The Skinny Island Post

The Plot

Just weeding and prep work today, but at last we are underway with the spring garden.  After morning ocean fog, a balmy 72 degrees by 10 a.m., light winds from the northeast.  Sun not yet fully on the plot in this shot, but you get the general lay-out.  Looking southwest.  Sun still relatively low in the south , but working its way north. By the equinox there is a full 10 hours of sunlight on this little piece of ground.  Light is not the issue.

Compost Pit

This is the compost pit, almost a year’s worth of leaves, kitchen scraps, sawdust, etc. nicely broken down, compacted and ready to use.  It was full to the top last fall.  I introduced some red wigglers then and they’re still active down in the pile. They’re great for helping to break stuff up, and their poop is an added benefit.  Even if I wasn’t trying to do a garden I would compost.  It’s just so cool. And easy.  Everybody should do it.  Makes great fertilizer and starter medium for just about anything.  Lots of commercial options if you don’t want to make your own system.  Turning is key.  For this I use an old-fashioned pitch-fork.  Labor intensive, but fun, and good exercise.

Compost Tomato

Ah, the beauty of composting.  This is a young, but very healthy tomato plant which has come up on its own in the hay over compost medium.  This one germinated from kitchen scraps, and not from other ways we have experienced.  Years ago, in Tallahassee, we got some free treated waste-water sludge from the city to put on our suffering grass one summer.  Supposed to be a very good fertilizer. After watering we had about a thousand little tomato plants.  Tomato seeds are not broken down in the human body. I’m just saying.

Oregano

This is the Oregano that survived the winter so well.  The Rosemary, Mint, Sage, Dill, Parsley, and Cilantro are also thriving.  Most of the Basil died in the December freeze, but enough survived that will re-propagate, I think.  If not, we’ll just throw in some more seed.  There’s nothing like fresh herbs every night, and the Pesto we make with the Basil is killer.  Fresh Oregano in spaghetti sauce? Forgetaboutit.

St. Francis

This is Francis, the Patron Saint of animals and gardeners, in amidst the Rosemary and Mint. I love his humility and grace, and if he can help the garden, he’s more than welcome to stay.

That’s the initial tour.  As I said, just weeding and prepping today.  We have a plan and will begin seeding tomorrow.

In case the wrong impression has been given, not everyone on this little slice of Skinny Island is lying around just waiting for Happy Hour. There are folks still trying to make a living, with varying degrees of success.  We took you on a little bike ride on the beach a few days back to point out some landmarks.  Today we’ll be walking on A1A, within our normal walking distance, 1.5 miles in either direction, to point out the businesses that fall within that 3-mile total distance.  We no longer know much of the world beyond those parameters.

Beginning north, there is an interesting little beach establishment about a mile from us that has undergone more changes in ownership than Bret Favre has retirements.  It is a funky little beach bar, with a little enclosed dining area for maybe 8 tables, and a big outdoor deck overlooking the ocean.  I can’t keep up with all the names this place has had, but it’s still there.  It seems each new owner gets it going in time for Bike Week, in March, and is able to hang on into summer based on that business, before folding.  It’s pretty much in the middle of nowhere, but a real old-fashion beach bar hang-out, if you like that sort of thing.  One of it’s more successful incarnations was as Betty’s A1A Cafe, an actual restaurant that served excellent food, prepared by Betty herself.  That lasted about three years.  When Papa was a soldier in the Army of the Lord, we would walk up there after church for Sunday lunch.  Very nice.  Betty actually outgrew the place and bought a larger one south of us, which we will get to momentarily.  The current owners have been in place more than a year now.

Moving south from there, the next business is the convenience store-gas station just the other side of the condo from us.  The prices are very high so we don’t go there much except for milk and surfboard wax, which are reasonable.  The gas beachside is outrageous, so we fill up on our infrequent trips inland.  When there are storms threatening I do go over to catch the latest news.  The Deputy Sheriff who patrols up here is almost always there during such times, and he is locked into any evacuation orders and the like.  When a voluntary evacuation of the island is ordered, a few leave, but not many.  Most everybody leaves on a mandatory evacuation.  Most but not all.  You have to kind of roll the dice.  When the winds top forty miles per hour they close the bridges, so you can’t get off if you want to.  I asked the cop one time what the truth was in the rumor you always hear that they’ll come around asking for a next of kin to notify if you decide to stay after a mandatory evacuation order.  He laughed.  He said there wouldn’t be anybody to go around collecting that information.  That’s what I thought.  You are own your own, and that’s as it should be.

