Holiday Island

02/02/2026

One quiet winter morning on the island, we noticed something strange in the fresh snow. Tracks — deep, winding, and unfamiliar — crisscrossed the shoreline and disappeared into the trees. For a while, it was a mystery. Too big for a fox, too graceful for anything clumsy. The island felt like it was keeping a secret.

Curiosity got the best of us, so we checked the cameras.

There they were.

A pair of deer, calmly wandering the island like they owned it, stopping every so often to stand up on their hind legs and stretch for the highest tree leaves they could reach. No rush. No fear. Just quiet survival in the middle of winter.

The tracks suddenly made sense. What felt mysterious turned into one of those moments that reminds you why the island is special even when no one’s around, life keeps moving, leaving stories written softly in the snow.

One quiet winter morning on the island, we noticed something strange in the fresh snow. Tracks — deep, winding, and unfamiliar — crisscrossed the shoreline a...

01/29/2026

Some heavy storms have made Alex Bay a winter wonderland!

https://www.facebook.com/share/1HZ5QdGAB5/?mibextid=wwXIfr

Residents in Alexandria Bay spent Wednesday digging out from more than a foot of snow that fell during Tuesday’s lake effect storm.

📰: https://www.wwnytv.com/2026/01/28/alexandria-bay-digs-out-latest-snowfall/

01/01/2026

🎉 **Happy New Year from Holiday Island!** 🎉

To all of our Holiday Island friends—thank you so much for joining us and tuning in to the live stream! Your support, comments, and shared excitement truly make the New Year celebration special and reminds us how lucky we are to be part of such an amazing community.

As we welcome **2026**, we wish you all a year filled with good health, happiness, laughter, and unforgettable moments in the 1000 islands and beyond. May the year ahead bring calm waters, bright days, and plenty of reasons to celebrate together.

Thank you for being part of the Holiday Island family. We can’t wait to share another great year with you! 💚✨

Cheers to an incredible 2026! 🥂🎆

12/08/2025

The sun is just about to set on the still of the waters reflection, so pretty❤️

12/05/2025

The St. Lawerence Seaway will be closing the locks on January 5th (one month away), repeating last years latest seasonal closure for the system since the seaway was constructed in 1959. The closure date was set forth in a Notice from the Seaway System dated 10/17/2024 outlining the final deadlines for the entire Great Lakes and St. Lawrence systems. I expect the shipping to start ramping up as we are in the final month, be sure to watch the LIVE VIDEO STREAM for ship traffic.

If you are new to the channel, even though the marine traffic stops the cameras are still live all winter long. Wintertime watching can be very beautiful and offers a different view of our river paradise. We tend to see more wildlife and their was a fox in full view running the channel on very thin ice that didn't seem to cross its mind. Yes, it does quiet down but even the river needs a winter break with groups like Save The River says "navigation during winter conditions can disrupt fish and wildlife habitats. Also, it warns ice cover can amplify wakes, scouring the riverbed and releasing heavy metals and other pollutants that have accumulated there over the years. "

Personally I love seeing the island wrapped in snow this time of year, mostly becuse we are able to enjoy it at a distance and not there freezing. Have a great Holiday season!!

Madelyn's Winter Story;
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mp7F3sWMLCg

09/22/2025

I’m sure some of you have noticed the live YouTube stream keeps going off, not even making it a day. This time it’s not the internet signal, whew 😅 but the streaming software OBS keeps losing connectivity with YouTube. OBS is free software so it’s hard to complain about it..

Well we are trying a new software, Prism and it’s currently been online for a few hours already and I’m sure looks seamless on YouTube but was quite the setup to recreate the original layout and a script had to be written to handle the switching between the cameras. Hopefully this resolves the connectivity issues and the stream will stay going without daily supervision 😉

09/18/2025

I missed this news story a month ago of a local hero and I am thinking by the views on the video not many others have seen it either...

20-year-old lifeguard Noah Bosley noticed a man starting to drown near scenic park in Alexandria Bay, NY. This young man sprang into action and dived in find him under the water and pulled him to safety, ultimately saving this mans life! Lets not let that go unnoticed, as we know in todays society most people would grab their phone to get that winning video versus being the person to help. The river is a little safer everyday on Noah's watch, Thank You Sir!!

When a man started to drown near the Alexandria Bay Park Beach over the weekend, 20-year-old lifeguard Noah Bosley sprang into action. For more Local News ...

