The June weather report from Richard G. Hendrickson, the United States Cooperative weather observer in Bridgehampton, arrived this week — a little late but nevertheless still of interest to other South Fork weather watchers.

    With such hot days this month, people may have forgotten that June was on the cool side. Although the temperature reached 94 on June 9 and 10, the high for the rest of the month was a more reasonable 85 on June 12. “There were two cool, cool daytime readings, on the 14th when it rose no higher than 66 degrees and on the 25th when it was only 67 degrees,” Mr. Hendrickson wrote. “Why these cooler temperatures have prevailed to the month’s end I do not know.”

    June nights were mild, and in two cases downright chilly. Mr. Hendrickson recorded 45 degrees on the night of June 4 and 46 degrees the night of June 5. “Mild nighttime temperatures continued throughout the month,” he said. “Over the years in the month of June there is often frost, but not this June.”

    There was measurable rainfall on eight days, with the heaviest, 1.69 inches, on June 23. “June is often the month when there has been little rainfall and early crops have often suffered. Some of those with cash crops have put in irrigation. Often over the long term it pays. And the opposite is true when we have had ample or many extra rains, with muddy soils and some washouts, making for delayed maturity in crops. Such is one of many, many hazards or perils that affect the farmer, whether he be in crop or livestock farming,” wrote Mr. Hendrickson, a retired farmer who has been watching the weather for more than seven decades.

    The heaviest rain in two days came on June 22 and 23, when a total of 2 inches fell. The total rainfall for the month was 5.78 inches, about 2 inches more than the long-term average for June.

    Mr. Hendrickson reported 5 clear days, 7 partly cloudy days, and 18 cloudy days. Winds were mainly from the southwest, as is typical in the summer.

    He recorded thunder and lightning on June 1, 9, and 17.

    He warned people: “Use extreme care when sudden thunderstorms visit our area, on the golf course, in your boat, in the hayfield, or when clamming.” Mr. Hendrickson recalled a lightning bolt that “hit a barbed wire fence and killed chickens nesting in the tall grass under the fence. I have seen the hissing St. Elmo’s ball of fire going from a telephone pole to a lightning rod on the farm home. Scared the living hell out of me, and it would you too.”   

    David Paton, the author of “Second Sight: Views from an Eye Doctor’s Odyssey,” will speak at the East Hampton Library on Saturday in an author’s talk to begin at 1 p.m.

    Dr. Paton, the head of the ophthalmology department at Baylor College of Medicine in Texas, was a driving force in the early 1970s behind the formation of ORBIS, a nonprofit whose flying eye hospital staff teaches modern techniques around the world and offers treatments in Africa, Bangladesh, China, India, Latin America, the Caribbean, and Vietnam. His friendship with Betsy Trippe DeVecchi led her to secure help from her father, Juan Trippe, the founder of Pan American World Airways, who had a house at Georgica Beach and who helped make the idea a reality.

    Dr. Paton is a member of the East Hampton Heathcare Foundation.      

    Seating is limited, so the organizers have asked that those planning to be there reserve with the reference desk staff in advance.

    More about Dr. Paton and the group he founded can be seen on the Orbis Web site: orbis.org.

    The East Hampton Village Planning Board, at a meeting last Thursday, asked its planning consultant to draw up an alternate plan for clustering houses on property at the corner of Newtown and Race Lanes.

    The 5.68-acre property, known as the Martha Greene estate, is north of the Osborne Lane traffic light, and backs up on the railroad tracks. It contains an old two-story residence and two other buildings, which would be razed.

    Vincent Chiavarone Builders and J. Mart Realty had applied to subdivide the land into six house lots, with 25 percent reserved in a conservation easement at the back of the property. The lots would vary in size, averaging about 30,000 square feet each, in a one-acre zone.

    The board had previously asked the applicants to consider smaller houses and to come up with a plan that would preserve 50 percent of the land. On Thursday, however, the board agreed with the applicant that setting aside 50 percent would not be in keeping with the character of the area. Board members also learned, in a letter from the applicants’ attorney, Thomas J. Osborne of Osborne and McGowan, that the applicants did not feel smaller houses were appropriate.

    After Mary Ella Moeller, a Newtown Lane resident, spoke up in favor of smaller houses or five houses instead of six, Gene Cross, the planning consultant, suggested that “it may be more important to limit the width of the house, rather than the size of the house.” That way, “you retain the character of the houses across the street,” he said.

    Linda Riley, the village attorney, pointed out that the village code allows “the board to permit larger houses in exchange for the open space” in clustered housing developments.

    Mr. Cross also suggested the possibility of mandating an amount of open space somewhere between 25 and 50 percent. The board asked him to come up with such a plan before the next meeting on Aug. 11, adding that it should call for narrower, but longer, houses.

    A motion by the Town of East Hampton to throw out a case filed against it by the Ellis family over establishing further access to Lake Montauk was dismissed by New York State Supreme Court Justice W. Gerard Asher on June 28.