A mile and a half to the south is Alfie’s Restaurant, directly across the road from the Lifeguard Headquarters.  It’s a venerable old landmark, with decent food, but nothing to rave about.  Moving back north, the next establishment is another convenience store/gas station.  I think we’ve maybe been in there twice in fifteen years.  Next is a sweet little 50s era motel with its original tile roof intact, a real throw-back, with a shuffle-board court, even.  A few years back the owner was struck and killed crossing A1A.  Immediately adjacent is a funky little shopping area with bait shop, barber shop, gift shop, and pool supply on the ground floor, and one level of apartments above.  Then there’s a little walk-up place that sells lobster rolls.  It’s been a lot of different things, too.  Lobster rolls; a little too New England for me.  Next is a funeral home/crematorium; then a real estate office and hair salon in a bright yellow building; then Bicentennial Park, which I guess doesn’t qualify as a business, but is a unique spot, stretching from ocean to Intracoastal.  Then comes Betty’s A1A Cafe, part II.  Great views and good food, but she’s just gotten too pricey, and they’re always advertising New England clams on their sign.  What, there’s no seafood in Florida?  Whatever.

Another Real Estate office a hundred yards north.  This one has been up here for many years, run by a man many called the Unofficial Mayor of Ormond-by-the-Sea. (We don’t have an official mayor.) A great guy, very civic-minded, he unfortunately died of a heart attack a few months ago at age 60.  New owners; new sign.

We’ve already talked about the nautical gift shop and campground, both in the vicinity of the sub tower, and both gone now.  Next is a little Greek Restaurant, some 500 feet from our house, but closed for ten years now.  Jimmy, the owner, (Jimmy the Greek?) still lives behind the restaurant.  His daughter lives down one of the side streets and walks her little Chihuahua past the house almost every day.  Actually, the dog follows along behind her a few feet.  I’ve asked her if Jimmy is going to open the place again, and she’s always said he’s still talking about.  About six months ago she said he was going to set her up to open and run the place.  A few days after that, she said he’d changed his mind.  Then, somebody lost control on A1A and plowed their car into the front of the place, causing extensive damage.  Jimmy used the insurance money to repair and dress up the place, even laying new asphalt in the parking lot and painting new lines.  We thought sure he was opening again, but the daughter said false alarm again.  We’d like to have it back.  It was a nice little place; Jimmy was a good cook, and there was a cool little six-stool bar.  We’ll see.

Next is maybe the most interesting anomaly on the beach, Rich’s Garage.  There can’t be an automotive repair shop with a better view than this.  The bay looks directly out onto the Atlantic.  It also has been here forever.  Two guys owned it prior to Rich, one of whom lived in a little attached apartment.  They were rude and impatient, and always out to get you.  Rich is a whole different story.  A one-man operation, (sometimes helped out in the office by his mom,) he calls all his customers Sir and Ma’am, does a great job quickly, and is reasonably priced.  And talk about convenient.  I’ve actually pushed vehicles up there by hand.

That’s it.  Quirky and not always pretty to look at, commerce nevertheless thrives, after a fashion, on this part of Skinny Island.

Please let this be it. Eighty degrees, light west wind, nice little swell curling out on the bar. Off island for a few days, we came back today and opened up the house.  Palms and palmettos swaying, cats lazing around, this is what we’ve been waiting for.  Overnight it’s T-shirts, shorts, and bare feet.  Hope it lasts.

