A Christmas Eve swell came in with a front. The Gulf was blown out and full of foam. Ross, Timmy and I were down at the beach on Christmas Eve in the rain at dusk moving equipment. There was a coastal flood watch out. By the morning after Christmas the wind had turned and come fast out of the north making it a clean cold surf. That morning I walked down to what is left of the old pier by Phillip’s Inlet. The inlet was open from the rain and bleeding the lake into the Gulf. It was beautiful. Still I believe the Inlet is most beautiful when the tide is coming in wide and deep, and the clear gulf water is pushing the copper lake backwards to its dune boundaries.
Even as early and cold as it was the day after Christmas, three people were at the Inlet trying for redfish. In the fall there are speckled trout and flounder. And in the spring of course there are pompano in the holes off the first sand a bar. They say bull sharks are around the old pier, but I have never seen a bull shark here. Once years ago I was out on the second sand bar in front of the old pier on a Sea Doo. On the water, the “second” looks like a vein of emerald running through blue along the coast. In that emerald vein far off to the west, I saw a lone dolphin coming. I killed the engine and waited for him. I remember thinking how big it was and odd too, that it did not porpoise for air. Then gravity weighted me as I realized, its movement was not up and down as a dolphin, but rather slow and sideways. The enormous shark approached in grace and in utter silence. It passed directly under me, and was longer than the Sea doo GT which was 119 inches. It was a twelve foot great hammerhead. After it passed, I started the engine to follow. But in a sudden and quick movement, the giant was gone into deep water. The sheer speed and athleticism of something so big was inspiring and intimidating at the same time.
Sometimes in the summer, I take the Sea School kids here to snorkel the inlet and the old pier. The underwater parts of the pier’s pylons are deeply eroded. There is little diameter left. They make you think of a tottering old man who has pulled up his boot cut jeans and is standing with his very thin legs in the water. One wonders how many more storms this pier can take. Back in the summer of ’86 I climbed this pier with Shaun Ellis and Allen Thompson. It was laden with brown pelicans and gulls. We were young then, and walked out onto the old pier without worry. The pier was old even then. There were more dunes then and bigger ones too, and the Inlet ran on the west not eastside of the pier. In those days, Camp Helen was not a state park. Its rundown cabins with broken windows and its wooden water tower, made you think of a Friday the 13th film set. It had a ghostly feel. While much of highway 30-A felt undiscovered, Camp Helen felt abandoned. Back then there was no Rosemary Beach and far less people. But there was more, much more of the old pier.
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- Morning sun behind the old pier
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- Looking west
