Been thinking a bit recently about the ocean. Well, mostly the beach but the ocean is attached.

I ended up in Florida at age 9 in east coast Eau Gallie (now part of Melbourne) from New York. My dad had landed a civil service job working on the Vehicle Assembly Building on Merritt Island.

Eau Gallie is commonly said to mean "rocky water", since coquina rocks were found in the area. While eau means "water" in French, gallie is not a French word and might be derived from galet ("pebble" in French).

Our first apartment was on the west shore of the Indian River - a salty tidal straight running parallel to the ocean protected by the "barrier island" (a strip of solid land between the Atlantic & the "River").

I was allowed to play in the river mud a lot as a kid but not too much ocean at that age.

I did have some friends whose parents were in the military (Cape Kennedy/Canaveral - Space stuff, etc.) and they would occasionally invite me to join them for a beach outing.

In retro it was the officer’s beach and kept up pretty fancy-like. I was under 10 years old in those days and being small, I was particularly cautious about the waves & the power to sweep one out to sea. (I had probably been over-warned but as a parent I would have done the same to my kids).

My pal’s name was Paul and his dad was in the Air Force. My parents let me join them on several wonderful outings (after the extensive parental "protective terrification") re. being carried out by the waves to be eaten by denizens of the deep.

These were real idyllic textbook picnics. Beautiful blue breezy days, great picnic food, ants, the whole works. We were chaperoned & kept safe from the waves so it was A O K.

I have very fond memories of these outings though one memory is a bit of a shocker.

Pelicans have this hunting technique where they skim the waves flying parallel to the line of break a few inches above the surface. Small fish, backlighted by the morning sun are easily spotted by these dinosaur looking flyers up at the wave’s crest.

The birds just glide low, spot ‘em from the air, dip the beak on the fly, and snatch up the unsuspecting swimmer - its breakfast time! Good technique.

I also noticed Pelicans in the water swarming the wharf where the private fishing boats come home in the evening. (The birds know the schedule.)

The fishers cut & gut their catch and the big birds gather in a tight pack at the spot where the chum is being dumped into the drink. This is sea bird gourmet & easy pickins for the Pelicans and so they do a wild community chow down.

Ironically, a pelican has to raise his beak and open his mouth to swallow the prize. The more aggressive (smarter? older?) birds wait & watch and if a neighbor lifts his head and opens up to swallow in a crowd, somebody near will snatch the food right out of the pouch before it goes down.

So the clever pelican tucks his head when he scores and tries to drift to the edge of the pack unnoticed. Once they’re at the pack’s limit it is relatively safe to lift & swallow - then go back for more.

Back to the shocker. I was onshore digging in the wet sand with my buddy Paul. Maybe it was sand castles. Maybe it was just digging to see what was down there - multicolored shell bits, seeping salt water and the occasional startled ghost crab. (one ran up my arm once and down the beach to escape).


These little guys are not deceased nor zombie crustaceans as the name might imply. They are the exact color of the beach sand and unless they move, you just can’t see them. When they do move, they stop & wait every so often so your eye often sees peripheral "ghosts".





It was a perfect beautiful beach day. The water was clear & turquoise blue and yes, the fish were pretty easy to see in the wave. We were watching a line of 5 big birds working the wave top.

The clear blue backlit waves rose about 3 feet from the ocean surface. As the front (southbound flight) bird began to dip for a fish, a sudden large shark shadow came up from the bottom left and took the place of the intended meal. Tables were turned big time.

The shark snatched the pelican by the neck, the wings went back and we saw through the translucent blueness as the bird was immediately dragged down and completely eaten - all gone. The next bird in line wheeled straight up and the rest of the pack scattered. You never know. Bye Birdie.

After that, I don’t think I went into the water past my knees for years.



I "grew up" in Vero Beach Fl. It is about 50 miles south of Eau Gallie. I completed Jr. High & High School in Vero (graduated June 1967). The water was the main focal point of life there. We had the Indian River & 3 accessible beaches on the Atlantic. I love them all.

One of my favorite jobs - I worked at the Driftwood Inn near the central beach and at the edge of the earth. I used to go in at 6 am to begin my setups for breakfast at the restaurant. My first chore was to go out on the deck, chase the lizards from the outdoor patio tables, wipe ‘em off & put down placemats, flowers in bud vases, etc.

I saw the beach in every possible morning permutation & all seasons. The long still hot Florida summer was the most colorful with north to south bands of turquoise gradually deepening to cold dark blue as the distance from shore increased.

Once I was helping setup an outdoor breakfast for one of the many conventions that visited the Driftwood. Pretty sure it was Binney & Smith (Crayola Crayons). My son Ben was given a prototype set of the liquid markers by one of the founders - a super nice lady in blue jeans. I can’t remember her name but I remember being impressed with the kindness of these particular corporate manufacturing folk.

It was pre-dawn and as I looked east to where the sun was fixin to rise. I saw the famous "green flash" (I haven’t seen it since). The green flash . It actually made a "pop" noise in my head when the bubble broke into yellow sunlight.