    Harry Ellis sued after the town attempted to clear a parcel just south of his house on East Lake Drive in Montauk and open it to the public. “I didn’t want to file a suit against the town that would cost the taxpayers money, but the gun was put to my head,” he said.

    The justice’s decision states that the town did not offer enough evidence to contradict Mr. Ellis’s claim. It said the case could proceed, as there remains a reasonable doubt as to the ownership of the land in question.

    Last year a group of citizens who believe Lake Montauk does not have enough public access studied old files and maps and identified the parcel as being town-owned. But Mr. Ellis disputes that, saying members of his family have used it as part of a driveway since 1975, when they bought the house, which sits just south of a nature preserve on East Lake Drive. He claims that a 50-foot right of way was issued to Robert Bullock in 1930, when he owned the property.

    Over the winter Mr. Ellis spent much of his time in the county clerk’s office in Riverhead researching waterfront land titles in Montauk. “I consider myself a historian by now,” he said. He presented most of his findings to the justice in the case, which names the Town of East Hampton, Supervisor Bill Wilkinson, Larry Penny, who is the town’s natural resources director, and the Department of Natural Resources as defendants.

    When people started using the nature preserve as a beach and driving four-wheel drive vehicles down to the shore, the town tried to identify other parcels that could be opened to the public, including the heavily overgrown one next to the Ellis family residence.

    Some claimed that Mr. Ellis was preventing them from walking on the beach in front of his house or from using the overgrown land as a path to the beach, which he denies. “Just because I live next door to the property doesn’t mean I’m encumbered by its maintenance,” he said.

    Mr. Ellis hired an attorney, Jim Henry of Sag Harbor, who filed the suit. He did not return calls for comment. Mr. Ellis said he quite honestly doesn’t know who owns the property. “That’s now in the court’s hands.”

    Carl Irace, an East Hampton Town attorney, said he wouldn’t comment on pending litigation, but said, “It was only a preliminary motion that was dismissed.” He said the town has a lot more work to do to get the paperwork together for the next step. “Now we move on to discovery and collecting information,” he said.

­    The Home, Sweet Home Museum is showing lithographs and watercolors by Gustav H. Buek, who owned the James Lane house from 1907 to 1927. Etchings by Frederick Childe Hassam and Charles H. Miller are on view as well, through Sept. 30.

    The hours are Monday through Saturday, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., and Sunday from 2 to 4 p.m.

   The East Hampton Board of Education heard Tuesday from a promoter of a two-day August rock festival hoping to use school district property for parking.

    Chris Jones, an organizer of the two-day MTK music festival, which will be held at the East Hampton Airport on Aug. 13 and 14, asked board about using the high school’s parking lot for overflow traffic, providing security and shuttles to and from the event on his own dime. He also offered to write a donation check to the school district for $10,000 regardless of whether the Long Lane, East Hampton, lot was used or not, and an additional $5,000 if the lot was full.

   There were some questions and misunderstanding about this, which led finally to George Aman, a member of the board, making a motion to enter into a two-day contract for $15,000. Mr. Jones agreed.

   “Are you all coming?” he asked the board.

   “Can we park for free?” answered Dr. Aman, with a smile.

    The Great Bonac Fireworks will light up the sky over Three Mile Harbor on Saturday night, getting under way at 9:15 p.m. The extravaganza can be seen from beaches and other locations ringing the harbor, and will of course be viewed by hundreds on boats moored right in the harbor, under the firework lights.

Fireworks by Grucci will present the show, which has been a midsummer tradition, on or about Bastille Day, since it was inaugurated by George Plimpton in the early 1970s, continuing for decades as a fund-raiser for the former Boys and Girls Harbor camp.

Two years ago, the Clamshell Foundation, a local nonprofit, took up the fuse, so to speak. The group is hoping not only to cover the approximately $50,000 cost of the show, but to raise enough to make donations to other community groups.

Donations can be sent to the foundation at P.O. Box 2725, East Hampton 11937, or made online at www.clamshellfoundation.org.

    Looking up East Hampton Village property records, especially those that pertained to permits, design review, zoning, planning, and building inspection, may have been a lengthy, costly paper chore — until recently. But now, “with a few keystrokes,” Larry Cantwell, the village administrator, said, the data on a particular property can show up in one neat, tidy place: the village’s computer system.

    “Space becoming constricted” was one reason Mr. Cantwell cited for the three-year project, which converted over 200,000 pages of documents from paper to electronic records, thanks to Linda Beyer and Pam Bennett, village employees.

    “It will save enormous hours of staff time,” Mr. Cantwell said, adding that it would make it easier to get property information to those who request it, which includes, but is not limited to, “property owners, title companies, contractors, lawyers, buyers, and real estate agents.”

Three years ago, East Hampton Village received a $10,000 grant to get the changeover started. This included buying software. All in all, the village has used $50,000 in state records management money, and about an equal amount in village funds.