* * *

Everybody’s feeling it.  A Monday holiday to coincide with the first good weather in months. Traffic on A1A heavy; the beaches full; people walking, fishing; some brave little grom surfers in the water.  Looks like a full-on summer weekend. May have to break out the fishing rods this week.  They are all rigged and ready to go, but every day when I check the guys down there fishing are still wearing waders.  And these are snowbirds! They’ll be around through March, probably, then head back north, and we’ll have the beach to ourselves.  Water should be up near sixty this week, which is warm enough to wade.  Some big whiting are showing up, and the occasional red, but no bluefish after mullet yet.  We’ll definitely mix it up when they show.  Blues are aggressive and fun to catch.  They’re also very good smoked, and even better grilled.  A lot of folks don’t care for them; it’s a dark meat fish, but very flavorful. About ninety percent of what everybody catches is whiting, though, a firm, white flesh fish, you can fix just about any old way. You catch a lot of sail cats through the summer, which are completely useless, and little bonnet sharks in the spring.  They have a head like a hammerhead, and a one-pounder can feel ten times heavier.  People sometimes land bigger sharks.  There was a big filleted carcass on the beach one morning last summer.  I was out on the board and commented about it to another old timer who’d joined me.  He’d lived around here a good bit longer than us and told me a Jacksonville shark club has been driving this far south for years to shark fish at night.  He said they chum the water to bring in big ones.  I’ve never seen anybody shark fishing at night, but the idea of chumming was not very appealing.  My few shark encounters have been amicable, and I’d like to keep it that way.

* * *

Garden gets planted this week, too.  Rather ambitiously, we acquired several packs of seed this weekend: yellow and zucchini squash, green onions, cantaloupe, cucumbers, green beans, okra, and radishes.  Going to set tomatoes and peppers from plants.  Busy week.  Stay posted with The Skinny Island Post!

The Feral Poet gets around. The following are a few of his travel observations.

Virgin River, Last Night in Zion

Waiting for the moon
to rise over Watchman,
good micro-brews chilling
in a cheap ice chest,
we stroll in amber dusk
past cook fires, tents, and trailers
to be with the river
one more time.
A short steep path
down to swift cascade,
canopy of cottonwood
and red rock wall,
empty and reverential.

Three hummingbirds feed
above the river,
visible only in the moment
they dart to a new hover,
vanishing then in stillness.
How to tell this–
the grace, the ancient continuous balance?

In last light bats appear
against a slate sky,
and then the moon,
carving jagged peaks.

* * *

Cape Lookout

Wild Oregon
coast in rain;
sea breaking bottle-glass green
under blanket of gray.
How many squalls
have sung in these
old-growth firs?

Waking many times
to blessings of a dry tent
and your nearby
breathing.

* * *

 Joshua Tree

That thing
the Mojave does,
seeping in,
or draining something out,
so pronounced at dusk,
and then you remember
how this strange tree
got its name:
Joshua, awed and overwhelmed,
arms raised in supplication.

I am listening to a mockingbird, which along with baseball, is the true harbinger of an imminent spring. I have loved and been fascinated by mockingbirds all my life. They are at once lovely and feisty; mysterious and comforting. They are found virtually everywhere in the U.S, and into Canada. It is the state bird of three states, including Florida. 

The story you are told as a child, and indeed, the story you read if you research, is that the marvelous rhapsody you hear from this bird are imitations of other birds this individual has heard.  Those who know say a mockingbird can have a repertoire of 50 to 200 different calls.  All learned through imitation of other birds?  I say Horse Hockey!

I’ve listened to a lot of mockingbirds, and I’ve thought about this a lot, (apparently I’ve too much time on my hands,) and it just doesn’t add up.  First off, mockingbirds are very territorial, meaning they not only vigorously defend the area in which they live, they don’t venture very far from the tree or bush they call home.  Sit and listen to a mockingbird over a half-hour or so.  You’ll hear more individual calls than you can count, many only a few notes, but individual nevertheless.  Now ask yourself, how many of those calls have you heard any other bird utter? Two, three, four, maybe? Well, they learned them somewhere else, you say.  No good.  A mockingbird would have to travel thousands of miles to hear all the songs he sings.  I already told you they don’t roam far. So where’d they hear all these songs they are supposedly imitating?

Truth is they don’t.  My theory–stay with me here– is that they’re making it all up as they go along.  It is a spontaneous expression, perhaps among the most beautiful in nature. It is the male doing most of this singing, and the theory goes he is doing it to attract a mate, and I can go along with that to some extent.  But they keep doing it, even after mating and building a nest. (Both males and females then tend the nest.) He just keeps on singing, sometimes straight through the night, if a moon is out.  So do the females. What does that tell you?

