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Tag: Salty Dawg

Remember the Sandbar

Written by Ernie Vanderwalt on . Posted in Beach, Outdoors, Salty Dawg.

As I mentioned before, swimming out into the Gulf, past the shallows off Anna Maria Island, to reach the sandbar is the whole reason I go under in the first place.

The pull past my ankles, the deep stretch where my feet can’t reach, the shallow water waiting on the other side. What I haven’t told you is that I’ve had the privilege of walking someone else out there too, past the point where their feet leave the bottom and the fear gets real.

Her name is Tracy. I’ve known her and her husband for years, long enough to know she loves this Island, the shore, and standing at the edge of the Gulf watching the sun go down. What I didn’t fully understand, until she told me, is how much that love has always come with a limit.

Then, one afternoon a year ago, that changed. I asked her to tell that story in her own words, because some stories only ring true in the voice that lived them. I could try to describe her fear for her, but it wouldn’t be honest. It isn’t mine to tell. So, here’s Tracy, telling it the way she remembers it.

“I have always had a complicated relationship with the ocean,” she said. “As a 12-year-old, I nearly drowned, and although I love walking along the shore, listening to the waves and watching the sun disappear into the sea, I have never been comfortable swimming where I can’t feel the sand beneath my feet.

“A year ago, while visiting friends on Anna Maria Island, my husband and our friend, Ernie, swam out to a sandbar. I stayed in the shallows until Ernie encouraged me to join them. To reach the sandbar, I would have to cross a stretch of deep water where my feet could no longer touch the bottom, the very thing I feared most.

“The moment the sand disappeared beneath my feet, panic set in. I wanted to turn back. But Ernie calmly kept encouraging me. He said, ‘Just keep swimming. The sandbar is just ahead.'”

“I trusted him as he swam beside me. A few moments later, my feet touched sand again. Standing there, looking back at how far we had come, I realized something profound: the fear had been temporary, but the freedom on the other side was lasting,” Tracy said.

“Since then, ‘Remember the sandbar’ has become a phrase we use whenever life feels overwhelming. Sometimes the only way to reach solid ground again is to keep swimming and trust that the sandbar is there, even when you can’t yet feel it,” Tracy said.

I think about that afternoon more than Tracy probably realizes. I’ve swum that stretch of water a hundred times without a second thought, because for me the fear left a long time ago. Watching her cross it reminded me it was never really about the distance, though the distance is real enough. The near-shore sandbars off this Island sit anywhere from 50 to 150 feet out, depending on the tide and where you’re standing on the beach. That day, with Tracy, it looked closer to 80 feet – the width of water between where you are and where you’re trying to be. Every one of us has our own version of that stretch, whether it’s water or something else entirely.

I didn’t do much that day. I stayed beside her and said the same eight words a couple of times: “Just keep swimming. The sandbar is just ahead.” But I’ve come to think that might be most of what anyone needs, standing at their own edge of deep water. Not a lecture, not a rescue – just someone who already knows the sandbar is there, willing to swim next to you until you feel it under your own feet.

Salty Dawg: Sand dollars

Written by Ernie Vanderwalt on . Posted in Opinion, Salty Dawg.

The Gulf gives on its own schedule. Some weeks I swim out at sunset and the floor is bare, sand rippled and empty as a swept kitchen. I’ll surface with a shell, maybe, tucked in a pocket like a consolation prize. Other weeks I go down and there they are – pale circles scattered across the bottom like the sea emptied out a drawer. Sand dollars.

That’s when I hoot and holler in the Gulf.

I find one, and instead of coming up satisfied, I dive again. Same spot, breath held a beat longer each time, because if one washed up here, there’s probably a brother a few feet over. It’s the same instinct a dog has pawing at dirt over a bone it already knows is there – you don’t stop digging just because you found something. You dig because the finding proves the ground is rich.

My wife, Fewi, told me sternly, “You are not retired,” so I call it Sand Dollar Enterprises, back in business. She calls it junking up the garage.

