EAST HAMPTON, N.Y. - Ever since Jimmy Minardi mounted his $8,500 video camera last summer and aimed it at the Atlantic Ocean, the surfers here have been complaining.
The camera streamed video straight to Minardi's website, letting surfers check the waves without having to pack up their boards and wet suits and heading to the beach with fingers crossed.
These surf cams, or wave cams, which have gained in popularity in recent years, help advertise lesser-known beaches to outsiders who are looking for new surfing spots.
But the cameras have also caused problems in the territorial world of hard-core surfers, many of whom blame them for leading crowds to once-secluded beaches. Today, there are perhaps a dozen cameras along the South Shore of Long Island and another dozen along the Jersey Shore, surfers said.
Vandalism is common enough that the operators - from surf shops that run a single camera to large surfing-related companies that own dozens of them - keep the locations confidential. Officials at Wavewatch.com and Surfline.com, two of the larger surf cam sites, said they tried not to pick spots where the regulars would be riled.
Still, Jonno Wells, the chief executive of Surfline.com, which operates about 100 Web cameras at beaches from the Hamptons to Hawaii, said his company regularly received angry e-mails from "squawkers blaming cameras for crowding."
Rafael Patterson, the brand manager for Wavewatch, which operates 18 cameras nationally, said his company also received complaints, but tried to be sensitive in selecting surf cam locations. Wells said several of his company's cameras had been damaged; Patterson said he did not know of any vandalism. Minardi, 45, a native of East Hampton, is a fitness instructor whose celebrity clients include Jerry and Jessica Seinfeld. He said he shrugged off the complaints he received - until someone ran off with his camera last month.
The East Hampton Village police are questioning local surfers in search of a suspect.
Was it the actor and surfer who sent Minardi an e-mail message saying that as a member of the Screen Actors Guild, he would bill him at union scale every time he appeared on camera? Was it the person who threatened to block the camera by putting a sign in front it?
The camera was planted just east of the Georgica Jetties, a good wave break that does not attract the big crowds that flock to better-known surf spots like Ditch Plains in Montauk. But the problem, said Matt Norklun, the surfer-actor who sent the e-mail message, was that the camera attracted too many surfers to the area, many of them neophytes (known to experienced surfers as groms or kooks).
As a result, there were jokes among the tight-knit surfing community here about how to block the camera. But after its disappearance, Norklun said, not even a whisper surfaced about who might have taken it. Or why.
Minardi said the camera could simply have been stolen for its value.
An outspoken critic of the camera, Norklun said the police questioned him after it disappeared.
"I don't know who took it, but whoever it is, he's a folk hero around here," he said. "The police asked me, 'Would you tell us if you did know?' And I said, 'Probably not.' "
As for his demand to be paid union wages, he said, "A lot of guys were angry with Jimmy, and I wanted to drive the point home that the camera was a nuisance."
Minardi received permission to install the camera on the oceanfront property of advertising executive Jerry Della Femina, in the rarefied Georgica Pond section of East Hampton, where Steven Spielberg and Mortimer B. Zuckerman, to name just two, have large summer homes.
The camera was mounted on a wooden post, tucked between two juniper bushes, that was cut down cleanly, perhaps with a power saw.
Della Femina said he was unhappy that someone would cut down the camera on his property.
As for the surf cam controversy, he said, "I find it incredible that there are surfers who think they have the right to a spot in the ocean."