Now, I’m not saying a mockingbird sings for joy; I won’t go that far. But it is a spontaneous expression of their nature, and it is certainly joyful.  It’s also physically impossible they’re imitating all that many other birds.  Trust me on that.  I’ve devoted years to these findings.

It’s going to be alright now. Pitchers and catchers reported to their Spring Training camps this week; the others are trickling in; everybody will be full-strength next week.  Chipper Jones is back, taking full cuts and fielding grounders at Disney; Manny is in St. Pete with Tampa Bay now; same old hair, but a whole new attitude. We’ll see.  Anyway, all’s right with the world right now.  Even the weather sat up to the sound of popping leather, stretched, and decided, as my mother used to say–to straighten up and fly right–hence this beautiful weekend in Florida. 

We have professional baseball on Skinny Island, you know.  Well, not technically on Skinny Island, but its own island between Skinny and the mainland, in Downtown Daytona Beach, just a few miles south. It’s the Daytona Cubs, a Class A affiliate of the Chicago Cubs.  They play in a sweet little ball park, all surrounded by water. In summer you can sit up in the bleachers and watch the sky colors change above the emerald green outfield and feel the breeze blow in off the ocean. Its got to be one of the best places in the country to watch a game.  This year we are going to be Silver Sluggers.  It’s a promotion the team has for us elderly folks.  For $15 dollars apiece you get seven home games, a T-shirt, special drink rates, and an ID card. Don’t know how you can beat that anywhere.  I’m not sure whether they seat all the geezers together or not.  I wouldn’t, but I’m not the owner, and most people would think that’s fine, anyway.

 We got seriously into professional baseball several years back.  Having been born and raised in Tampa, Papa got it in his head shortly after the Tampa Bay franchise took the field, that we should be supporters. We bought two partial season ticket packages– 22 games– in the upper deck down the third base line. That was in 2000.  We had tickets to at least one game in every home stand, sometimes a Saturday and a Sunday, sometimes mid-week.  Papa still had his Alfa Romeo Spyder in those days, so we would jump in the little roadster about three in the afternoon for weekday games; drive three hours; sit three hours. then drive back three again; and go to work next morning.  Nothing to it.  For back-to-back weekend games we would stay over.  We found a wonderful place on Treasure Island overlooking Boca Ciega Bay called The Bluenose, now closed and torn down, a classic old Florida motel, and it became our regular sleep-over.

The second year we got tickets down on the first level, a little down the first base line from the home team dug-out, and continued our break-neck driving pace back and forth.  Meemaw called it the Tilt-a-Whirl. We liked that so much we decided to move even closer to home plate, and the third year bought tickets right behind the home team dugout, about fifteen rows up.  Perfect seats, with great seat neighbors. That’s when we started looking for a house.

We were driving over so much, and forking out dough for a room, it seemed to make sense. Plus we really like the area. We found and bought a little house a few minutes from the ballpark and about the same distance from the beach.  It was our baseball house.  Papa used to sit in the stands and figure how much each game, inning and pitch was costing him. The Alfa gave way to a 1969 Volkswagon bus, great for pre-game tail-gating, and then a mundane Saturn.  Meanwhile the team was horrible.  They lost to everybody, all the time.  Attendance was terrible, but ticket prices continued to climb year after year. We had those seats through the ’06 season, then gave them up.  Too costly to continue watching them lose. The season after that next one they went to the play-offs, and then the World Series.  You’re welcome. 

We kept the house. We still go over when we can, and we still go to an occasional game.  We saw our old seat friends last year, and they are fine, but also getting tired.  They said having the World Series at the Trop was worth all the pain.  I’m sure they’ll be back again this year.

One of the things we are trying to do here is maintain some sense of the real Florida in a place that cycles wildly from bland, vapid sameness, to theme park mania, to some kind of insipid, Post-Jimmy-Buffet parrot-infused coconut psychosis. By real Florida I mean a quiet appreciation not only for small block houses with old crank jalousie windows, oranges and grapefruit on your backyard trees, trailer parks on little bays where you could live on one SS check, mimosa and Jacaranda trees, but three of our favorites, shrimp boil, Cuban sandwiches, and smoked mullet. And who better to pontificate on these delicacies than your intrepid Skinny Island Post reporter, me, a six-generation native.