She’s not wrong. There’s a shelf out there that’s turned into a small pale colony, and every one of them came up the same way – a fist closed underwater, pockets going heavy, grinning like I’d found something worth more than it is. I guess it depends on how you measure worth.

Here’s the rule, though, and it’s not a small one: I only take the bleached ones. The kind that have already lived their short flat lives on the ocean floor, died, and been picked clean and white by the sea itself before I ever got there. A live sand dollar is brown, almost furred, covered in spines that move – you can feel it moving slightly in your hand if you’re paying attention. Those I leave exactly where the current put them.

Some people hear “sand dollars” and picture me thinning them out, one dive at a time, until there’s nothing left down there. That’s not how the Gulf works either. God is still making them. Every season, more drift up, live out their time, die, bleach white in the current, and wash into reach. I’m not depleting anything. I’m just the guy who happened to notice the tide brought the mail today.

The sand dollar collection is displayed in the garage. – Ernie Vanderwalt | Sun

Maybe that’s the actual why of it. The hunt’s the real half of the joy – the collecting’s just what I’ve got to show for it. I love that feeling going down. Every dive is a small test of whether the Gulf is in a giving mood. Some days the answer is no, and I come up with nothing but salt in my eyes and call it fine anyway. Other days it’s yes, and I keep going back down like I might miss one lying down there waiting for me.

The garage keeps filling. Fewi just sighs. And somewhere out past the sandbar, the sea is still making more than I could ever carry home.

Salty Dawg: The gift of getting salty

Written by Ernie Vanderwalt on . Posted in Editorial, Opinion.

I got in the Gulf tonight shortly before sunset, the light doing that thing it does where the water turns the color of something you can’t quite name, gold sliding into rose sliding into the gray as the day is closing out. I’d spent the afternoon at the cancer center with my neighbor. Treatment. A different kind of light in that building, all fluorescent and fixed, no seasons in it at all.

Most days I live in the fast lane like everyone else, somewhere to be, some sense of forward motion. My neighbor lived there too, until he didn’t. Illness doesn’t ask permission before it takes the exit for you. One day you’re driving with everyone else and the next you’re pulled onto the shoulder, watching traffic go by at a speed you no longer have access to.

Driving him home, I felt something I couldn’t name yet. Like standing on a bridge that isn’t quite the mainland on either side, suspended over water, a strange sense of in-between. That feeling followed me to the sunset – it does that too, slows you down whether you were ready for it or not. Tonight I needed it.

My neighbor used to swim too. Before the diagnosis, he had a whole retirement mapped out in Punta del Este, Uruguay. A house near the water. Years he could see clearly enough to plan around. Cancer took that plan apart. He can’t get in the water right now. No salt water on his skin. No sunset from the sandbar. His seasons have been interrupted in a way mine haven’t, not yet, at least not today.

I didn’t say any of this to him in the car. We talked about other things. But I’ve been carrying it since, and by the time I hit the water tonight it had turned into something pensive. So, I dove under, came up salty, and let the sunset do its thing. 

I floated longer than I meant to. Not swimming, just drifting. The Gulf fills me with gratitude, mindful of my mortality – finite, like the sunset, beautifully ending each day. 

Out there, life feels short in the best way. A pelican folded its wings and dropped straight into the water 20 feet off, gone and back up with a fish before I’d finished the thought I was having. 

I dove down again, swimming around the bottom looking for white-bleached sand dollars. Nothing out there lasts, and somehow that’s the whole reason it’s worth loving. I surfaced smiling for no good reason I could name.

The sun always sets. Fast lane becomes shoulder. Health becomes treatment. Ordinary Tuesdays become the ones you wish you’d noticed while you were still speeding past them.

But tonight, simple light on flat, calm water. Nothing to fix, nothing to figure out. Just salt on my skin and a sky doing the one thing it does better than anything else, going out gloriously.

Get salty while the season allows it. Some evenings, that alone is the prayer.

Salty Dawg: Two dolphins

Written by Ernie Vanderwalt on . Posted in Beach, Dolphins, Outdoors.

