Sunday Morning, Turtle Beach

“Is that red tide?” The fat woman in the black one-piece bathing suit was standing in front of me, pointing at the long skeins of dark red seaweed washed up on Turtle Beach by a hurricane far out in the Gulf. Her daughter, a pretty girl of maybe 20 who was not thin but showed few signs of inheriting her mother’s weight, smirked and kept walking. She had succeeded, accidentally, in siccing her mother on an innocent bystander.

I was that innocent bystander, but I was in a good mood, so I decided to answer the woman. The alternative, and possibly wiser, choice was to bury my nose still deeper in the James Ellroy novel I was reading.

“No ma’am. It’s just seaweed. Red tide is an algae. If it were a red tide, none of us would be on this beach because the smell of dead fish would be overwhelming.” I smiled as I played local guide.

“Hmmmph. It smells pretty fishy to me.” I began to catch on. This woman did not want to be at the beach; she had only come because she was visiting her daughter from someplace up north and felt like she had to.

I had seen the daughter on the beach before. She usually nodded hello, sometimes spoke, and, like me, had no intention of getting a tan. I enjoyed watching her surreptitiously as she struggled to self-apply SP45 sunscreen to her back. I enjoyed watching because I had the same struggle. Neither one of us ever brought anyone to the beach to help with the sunscreen, and neither of us would ever ask a stranger to help apply it. That was just too intimate.

The woman walked to where her daughter was setting up their small encampment: an Indian blanket spread on the sand for the daughter to recline on, a folding chair for mom, a pair of large, colorful umbrellas, a small cooler, a radio, and some towels. The entire time the daughter worked, placing the various trappings of beach life on the small chunk of sand she had picked for them, the mother whined and moaned about the smell, the sun, the heat, and basically everything that wasn’t air-conditioned, luxuriously scented, and inside.

I returned to my book, glancing up only when the daughter rose to take a dip.

I love Turtle Beach, and it is a nice place almost any time. But mom was right, it was a tad hot on that particular day in August. My favorite time at Turtle Beach is late May. In late May, the water is a comfortable temperature, the air is not too hot, and—unlike June through December, when storms churn up all kinds of stuff to cloud the bath-temperature water—in May, you can wade out neck deep in the calmly rolling surf and still clearly see your toes wriggling on the bottom.

I was thinking about this when the daughter waded out of the water. Before the poor girl could even grab a towel, her mother was telling her it was time to go. I caught the girl’s eye and shrugged, smiling. What are you going to do?

So, barely 15 minutes after arriving, the poor girl has to gather up all her stuff and drag it back to the car because mom never wanted to go to the beach in the first place. Anyway, there’s always next Sunday, and maybe mom will go home before then.

Turtle Beach isn’t very crowded on Sunday mornings—another reason to like it. After the fat woman and her daughter left, I was alone on the beach for about 100 feet in either direction. This is about as close to paradise as you can get on the Gulf coast, any time of year.

An occasional boat or Jet Ski passed by offshore, and I began to tire of reading. Soon, I noticed a roiling in the calm between swells. I guessed it was a small school of fingerling feeding near the surface. From far off, a lone pelican turned in my direction, made a couple of passes above the roil, and fell from the sky like an air-to-ground missile, slicing through the school of tiny fish and bobbing back to the surface, his elastic gullet full of water and breakfast. He strained the water out along the edges of his bill, then threw his head back and swallowed what he had netted.

Pelicans are amazing at sensing schools of fish from a distance and zeroing in on them. Unfortunately, their mode of hunting is hard on necks and eyes—pelicans often break their necks, misjudging the angle or distance of a dive, and many older pelicans go blind from the pressure of the water smacking their eyes in a dive.

Soon, two more pelicans had joined the first, and they were having quite a feast until the gulls arrived with their noise and squabbling. The pelicans soon left, probably looking for a less crowded buffet, and the gulls soon ate or ran off the rest of the school.

I noticed a few more people arriving at the beach and looked at my watch. It was noon, and I had been on the beach for three hours—time for me to follow the pelicans.

© 2025, Brian G Parker

All images are AI-generated.