For the uninitiated, uninformed, and just plain slow, we will talk a little about how we prepare these native dishes, but don’t try this at home if you feel the least bit intimidated, or don’t know to bang your shoes together every morning before putting them on, to dislodge any scorpions that may have taken up residence overnight. To begin, a shrimp boil is just that: boiled shrimp.  That’s the whole meal. Any side dish, including salad, bread, zucchini, or what have you, diminishes from the experience, and is not allowed. Beer, of course, is not only allowed, but encouraged.

Start with good shrimp, roughly a pound each, heads on, and fresh as you can get them. We used to get them right off the boats in the Keys, before the shrimp pretty much disappeared down there and they started bringing them in from Costa Rica. You can still find fresh Florida shrimp, but it ain’t easy. Trust your fish monger; a stand-alone fish market is best, but if that’s not possible, get to know the fish guy at Publix. Enjoy the peeling process. Put on some music, pour some wine or crack a beer, and have at it. Pinch off the heads, strip off the casing, and save both aside for paella.  And contrary to what you’ve heard, don’t worry about deveining the rascals. That minute amount of shrimp poop is not gonna kill you, and in fact it adds flavor. Leave on the tails; that’s your dipping handle. You remove the tails, too, if you’re putting them in a sauce or some other fancy dish you eat with a fork. We won’t be doing that.

Get your water going, enough to immerse all the shrimp, but making a habitat for them, so use some judgement. A packaged boil mix is fine, like Old Bay, or you can experiment and make your own. Salt, pepper, paprika, red pepper flakes, whatever you want. Melt some butter in a bowl and add some garlic if you like, or mix up a little cocktail sause with ketchup, lemon, and horseradish. Less is more, here. You want to taste the shrimps. Bring the water to a rolling boil. Drop in the shrimp, but don’t walk away. You want them to turn pink and curl a little, not turn to rubber. No time limit; just watch. Ladle them out, divide and conquer. You should have enough so the very last one is all you can possibly stuff in. Simple but effective.

Making an authentic Cuban sandwich at home raises the bar several degrees, but it is well worth the effort. You’ll need good, thin-sliced ham and pork, Provolone cheese, (Swiss works well, too; just no American,) mustard, mayo, and long slices of dill pickle. The baker in this house has begun making her own Cuban bread, but I would not recommend that right off. You can buy perfectly good Cuban bread loaves at Publix. Cut this loaf into six-inch sections, and slice open length-wise.  Slather on mustard and mayo to both sides, then pile on your ham, pork, cheese and pickle slices. Done, huh? Oh, no. What you have at this stage is a decent ham and cheese sandwich, but not a Cuban. You have to hot press the sucker now. No commercial sandwich press? Not to worry. We have a heavy cast iron pan that came with a really heavy press apparatus, with handle. In lieu of that, use a pot lid, or, as a last resort, a big spatula. The point is to have a hot pan, then press the sandwich as flat as you can, turning to get it hot on both sides, melting the cheese, and heating throughout. Now you have it.

Smoked mullet, the greatest of the great in native dishes, requires fresh mullet, of course, and a smoker. We net our mullet from the beach, (when they are running, which precludes it being an everyday thing.) They should be a good ten to twelve inches or longer, heads on. Scale it, cut off the head and the tip of the tail, then slice open stem to stern at the belly, and remove all the guts. Then you butterfly it, meaning you open it up so it will lay flat, exposing all the meat inside the flanks. We have a stand-up smoker/grill with two racks. You start a bed of charcoal in the bottom, and when that’s ready, lay out your mullet on the racks. You have to add wood ships to the coals periodically to smoke things up. About five hours later, it’s ready. We eat it as is, and also make a fine mullet dip to eat as a snack with crackers.

We talked in an earlier post about Spanish Bean Soup. This, and Paella, as prepared in the famous Tampa landmark restaurant, Columbia, are two more favorites, both served with Cuban bread. It’s hard to escape the Cuban/Spanish influence when you’ve been here as long as we have, and who’d want to? More fish dishes, and a few words about oysters in posts to follow. Hey, eat Florida! and Bon Appetite! 

