Ice Bridge Crosses Quinnipiac

As temperatures worked their way toward the windy single digits Saturday morning, an unusual sight greeted Fair Haveners lucky enough to have an easy gander at the Q River: the watery thoroughfare was frozen in parts, bank to bank.

Well, almost.

At around 11:30, a groups of swans and gulls a dozen strong huddled on what appeared from the distance at least to be solid surface midway on an ice bridge.

As the birds (pictured) tucked in on it, the bridge stretched from the eastern bank west to at least the finger docks of the Fair Haven Marina. The streaming outgoing tide made a rippling new beach right behind them.

It’s quite common for the Q, along with rivers in general, to begin their freezing at the margins. Along the banks and in particular in the rectangular enclaves of the finger docks at the Oyster Cove Condominiums, 50 yards north of the Grand Avenue Bridge, the harder freezing was well underway.

In such areas, where the flow of water is slowed, freezing occurs more rapidly. That’s why, when the ponds freeze, we get more of the company of the ducks and other birds swimming our way from the already frozen inland waters. Like us, around noon, these birds were looking for a lunch that didn’t require them to go ice fishing.

On the western shoreline Saturday conditions left a kind of crossword puzzle, with sections of ice separated only by zig-zags of water.

Yet farther out on the river, a narrow and in parts wider meandering bridge of ice was complete and holding, a far more unusual sight.

Old-timers in the area tell tales of the river freezing thickly enough so that you could skate on it. That was in winters past when the tellers, many in late middle age, were children.

I put the question of frequency of freezing to folks at the Quinnipiac River Watershed Association. The group’s president, David James, replied: ​“We have little in that type of history. Maybe some random article. We do not even have observers in New Haven. My hunch is they are similar to our temps. So it’s been years. When I was a kid in South Meriden I would walk to Wilcox, crossing Hanover Pond on the winter ice. Since then I would say freezing occurs at odd times, and more in earlier years before 2005 since temp changes recently have limited freezing.”

Certainly, the state Department of Energy and Environmental Protection is not listing ice skating as one of the recommended winter activities in this part of the Q, at least not this year.

This day certainly didn’t appear to be going in that direction.

Barely 15 minutes after the almost bank-to-bank ice bridge was noted, the rushing outgoing tide had broken through and the bridge was no more.

The river’s waters flowed on, looking very blue in the bright noon light.