Tag Archives: blue

It’s a Beautiful New Year

On December 31st, the eve of 2024, Ed photographed our region. On a bright sunny day after the settling of heavy El Nino rains, the camera revealed a world of beauty. Stubborn water quality problems and lack of seagrass habitat for wildlife persist but we are thankful for policy shifts that since 2019, have spared the St. Luice River major damaging, toxic discharges from Lake Okeechobee, and it shows.

El Nino’s guaranteed rains through spring,  an entrenched legislative culture of protections for agriculture and development, and a lake sitting today at 15.97 will make this blue beauty difficult to hold.

But for today, it is a beautiful new year. Happy 2024 to everyone and may we continue to to speak out at any cost and may we continue to shine the light. J &E

~The St. Lucie River Indian River Lagoon 

~Hell’s Gate, Sewall’s Point and Hutchinson Island where darker estuary waters collide with the incoming ocean

~St. Lucie Inlet at today’s Sailfish Point, Hutchinson Island 

~Boats fishing over the reef off of Peck’s Lake in the blue and beautiful Atlantic Ocean. It is widely reported that only 3% of reefs have survived warming, pollution, and other stressors.

~Manatee Pocket bottom right -looking towards St. Lucie Inlet

~Rocky Point and St. Lucie Inlet State Park south of inlet. The once 700 acres of seagrass mostly bare. Like a plant in one’s yard it is dormant in winter but should not be absent

~The C-23 Canal divides St. Luice and Marin counties discharging into the St. Lucie River and is highly polluted from agriculture and development’s runoff. Reservoirs and stormwater treatment areas are underway by the ACOE and hoped to be completed by 2032.

The Search for Blue Sea Glass, SLR/IRL

Blue Sea Glass, (Photo
Blue sea glass. (Photo via “West Coast Sea Glass.”)

One of my favorite childhood memories is searching for sea glass along our beaches, on the other side of the Indian River Lagoon…

My parents’ friends, the Nelsons, were one of the first to build “out there,” on Hutchinson Island; I would often spend the night with their daughter Lynda.  Lynda and I would wake up in the morning before dawn, climb the stairs to the roof, and wait for the sun to rise. Like yellow gold, it would emerge over the ocean, and we would begin our treasure hunt for sea glass.

In those days, in the late 1960s and 1970s, our Martin County beaches were not “renoursished,” and if you picked the sand up in the palm of your hand,  it was beautiful and consisted of thousands of little crushed shells of every imaginable color….often a piece of sea glass would be there too.

Lynda and I had baskets her mother had given us, and on any given weekend we could fill a small basket full with glass. The most common color was brown, then green, then clear, and the rarest of all was blue! Blue was the prize. Blue was goal…Lynda always won!

Sea glass comes in many colors....
Sea glass comes in many colors. (Photo via “Odyssey Sea Glass.”)
Sea Glass Color Chart
Sea glass rarity color chart. (Image via “Find Sea Glass.”)
Along the beach, 1968. Lynda Nelson, Cindi Luce, and me. (Family archives)
Along the beach, Jupiter Island, 1968. Lynda Nelson, Cyndi Luce, and me. (Thurlow family archives, via Sandra Henderson Thurlow.)

It is harder to find sea glass today. And this is a very good thing…

Prior to the 1970s, and many places until the 1990s, trash was dumped from barges off the shores the United States. It was not until the 1972 passage of the “Marine Protection Research and Sanctuaries Act” that laws, regulations, and public awareness stopped this practice.

The plethora of glass along  Atlantic beaches came from the bottles dumped with the trash. After years of being tumbled in the sea, once sharp pieces emerged rounded and frosted by nature….just beautiful!

What do they say? “One man’s trash is another man’s treasure?” Thankfully in this case, there is less “treasure” to find.

______________________________________________________________

Links:

The History of Waste Disposal in the US and Ok. (http://www.deq.state.ok.us/lpdnew/wastehistory/wastehistory.htm)

Ocean Dumping History: (http://marinebio.org/oceans/ocean-dumping/)

NOAA  Ocean Dumping: http://www.gc.noaa.gov/gcil_mp_ocean_dumping.html

EPA Ocean Dumping and International and National Laws to Stop Practice of: (http://water.epa.gov/type/oceb/mprsa_before.cfm)

Sea Glass Sites: (http://www.findseaglass.net/sea-glass-colors-what-are-the-odds-of-finding-them/)(http://www.odysseyseaglass.com/north-beach-sea-glass.html) (https://westcoastseaglass.com/glass_color/cobalt-blue)