Spring Break on Boca Grande

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Michele (one of my best friends and my most consistent beach buddy) and I went to the beach on Friday.  It’s early in the year and we haven’t been to the beach, one of our favorite places, for a while. 

Our normal beach of choice is the 9^th Street beach access at Boca Grande.  Boca Grande is on an island about a 12-minute drive from my house.  Because it’s car accessible only over a toll bridge, the beaches there are less crowded than the public beaches on Manasota Key, which are also only 15-20 minutes from our house.  There’s a nice state park on the southern end of Boca Grande with a historic lighthouse and gift shop open to the public.  The beach there has clean, modern bathrooms and a boardwalk to get you across the dunes.  That beach is also one of the best shelling locations in the area.  Most of the tourists who come to the area head to the Gasparilla State Park for their Boca Grande beach adventures. 

It was at this state park that we saw a shark in the very shallow waters of the beach a few weeks ago when my niece and her family were visiting.  My endothermic great-niece, Josie, was hanging out in the water at the time (surface temperature about 62°!) when some bundled up (because the wind was howling and it was dang cold just being dry there) beach enthusiasts started yelling.  Their shouts became frantic because they’d spotted the shark not far from where Josie was frolicking in the water.  She finally looked at her mother who motioned her to get out of the water.  Not 30 seconds later, the shark swam right through the spot where she’d been. 

In the 3 years I’ve lived here, and the many times before I’ve visiting the waters of the Gulf Coast of Florida, this is the first time I’ve ever actually seen a shark.  I love being in the water, and am still processing whether or not I’m now too afraid of a shark encounter to spend as much time in the water as I do.  But I digress.

This week, for the first time ever, we couldn’t find anywhere to park in any of the many beach access side streets.  We had noticed that the lines at the toll booth to get on the island were longer than we’d ever seen them.  And the traffic was terrible.  We were commenting on it when one of us remembered it is the week of spring break.  Ugh.

Spring break in our area is nothing like spring break in other Florida areas.  We’re pretty isolated here, about 20 miles from the highway in either direction with no major airport within an hour’s drive.  Our county doesn’t allow high rise condos or hotels on the beach so most spring breakers choose other locations.  Gasparilla Island, on which Boca Grande is located, is a little more exclusive and probably much more expensive, but there are those who can pay for the inconvenience of access and the privilege of being there.  The overload of people in Florida during spring break carried over to Boca Grande. 

After driving around for about 15 minutes, we finally did find a place to park that offered beach access.  To our surprise, though, we had to get down a 4-foot high, thick, concrete sea wall to get to the sand and water.  The beach there had few people, exactly how we like it, but we knew that once we got down that wall, we still had to get back up when we wanted to leave.  Undaunted, we figured out how, not gracefully, to get from the top of the wall to the sand, regardless of the reality that we’re both 70 years old.  We weren’t sure how the heck we were going to get back up that wall, but we’d cross that bridge when we came to it. 

The beach was beautiful that day, but it sure was more crowded than we’d ever seen it.  The crowds gave me the opportunity to watch people more than I usually do.  Here are the things I noticed about Spring Break Crowds.

1. Lots of women take beach vacations together.  There were scores of groups of college aged girls (women?) than usual, but there were still plenty of the more common older women.  Most of the youngsters, but also a fair number of older women, have no compunction about exposing bare skin.  The decision to do that doesn’t seem to be correlated with body shape or condition.  I’m still old school enough, morally, to be shocked by some of that.  But it’s none of my business so I processed and dismissed the near nudity.  I did have to laughingly speculate, though, on how sorry (and sore) I knew some of those fair skinned princesses would be with the sunBURN (not tan) I knew they were working so hard on. 
2. Real men don’t wear swimsuits with iguana or turtle or flamingo print patterns on them.  The males who looked like real men chose swimsuits that were much more…boringly tame.  Solid or two colors.  No man buns either.  Thankfully I did not see one man wearing speedos. 
3. Regardless of being (nearly) 70 years old, I can still (very much) appreciate a nearly nude, well-muscled younger male body. As long as there are no colorful plants or animals on his swim trunks.
4. Even when they’re only walking on the beach, it seems easy (for me) to distinguish which beach goers have real money or “status”.   Their clothes and haircuts look more expensive.  The way they carry themselves is distinctive.  They just seem to be “put together” even for something casual like walking the beach.  I saw a guy who reminded me of an old rock and roll star.  He just had that look.  I didn’t see anyone who looked like a celebrity I recognized, but I saw plenty of people I could make up stories about.  It was kind of fun, actually. 
5. Everyone seems happy at the beach.  And I get that, because I’m very happy at the beach. 

Whenever someone got up to leave the beach separated from our vehicles by that looming 4-foot barrier wall, we turned around to watch (and learn) how in the world we were going to scale that wall.  Finally, someone stepped onto a rock, about a foot high, conveniently placed in front of the wall, turned around to face the water, and lifted their butt up onto the wall.  They made it look so easy!  It was, in fact, far easier than we anticipated to get up onto the wall like that.  Sure, once we were sitting on our butt and brought our legs up to the same level, we had to roll over and climb up on our knees to stand up.  But we have to do that at home whenever we find ourselves, for any reason, on the floor.  So we were in familiar territory and got to our vehicle without further incident. 

Michele looked at me and said, “We’re never doing that again.”  And we laughed. 

We’ll never go to the beach again during spring break.  You can take that to the bank.

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