Saturday and Sunday, Full Moon
21 and 22 May 2016
Broward County, FL
© J. Manos
It’s hard to resist flat water. When the sea goes flat it is the quietest oceanic breath inhaled from way out there pulling you to the waterline and in. Almost impossible. Nighttime. Day. Whenever. And you stay. You always think of reasons to say longer.
The water was clear and calm enough that I could see my darker feet on the rippled white sand bottom with the moonlight, and then just the bottom when it got too deep to stand. I didn’t go too far out this time.
Have you ever slept with somebody all night holding each other and it felt like you were inhaling each other’s clean breaths the freshest breaths inhaling exhaling as you slept deep sleeping breaths and you may have even known in your sleeping semi-consciousness that it was the last time you’d spend the night like this and it was pretty perfect in that one moment?
It was my first swim since that unknown visit two weeks ago by that 12-foot Great Hammerhead shark who came up behind me for a few seconds and paused, staring at me, and I never even knew. (Until my shock upon viewing the GoPro footage later.)
© J. Manos
Though.
I tried to spark some phosphorescence by waving my hand in the crystal water – not much tonight a couple yellow sparks neon like stars but no more than that.
I tend to forget the little rip current that is sometimes off my beach. It runs diagonally out to sea south of where I like to enter.
Even on the calm night like Saturday I felt it tug and from the reflection of the lights back on shore you could see it streaming outward. I u-turned off its edge and swam back north.
Saturday night was absolutely clear. Not a cloud. The GoPro video setting doesn’t record nighttime that well. At least as far as my non-technological ass can figure out.
Sunday a rainstorm formed lightly over land but blew up big once out there several miles at sea.
The GoPro photo setting on “Night” worked pretty well. It picked up stars lesser seen by the naked eye.
And of course it picked up the storm, the rising moon, Mars, and the ocean as it reflects to us.
Overnight, early Sunday morning, Mars reached exact opposition with the sun, “meaning the Red Planet, Earth, and the sun were all in a straight line”. On May 30th Mars will be the closest to Earth in 11 years. It’s bright up there in Earth’s sky.
Back near shore you may even sit solid wet in a couple feet of water under the shadow of the low tide bank that protects you from any city lights and in the natural darkness and all that night light from the moon and Mars imagine the ocean primeval, the crystal black water just full of life – but now emptier by all comparisons.
Can you imagine what it must have been like to swim here a couple hundred years ago? Even a hundred years ago??
Shiiiit you’d be bumping into all kind of fish and creatures and things everywhere.
Water’s warm enough for shirtless swims again… as long as you don’t stay out too long you know.