight sent me this video this morning which I decided to post on Facebook, then decided to embed here which is exactly backwards. Hopefully it won’t double post on Facebook 🙂