    The records go back to 1952, when the first building permits were issued after zoning was adopted. With a tax map number, it is now possible to get a full mélange of data, either from Village Hall employees or from a computer in the lobby set up for public use. Information can even be e-mailed.

    Another reason for the change, Mr. Cantwell said, was “recognizing how important records of property are. Property values are high,” he said.

    Urban areas have used electronic devices for years, and smaller communities throughout the state are just starting to catch up. East Hampton received help, on a different front, from the New York State Archives. This came first in training and education on records management, which has changed drastically in the past 15 years because of computerization.

    “Hopefully,” Mr. Cantwell said in a letter to the village board, “we will save a few trees into the future and reduce the need for storage space.”

    All the records “are now in digital format,” the letter states. “And we have eliminated huge volumes of paper records.”

    The village is “caught up” on its property paperwork, and now it’s just a question of routine. “Every time we’re dealing with an application now, we scan it,” Mr. Cantwell said.

    “Here endeth the lesson,” said Joan Denny, acting chairwoman of the East Hampton Village Zoning Board of Appeals, using the traditional liturgical wrap-up after the board read aloud its draft approval of the East Hampton Library’s proposed expansion.

    The Friday morning meeting lasted all of seven minutes,  and the determination was unanimously approved, since the State Supreme Court had ordered the board this spring to provide the library with the two variances and a special permit it needs. The plans still need final approval from the village’s design review board before construction can begin.

    In that Supreme Court decision, the court allowed the village to impose some “reasonable conditions” in its approval. As adopted, the plans have changed very little since they were last discussed during public hearings in 2010, before the board denied the library’s application.

    The board approved a parking plan that includes an additional 16 parking spaces on the library property, for a total of 42. It also limited the seating in a lecture room to 60, with the understanding that the library would need to come before the board again should there be any further changes in seating capacity.

    The library has another meeting room, the Bendheim room, with a capacity of 25. It was not part of the expansion proposal.

    The library’s director, Dennis Fab­iszak, said yesterday that the site plan was being looked at a final time, and that he expects the plans to be in front of the design review board soon

    Montauk’s commercial and recreational boats will be blessed and the community will honor the watermen who passed over the bar during the year on Sunday during the traditional Blessing of the Fleet in Montauk Harbor. It starts at 5 p.m.

    This year’s ceremony will be the culmination of programs focusing on the Montauk fleet, which begin tonight with a round-table discussion at the Montauk Yacht Club at 6 p.m. Carl Darenberg, an owner of the Montauk Marine Basin, has promised to gather some of Montauk’s more infamous fishermen there to talk about the ones that got away and the ones that didn’t.

    Then, on Friday at the yacht club, Capt. Paul Forsberg and the Forsberg family, of the Viking Fleet, will be honored at a dinner starting at 7 p.m.

    The Montauk Chamber of Commerce decided to do away with its own harbor festival this year because for the last few years it had almost always been canceled or delayed by rain. “We wanted to concentrate on honoring the old-timers this year,” Laraine Creegan, the chamber’s executive director, said this week.

    Hundreds of boats take part in the annual Blessing of the Fleet. As usual, the parade of vessels will pass the Coast Guard cutter Ridley, which will be tied to the commercial dock next to the Gosman complex. On board for the ceremony will be the Rev. Michael Rieder of St. Therese of Lisieux Catholic Church in Montauk, the Rev. Ann Miller of the Montauk Community Church, the Rev. Alex Constantine representing the Greek Orthodox Church, and a representative of the Jewish Cener of the Hamptons.

    After each boat has been blessed, the cutter will move out of the inlet to stop at the bell buoy in Block Island Sound, where memorial wreaths will be tossed into the water. Members of the families of the seven who died in the last year will be aboard. 

    This year’s wreaths are for Charles Bradford, Louis Escaler, Capt. Norman Edwards Jr., Larry Bridges, Curtis Briand, Bill Burton, and Ron Brady. A separate wreath is dropped into the sea for those who died in the past.

    Other boat captains have been asked to leave their docks from marinas to the south and east in succession, following those who tie up at the commercial dock.

     Capt. Frank Braddick will anchor the charter boat Hurry Up in the middle of the harbor to control traffic via V.H.F. radio channel 06. In addition, the Coast Guard’s small boats, East Hampton Town Marine Patrol boats, and state police boats will be on hand to keep order.

    Tickets for the dinner tomorrow night at the Montauk Yacht Club can be bought at the chamber office, the Montauk Marine Basin, or at the door. They are $45 and include a glass of wine or beer.

    The Viking Fleet got started in Freeport in 1936 by  Capt. Forsberg’s father, Capt. Carl Forsberg. It relocated to Montauk in 1951. The fleet has been built up to include three party fishing boats, one high-speed ferry, a commercial fishing vessel, a cruise vessel, and a new boat currently under construction that will be called the Viking Fivestar.