09/13/2025

The reddish colored moon reflecting across the river is an awesome way to end the day❤️ Good night 🌙

09/03/2025

We are back online STREAMING our views to you https://www.youtube.com//live on YouTube. I want to thank our very loyal viewers for hanging in there throughout our longest outage in our 3 years of 24/7 streaming! I know many of you look forward to our cameras as a part of your daily routine, yes, I have seen the comments through the years on our page and other Facebook river groups! When I was asked “Who would watch a camera showing the bridge?” long before we were able to figure out how to get it LIVE, I knew it was people like you that love the river views as much as we do!

We are a “New” customer back with our only ISP that we can reliable enough signal strength to broadcast live. You may have noticed our last couple streams were much lower video quality, we were trying cellular options but the tower we were using was quite a distance away, fine for cellphones but not enough for upload consistently. We have tried multiple options over the last few weeks and ultimately had to go back. This is actually good, the price is much cheaper for a year and we had been only able to get a max of 10mbps upload with our prior service, sometimes better on a good day. Now with the new modem, new plans offering higher upload speeds and an attenuator removed from the line we are getting in the low 20mbps(right now anyway). We also took the opportunity to upgrade our main switch and upgraded the streaming server to Windows 11 during the outage as well.

If our stream brings joy in your day, all we ask is for you to take a minute and share our link on your page to help others find us https://www.youtube.com//live Thank you for your support and happy viewing!

Thank You to all that have subscribed to our channel, it really does help others like you find this stream!! If you haven't subscribed yet, did you know tha...

08/28/2025

I would like to share with our Facebook followers that we are offline again and working on another internet solution. Sadly after trying multiple cellular internet options only one was up to the challenge of high demand uploads and then only worked for a short time. Well just like on your phones, if you use too much of your unlimited data they will throttle you back and that happened 2 days ago. We lost connectivity, went up to investigate and try to restore it but a minimum of 4mbps(bare minimum) of upload speed to start the stream and we are no longer getting it. Cellular streaming is just not going to work for us. We are looking at 2 other options, so please be patient with us as we work to get the stream going again!

08/16/2025

In case you don’t like to read long reasons for the outage, we are working on a different solution and if it works quite possibly later today we will be live again, cross your fingers!

I want to thank our longest, loyal viewers of our YouTube channel over the last 3 years for your patience. Sadly, as I am sure you noticed the live stream is down. Why, simple answer is the reliability of having a consistent strong enough UPLOAD signal to broadcast is not a great concern of our ISP provider Spectrum, our streaming software requires 6mbps of upload signal alone for steady quality video. On a good day we would get 11-13mbps and a lot of days less than 8 and when you would see the stream crash it got under 6. Our ISP’s only focus is DOWNLOAD and they give you a guarantee for that but not UPLOAD (Capitalizing to emphasize the difference as most everyone only uses download to watch videos and more).

When we finally got the internet line 3+ years ago, which we spent a lot of time and money to get it installed and there is only one ISP available in our area to get internet from. In 2022 when I signed up it was more than half the cost that I have been paying for quite a while, the deal was for one year and I am sure you know that they will not give you the price of a new customer again. When the internet was new, not only was it cheaper but worked flawlessly and had the SAME upload speeds that I had to upgrade us to later on when we started slowing down.
Before the comments roll in, I have tried to get the ISP to correct the inconsistent signal loss. Last month when we were down for 5 different days they gave a $2.37 credit for and nothing for all the other outages including most the month of January that we were down. A viewer that works at the ISP reached out and helped recognizing the issue WAS on the ISP’s side, he continued to help throughout the month of February, I was ready to cancel the service at that point as well. A node was at fault and it was good for a few months but the issues have been back for some time, if you are a regular watcher you are very aware how much we have been offline. For me it has become a part time job, constantly checking to see if we are still streaming and then dealing with the issues with the ISP trying to get it back going including having to go up when no one was there to manually reset it when they couldn’t see the modem. Only a few times that we have been offline has it been on OUR end this year.

I feel as though 80% of you would do the same thing if you were on the other end of the call and cancel. Keep in mind it was not an easy decision for me as I enjoy watching as well and the amount of money spent just getting the cable line to the island. No, YouTube doesn’t pay us as the live videos are not counted towards watched hours.

We are trying a cellular based modem and when we get there later today will be trying to incorporate it into the network and if the signal is strong we are back in business.