I love going to the beach, enjoying the ocean, both from an observer’s vantage point (relaxing on the beach watching the waves come in), but also being in the water, riding the waves, and feeling the cool relief of the ocean on a hot summer day. I’ve had a season pass at Ocean Grove the past few years, and have often considered moving to the Asbury Park and Ocean Grove area in order to be closer to the ocean on a full-time basis. I can go into more details later as to why the real estate situation has deterred me, but yesterday was a new experience: truly nasty and disgusting water.
At first view, the water seemed fine overall. I went in to cool off, and entering the water, noticed white shreds of something floating everywhere close to the shore … at the risk of sounding disgusting, it looked as if the feathers of seagulls had been ground up and dispersed in the water. But swimming out past that, the area about 50-100 feet out seemed fine, and was very enjoyable.
As I came back to sit in my beach chair and dry off, I felt refreshed, but did notice as I looked back out at the water what seemed like sections of floating who-knows-what out in the water. I heard a guy talking to the lifeguards, who said he was usually a guy to walk the beach and pick up random pieces of trash, but that he felt overwhelmed yesterday. He asked the lifeguards if they knew why the water was dirtier, and they mentioned something about run-off from a local pipe, although I’ve never noticed any pipes sending run-off into the ocean at this beach. He said something about heavy rains in New York City tended to dump more crap into the ocean, but there haven’t been any heavy rains in the NYC metropolitan area recently.
I went out into the water a 2nd time – despite hearing all this chatter – as I simply avoided the floating junk sections and went to the clear water. Again, as I came back to my beach chair, all seemed fine.
Then I went out a third time, was talking to a friend in the water, when I suddenly felt like something took a nibble of my left side of my torso, and as I looked to see what it might be, noticed greenish-brown algae-like crud stuck all over my arms and torso. I have no idea what it was, but as I went in and found a shower up near the boardwalk, I noticed that it didn’t really wash off … one had to scrub at it, and it was hard to get off. My friend asked the lifeguards if there were any reports of oil spills, and they said no, but it didn’t seem like oil, it seemed like a weird algae. I went back to the shower a 2nd time to try to get more off, and it really took some scrubbing, almost to the point of being painful.
What the hell is going on? It totally ruins the day when you find yourself avoiding floating piles of crap and then covered with a mystery substance. I tried searching online to see if there were any reports of polluted ocean water in the area, and the only thing I found was notice from 8 or 9 days ago that Beachwood’s West Beach near Toms River will remain closed to swimmers for the remainder of the summer due to high levels of fecal bacteria – how disgusting is that? However, from what I can gather, that beach would be on Barnegut Bay and not getting ocean currents, as far as potentially sending this fecal bacteria 25 miles up the shore to Ocean Grove. But I’m not a marine biologist, so who knows?
You can see the dried-up view of this crap on my arm in the first two pictures below – I thought I had gotten all of it off at the beach shower, but found more on my body when I got home. While it was brownish-green (especially when wet) on my skin, the same crap turned white when it dried on my red swimsuit.
I don’t want to sound like Chicken Little with the sky falling (or the ocean becoming a full-time dump), but it’s a bit distressing when a usually joyful visit to what is usually a clean beach turns up stuff like this with no idea of what I submerged myself in.