The Gulf Stream was @ 20 miles out and you could sometimes see bigger ships on the horizon but the near maritime traffic was mostly pleasure boats - with and without sails. Postcard perfect.

There were also surfers galore in those days and color & fun and the smell of Coppertone was always on the beach.

One of my favorite pastimes when beaching was "rubber rafting". Riding the waves on inflated canvas mats. It is technically a form of surfing but you don’t stand up.

The sturdy commercial Rubber Raft was about four feet long and was actually 4 or 5 big air tubes ganged together to form a small platform. They were made of a heavy canvas (usually navy blue) with bright SpongeBob yellow rubber ends with grommets.

The business of the beach was selling food, (The Seaburger Restaurant), suntan oils (The Seaburger Restaurant) and @40 of these floatation devices (stashed in the crawlspace under the Seaburger).

It was a sales concession, and on a good day all 40 of these guys would be inflated to the max (you get a better bounce when you go "over the falls" on a wave) and stacked in a row, waiting for the day’s customers.

The all had big white painted numbers stenciled on the sides to ID the individual floats. You would rent a raft from the concessionaire (I think I recall .50 per hour - well worth it even then before current inflation), and ride for as long as you could.

The raft boss had minions who would walk the mile or so with a clipboard - looking for delinquent riders. You might sneak one more ride in after the toadie motioned that your time was up but there’s no place to hide out on the waves.

It wasn’t uncommon to see a raft worker dragging a half dozen floats, roped together by the front grommets, back to the corral to await re-rent. Sometimes you could pay the worker for more time, sometimes you had to follow them back to re-rent.

Riding the rafts was as much fun as I had at the beach. The excitement factor depended entirely on the nature of the breaking waves. They could be anything.

Wind & weather of course were the main influences but it is a BIG ocean and lots of planet earth energy contained within so there was no certainty except they would break upon the shore.

Vero’s beaches were relatively shallow with a barrier reef about a half mile out so the waves would come in sets of @ 3.

Before the current wave spent its energy and retracted back into the bigness, another two or three were coming in to break over the last one so there was generally a set of "stairs" made out of water.

If conditions were right you could catch a wave as it crested outside the break and ride the air raft down several "bumps" onto the previous waves. Sometimes all the way in, to finally scuff into the wet sand and feel the water trickle behind you back into the ocean.

If this default wave structure was excited by weather or other conditions it could get pretty big. The initial "drop" when you went over the crest of the outside wave could be as much as 3 or 4 feet and you come down hard on the wave in front of you. Also much faster if the waves were big.

I remember one beautiful Sunday afternoon. A third of the county was out at the beaches and nobody went into the water. Waves (you’ve heard surfers talk on TV) peel off to one side or the other when they crest & break - left or right.

The waves that day were gigantic - maybe from a storm way out - and hollow and they broke simultaneously all the way down the length of the huge green swell at once (not left or right) and BOOM! Crashing right on the shore.

The thunder was massive and any foolish & or brave youngster trying to get out past the break was smashed flat on entry. We all just watched, everybody stayed on shore - it was a nice day but no swimming possible. I never saw it like that again.



On good days, it was not unusual for a gang of regular rafters to try to crash each other. Even at relative high speed water is pretty soft and the rubber rafts were actually flotation devices so injury was rare.

But the heavy canvas duck would wear pretty hard on soft young bodies and if you didn’t wear at least a T-shirt and you rubberrafted more than a few hours, you would rub your nipples raw (this hurts in salt water!).

The T shirt helped with sunburn too. We hadn’t heard much about sun blockers in those days.

I recall one greyish day at South Beach with my brother Mike. It was windy. The break was not in sets but pretty random and large.

The crests & troughs were radical enough where your neighbor on the water would disappear into a trough and or rise above you as you disappeared into trough. The waves were powerful and fast and we had a blast avoiding the rough or malformed ones and catching the occasional perfect monster which shoved us to shore in a roar of white water at a terrific rate.

When you are propelled really fast, the raft "chatters" as it makes tiny surface bounces on the way in. Hang on!

Not paying any attention to anything but the ocean’s roiling surface, it slipped my mind that everything swimming below me was a possible incident. Between the wave crests, in one of those troughs I got "bumped".

Something bigger than a small fish bumped my overhanging right leg with questionable intent.

OK, so now I’m paying attention to the "great below". I pulled the leg (and the other one) out of the water and balanced sitting on the rubber raft cross legged but with the radical action of the rough waves I was in danger of capsizing (into the gaping maw of a sea monster?) So I had to put my legs back into the drink to stabilize.

At that moment @ 3 feet off to my right a large gray bottle nosed dolphin rolled its head up sideways, looked at me and "blew" its misty exhaled air out the top hole with a huge loud steamy sound.

The next moment I was on shore. Don’t know how I got there. Mike said I might have been running across the wave tops carrying the raft - I don’t recall. But I was back on pretty dry land - at least dry enough to where any creature out there could not get me without lumbering onto shore. I have legs, I could outrun any fish any size.

