Robert Bridges has kept a weather eye on West Grand Traverse Bay from his living room's front window.

A COMBINATION of open water and a thin sheet
of ice could be found inside the harbor in Elmwood
Township late Monday afternoon. Outside the
harbor’s entrance, the water in West Grand
Traverse Bay appeared nowhere close to be
frozen over.

His home sits on a hill overlooking the bay in Elmwood Township, and he also owns frontage on Cedar Lake. Looking out the window Monday morning, Bridges said he doesn’t know if the bay will freeze over this winter.

“I tell you, if it doesn’t freeze by Valentine’s Day, it’s not freezing over this year,” he predicted.

Bridges based his opinion on 40 years of observations.

“We’ve had so much wind, the bay hasn’t really had a lot of calm when it was cold to let ice form,” he said.

Bridges reported a skim of ice on the bay Sunday morning. “I saw some birds sitting on it on the way to church. It’s so warm today, though, I doubt it will stay,” he said.

Like most people, Bridges hasn’t kept track of when the bay or Cedar Lake freezes over. He said as a general rule, Cedar Lake becomes ice-covered usually between Christmas and New Year’s Day.

“This year it froze over on Dec. 14, so go figure,” he said.

Though the region has only experienced one week of bone-chilling cold this season, winter is proving to be the second snowiest this decade. As of Jan. 30, 92 inches of snow has been recorded at the Road Commission’s Suttons Bay garage, 27 more than at the same time in 2007. On Jan. 25, 2006, 105.5 inches of snowfall had been recorded, making it the snowiest start to the winter this decade.

When temperatures plummeted to the single digits for night-time lows for several days two weeks ago, the frigid conditions were coupled with stiff northerly winds that didn’t let the cold sit still over the bay. On Tuesday night and Wednesday last week, the thermometer plunged to around zero degrees Fahrenheit, and stayed there. Again, the cold temperatures were accompanied by a steady west, northwest wind that kept the bay frothed up.

Andy Knott, executive director of the Watershed Center Grand Traverse Bay based in Greilickville, said he isn’t expecting the bay to freeze this winter. “I’ve seen some ice form down around the West End beaches (in Traverse City), but nothing very far out,” he said. While the Traverse City area did get a good blast of cold toward the end of November and into December that caused many inland lakes, to freeze over, a mid-January thaw wiped out ice that had built up along the West Bay shoreline.

“It has been an exceptionally mild winter, I think that is the main cause,” Knott said.

According to records kept by the Traverse City Area Chamber of Commerce, the last time West Bay officially froze over – meaning there was at least a covering of ice on the bay from the shoreline along Traverse City north to Power Island for at least a day – was between Feb. 15 and March 29, 2003. February 1996 was the last time before 2003 that the bay had officially frozen over.

State Department of Natural Resources Conservation Officer Mike Borkovich said Friday evening he was not optimistic about a bay freeze this winter. He cited many of the same reasons given by Knott and Bridges, including not enough cold temperatures and calm waters.