Hog Island’s Lost Town, Ocean View Power Outage, and Tidewater’s Early Spring Warmup

Good evening, neighbors! In this week’s Tidewater Talk, we kick things off with local life and a fun find: a new shuffleboard-style social spot where first-timers get coached and you can grab great bites while you play. We also dive into regional headlines, including Norfolk Southern’s newly opened rail transfer facility in Chesapeake and what it could mean for traffic and commerce around I-264 and I-464, plus a brief Dominion Energy outage that hit Ocean View and Bay View. From there, we slide into weekend picks: Norfolk Admirals vs. Idaho Steelheads at Scope, beginner steel pan classes at MacArthur Center, and a free container gardening workshop in Suffolk, complete with a takeaway salad kit. Weather-wise, expect highs in the upper 60s to low 70s with mid-50s lows, some foggy mornings, and a chance of weekend precipitation. For our Strange and Odd of Tidewater segment, we ferry across the bay to Hog Island, a barrier island with a past that reads like folklore. Once home to the elite Broadwater hunting club (visited by President Grover Cleveland) and the towering Hog Island Light, the island’s shifting shoreline forced residents in the 1930s to barge whole houses to the mainland towns of Willis Wharf and Oyster. The lighthouse was dismantled in 1948, and its former site now lies nearly a mile offshore. Today, Hog Island is a quiet expanse of dunes, marsh, and research stations—a vanished community that reminds us how the Atlantic can literally rewrite our map. Stay strange, neighbors!