Raw, foggy, and wet today, with showers moving up the coast from the south, but no wind, and temps hovering mid-sixties.  Actually pleasant.  Seas very rough.  Even with everything closed up, you could hear the crashing of big surf last night.  There is a period between one and five a.m. when there are no cars on A1A and you hear nothing but the ocean.  Best in summer when we have all the windows open, of course.  We rarely have to use the air then; there’s almost always some kind of cooling breeze, so from the time we find our lows in the 60s, it’s all open.  Still a few weeks from that, I think; we don’t do cold well, and the heat running now feels very nice, thank you.

* * *

Our mailman keeps the weather and climate thing in perspective for us.  A New York transplant, (naturally,) he in his mid-thirties, I guess, a stocky guy with buzzed hair, a very genial manner, and a heavy Long Island accent.  He drives his mail truck wearing official USPS shorts, even on the coldest days. I go out to the road to meet him when I see him coming, and he never fails to say something like, “Another day in Paradise, huh?”  He loves to relate how bad they’re having it back home, and how much he loves it here.  He was gone for a week, and when I saw him yesterday he said he’d gone back to New York for a visit.  He said there was three feet of snow out on the island; the roads were deteriorated, and everything was falling apart.  He said he’s been down here five years and will never move back.  I can see it.  He has probably the best route in the county, cruising up and down A1A and the side streets of Skinny Island, and I see him go back by around noon to stop into the convenience store for lunch, which he eats parked facing the ocean. I like the guy. So far he hasn’t once said how much better things were back in New York.  He can stay.

With the exception of our neighbors to the south, also Florida natives, everybody else you meet out here are from “up north,” as they say. A couple who own one of the condo units on our north side, live in D.C., so I guess that doesn’t count as being from up north to them, but it does to us.  They are very nice and only come down on holidays and for stretches in summer.  I’m thinking anything north of Atlanta is “up north,” and the way the winter’s been up that way, it is!

One of my favorite transplants was a guy named Charles, who was the live-in maintenance man at the condo building a little to the south.  I guess he got some discount living there by being Mr, Fixit, I never did hear the straight story on that.  He was a Boston native, about fifty, an early retiree from the fire department, and a funny Irishman full of stories. You’d see Charles go by every afternoon on his way to the convenience store, and a few minutes later headed back the other way with a twelve-pack of Bud. If I was out he’d stop and talk. Very interesting guy. He had an aluminum row-boat with a small gas engine he kept tied up down on the beach from his condo, and every now and then you’d see him haul it down to the water and push it in, and off he’d go fishing, nevermind the sea conditions.  I always thought he’d capsize and drown, but he never did.  Thing was, his trips to the convenience store started occurring earlier and earlier in the day, until finally he was going by about ten o’clock in the morning.  That went on for some time. Then one morning, maybe eight or eight-thirty, I went down to the beach to paddle out for some surf, and saw Charles down the beach struggling to get his boat in the water.  It clearly wasn’t a day he was going to be able to get out–the sand bar break was a good four feet– but as I soon discovered, I don’t think he knew that. I went down to see if I could help, or better, dissuade him from trying, and found him drunk as a coot. Red-faced and swearing him best Irish curses, he had the boat sideways in the shore break, and it was working him over. He got knocked down just as I got there, the boat rolled over him, and I thought that was it.  Nope, he popped up the other side laughing his ass off, but now convinced he should let this go for now. Together we pulled the boat up to dry sand, and then I sat him down.
“Do you need some help getting up to your place?” I asked.
“No, man, I’m fine,” Charles replied.
“You sure?”
“Yeah, I’m just going to sit here a while,” he said.
He was so out of breath and red I thought he was going to explode, but he waved me off.           “Go on,” he said.  “I’ll watch you.”
“Okay,” I said, and started away.
“Hey,” Charles called.
I turned and looked at him and there were tears in his eyes.  “Thanks, Man,” he said.
That was eight or more years ago.  We never saw him again after that.

* * *

Three p.m., and the sun is finally threatening to break through.   Gray-green clouds in the east, and olive water. Taking some coffee down and watch the waves in this new light.

