As feared, a high tide pumped up by storm surge from the nor'easter sloshed water up to the dunes at some South Shore beaches last night.

But the shoreline, while battered, didn't get quite the beating officials had expected.

"We actually did well, considering the forecast," said George Gorman, regional director for the New York State Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation.

State parks beaches from Jones Beach to Montauk experienced minor to significant erosion, Gorman said. Still, Gorman said last night, most appeared to have escaped the severe impact some had feared.

Storm surge piled up by the nor'easter had been expected to add between three to five extra feet on top of high tide.

The timing of the storm had made for added concern, said Babylon Town emergency preparedness coordinator Gil Hanse.

"A nor'easter this time of year on a new moon, this is as bad as it gets," Hanse said yesterday before high tide. "With the new moon, there's a very large gravitational pull on the ocean." Springtime -- when the sun, the moon and the earth are all in line at the same time -- adds even more pull, he said.

Yesterday afternoon water was "spraying over the roadway at Orient Beach," Gorman said.

In the early evening, high tide stole sand from Robert Moses and Hither Hills state parks, and nibbled away at portions of Montauk. At one point the beach at Sunken Meadow was completely under water, although the waters soon receded. But Captree State Park lost another few feet, surrendering its picnic area to the water.

"This is significant erosion -- we did lose several feet into the dunes," Gorman said last night. "But we did have a good winter, with hardly any erosion and the sand was building up. We still are in very good shape."

Last night on Nassau's South Shore high tide was between 21/2 to 3 feet higher than usual, county emergency management commissioner James Callahan said. Still, he said, it was too early to tell how much erosion damage had been sustained. "You have to wait until low tide to make that determination," Callahan said. He expected to survey the beach on foot today, with a possible flyover by helicopter tomorrow.

By 9 p.m., Hanse said, flooding on the bay side of Ocean Parkway was "nowhere near like the 1990s storm." But he was still worried about what high tides today and tomorrow could do to Gilgo Beach, which he said had one of the highest erosion rates on the east coast.

Still unclear was how bad erosion would be on the North Shore. "We have a much bigger surge in the Sound, about four feet," said Stony Brook University oceanographer Malcolm Bowman, who said he planned to go down to Stony Brook Harbor at 11 p.m. to check.