I eventually went back in that day but I did watch the waves differently than before.



There was a beautiful peaceful mile between Vero's South beach and the central "Jaycee Beach". The walk north was always some form of perfect. One could while away a lovely hour walking north & back checking out the prizes that had washed up previous tide. There were only a few rich folk’s homes and they were tastefully set back from the dune line. The reef came pretty close the shore at about the half mile mark.

One day, at low tide the reef was exposed and about 10 feet out into the water. I decided to check it out.

The water flows around the foundation rocks and kind of digs a trench all the way around. The trench is about 3 feet deep and then you can climb up on the spongy hill. I dove in and started swimming to the left looking for a good place to climb up.

There was lots of sea critter activity in the trench - small fish, crustaceans and even an occasional sand shark. They are small and though "sharky" looking, they are afraid of anything people sized so I was OK. You still don’t "mess with them" so I didn’t.

Lots of small fish around the reef proper (not venturing into the shark trench). Mostly eating stuff - the whole reef was alive. They were just general fish (no offense offered) and not so much a circus of color like the reef surface. Maybe bland color is safer. They seemed busy & content.

The other critters were tiny weird alien looking clear bodied things. Swimming through their miniature colorfully tentacled valleys using varied means of finny locomotion - some just glide along, other do the snap swim thing with their bodies like shrimp & lobsters.

They were mostly see-through. You could see tiny fluttering action inside their bodies and the organs & eyes were a different color.

I’m sure some of these were "proto" grown up crabs etc. in their nymph stage. The others I guess were full grown at that size. Fascinating.

The reef proper had no exposed rock surface. Everything was covered with life. Brilliantly bright blues, reds, oranges, yellows, waving tentacles & tiny critters darting everywhere - avoiding me.

I thought it would feel slimy but instead it was soft and comfortable on my bare feet bottoms. Like a wet long fiber carpet. I was surprised.

I got down on my knees and peered into a busy tiny very colorful world. Miniscule crabs, shrimp, eels, & unknowns were all going about their business - drawing nourishment from the ambient soup or eating each other. A tiny live city.

Different colored patches of similar reefers banding together made a lovely mosaic of the overview. I spent a good hour out there, long enough to notice the tide was changing and time to get back on shore.

I passed that small piece of reef a few more times that week on my beach walks but never went out again. A week after that it was gone. Re-covered by the constantly shifting sandy bottom. I haven’t seen it since.

Earliest beach memories

I was a kid in New York. We left when I was 9 and those memories are along way back but I do have a one-time vague recollection of a subway car in the summer. What impressed this little kid was all the sand on the floor (I was tiny & close to the deck), and all the colorful people with their beach stuff.

At the beach we walked through a strange hollow sounding locker/shower room - it was actually a long north/south building with many doors on either side.

You get off the train, go in one of the west doors & change (from what to what?) then come out one of the east doors and there is ¾ of a million people spread out on the sand on Jones’ Beach.

I was with my mom and her beach buddy Molly Zam. They were girls - just barely 30 yrs old. We found a blanket spot near the dirty small wave sea shore.

I recall going in and even at that age I was not impressed with the vibe of the ocean there. I was however, very impressed with all the people going about their beach business. I must have been pretty young at the time because I could not read.

I saw "Sky Writers" and Banner planes. Apparently, advertising to that many people at one time was a golden opportunity for the merchants. Banner planes are single propeller jobs that fly low and drag behind a large colorful flag with the commercial printed on it - back & forth up & down the whole beach.

The Sky Writers were more computer like - they were a row of 4 or 5 planes with "smoke" tanks and they flew much higher. Way up there, they would release coordinated bursts of "cloud" and big square letters the width of the flight line, would form in the blue.

This could be fascinating and certainly attention grabbing as a jillion people tried to figure out what was being spelled out in the sky.

Like I said, I remember I could not read. I asked mom what the planes were writing & she said. "They’re writing ‘Chris is a good boy". Even then I knew better but I never forgot it, eh?

Another early beach memory - a completely different location, peaceful & comforting was out at Rocky Point. My dearest cousin’s family had a place out there. Again I have only vague memories of a long drive out, a stop at HoJo’s (Howard Johnsons - are they still around?) and a late night arrival. We kids were tucked in upstairs.

Next morning I remember the smell of bacon & breakfast and a slamming back screened kitchen door. I think there was a swing set in the yard and then a short walk to some sand cliffs. The grass stopped and the sand began. It was pretty steep and you kind of walked, kind of slid down to the beach proper.

The ground was most impressive. Round rocks - most about the same half potato size and a gazillion related shades of color were the bottom. No sand, just round rocks.

They were not sharp but still a little difficult to walk on. I recall the water was perfectly clear that day and I could watch, with wavy distortion, my own feet walking the bottom. The water was cold!

I found out much later that the place was geographically formed when a glacier melted. OK! Makes sense! The massive glacier grinding made the round smooth stony bottom and though I would have easily believed the cold water was gigantic ice melt, it was just the chilly Atlantic.

Sometimes I dream that beach.

Big Love to All