Papa's Cruiser

The hurricanes of ’04 took out so much sand we had no beach to walk, run, or ride on in winter, even at low tide.  Summers were better– the lows are lower in summer– but it really wasn’t near what it had been until last summer.  This winter has been good; lots more beach to work with at low tide, so it’s been filling in nicely.  Clear, sunny, and much warmer this morning, so Papa took advantage of a 10:00 low and took off on the cruiser.

Slight wind out of the northwest, a nice little three-foot swell starting to break on the outside sand bar, great longboard wave, but at fifty-five degrees, the water’s still too cold for me.  I have a Spring wetsuit–short legs and arms– but I only wear it when the water’s in the sixties. At seventy degrees, it’s bare-back time, just board shorts and maybe a rash guard.  Hope to be back in the water some time in March. I miss it, and it’s a great conditioner. The anticipation picks up on days like this.

The beach empty but for a few walkers way south, and a good fifty-yard width of hard sand.  Passed the sub tower, the whale-spotters already gone, though the whales I’ve seen were at mid-day or later.  No news of any since the one that was tangled in rope and eventually died.  We’re nearing the end of the migration season. There used to be a travel-trailer campground across A1A from the sub tower, a big one, with a store and pool room. Quite a number of folks lived there year-round. It closed about eight years ago, I guess, and the land was cleared and streets put in for a new housing development, but then came the real estate crash, and nothing at all has been built. It’s a strange scene; shiny black-topped streets with stop signs at all intersections, and no houses.  A little south of the campground was a great nautical gift shop, also long gone. They had a lot of funky shell stuff, but also some nice pewter and silver nautical-themed jewelry.  The building was knocked down and the lot is still empty. Recession on Skinny Island.

I came upon a patch of dead starfish, thirty or more, in an area maybe twenty yards square. You see them frequently, but usually more spread out than this. I don’t know what kills them.  They are naturally very mobile, so I don’t think they are left alive by a falling tide and then die.  Some days there appears to be a die-off of a particular species, certain crabs, for instance, or a bi-valve.  Last fall there were a lot of horseshoe crabs, and I’ve found a couple of dead dolphin, and one very old green turtle.  The females return throughout their lives to lay eggs on the very beach on which they were hatched, and they can live two-hundred years or more.  The one I found could have been coming back here since the Second Spanish Period.

This is our lifeguard station, about a mile and a half from the house. It is our turn-around point for three-mile runs and walks, and an impressive structure.  When times were flush they used to set up manned lifeguard stands in summer about every half-mile north to the State Recreation Area, but now the last one is around the sub tower. Now, when somebody gets in trouble in the water, they go barreling up the road, or on the beach, if possible, in their emergency truck, relying on civilians to send up the alarm. I’ve always thought something like this would make a great beach house, and I’ve fantasized about building one across the road, but I imagine there is some prohibition against that sort of thing. Still, if somebody would come up with the money, I’d look into it.

Two dead rays, a quarter-mile apart, the gulls feasting. you see them frequently on clear water days, usually in small groups, but the past two summers we were fortunate to witness huge migrations.  One lasted for several hours. We sat on the beach deck and watched thousands go by, illuminated in the breaking waves by the late sun. They were small rays, like this one, maybe a foot across, with brown tops and white undersides.  In May you see the big Manta Rays with ten-foot wing spans catapulting out of the water in prodigious leaps, usually a good ways out, but they come into the shallows to feed, too.  I was out on the board one day and one swam right under me.  They actually fly under water with big, slow undulations, their wingtips frequently breaking the surface.  When I first saw this one I thought it was two sharks swimming ten or twelve feet apart–the wingtips look like dorsal fins–and then I saw his great dark body.

I turned around after two and a half miles, and found the wind a little tough to pedal against coming back. About half-way home I came upon this crab.  You usually see blue crabs and sand crabs washed in, but I’ve been seeing more of this one recently. I don’t know what it is, but it looks like a rock, so maybe it’s some kind of stone crab. Quite a tough-looking guy, and maybe one of those rascal bait-stealers that likes to deplete my shrimp supply.

That’s it.  Nothing special, really, but a world apart, and different every day. Something to get lost in.