Three days without salt. That’s a long stretch for a man who counts water as oxygen, and I felt every hour of it. A tropical storm had stirred the Gulf into a wild mess, and my wife made her case for staying dry with the kind of concern that only comes from love. I told her I heard her. I stayed on the sand until the surge dropped.

Today the flag was yellow. Medium hazard, exercise caution. The waves were breaking in loose, unorganized sets instead of our usual easy roll, and underwater visibility was very limited. On the sea floor I could still make out a few things, but sand kept being churned up by the surge. Found a bunch of bleached sand dollars. It always makes me feel like a kid on Christmas.

Then I swam past the breakers, out where the Gulf was still working off its temper, and the day turned into a different world entirely.

A dolphin came flying up out of the water – a full breach, its body glistening in the morning sun as it hung briefly suspended in the air. There was so much sheer joy in that moment – a wild creature bursting with the pure delight of being alive. I shouted. Couldn’t help it. Out there alone with the storm’s leftovers still churning around me, this wild thing threw itself into the air for no reason but the glee of it.

I didn’t think the day had another gift in it. It did.

A second dolphin swam in close, closer than they usually bother with, a fresh catch still flashing in its mouth. And then it started tossing the fish – up, catch, and up again – like it knew exactly who was watching. I floated there, holding still, serene. An audience of one. I felt treasured.

When it finally peeled off and disappeared, I stayed floating, savoring it. A quiet sense of completeness. It’s hard to explain. I swim this Gulf nearly every day but do hope I never lose my sense of awe when handed a gift like that. A kindness bigger than the both of us, showing up uninvited amid a storm’s aftermath.

I almost didn’t write this one down. Some things feel smaller the moment you try to hand them to somebody else in words. But some things ask to be witnessed out loud anyway, clumsy telling and all.

So here it is. Two dolphins, one restless Gulf, and a reminder that showing up – even on the days the flag says think twice – is usually where the good stuff is hiding.

Salty Dawg: Wade In

Written by Ernie Vanderwalt on . Posted in Beach, Outdoors.

Most people meet Anna Maria Island the same way: They pull off Gulf Drive, kick off their sandals and walk down to the shore, sand so sugary and white. They stand there a minute. Maybe snap a photo and admire the clouds at sunset. The breeze comes off the water just right, and it feels like enough.

It is enough, for most people.

But the beach was never the point. The beach is just where the story starts.

I have a confession. I cannot just look at the Gulf. I have to get in it. Ankles first, the way it goes for everybody. Cool water lapping over sunburned feet, sand shifting underneath so you can never quite stand still. That part is easy. That part is the postcard. But if you stop at the ankles, you have only dipped a toe into what this place actually is.

So, I keep walking. Knees next, and the water finds the hem of your shorts. You make a decision, whether you meant to or not, about whether today is a look day or a swim day. Then the hips, and there’s no pretending anymore. You’re wet. You’ve committed. The Gulf does not care how far you meant to go. It only cares how far you’re willing to go.

Goggles down, and under I go.

This is where Anna Maria stops being a postcard and starts being a real place with an actual bottom, grass beds swaying sideways in the current, a sandbar a few hundred yards out where the water goes shallow again and the sun lights the sand up like a second sky underneath you. I swim out there most mornings scanning the bottom for sand dollars, those flat disks half buried until the light catches them right. Finding one still feels like the ocean handing you something on purpose, just for showing up.

I used to think that was the whole draw. The hunt. Turns out that’s only half of it.

I’m drawn toward the sea the way some folks are addicted to having coffee in the morning.

Salt water isn’t a hobby for me. It’s closer to a requirement. I love the noise of the world going quiet the second I go under. I love the salt drying tight on my skin after, salting my beard by the time I’m walking back to the truck, so even hours later I catch a whiff of Gulf every time I run a hand across my jaw.

Folks ask why I swim so much, why a grown man gets this worked up over a sand dollar. I used to try explaining it. The light underwater at sunrise. The weightlessness after a week where everything on land felt heavy. Honestly, I’ve stopped trying.

Some things you either feel or you don’t. If you’ve ever stood at the edge of the Gulf and felt the pull to keep walking past your ankles, past the point where turning back is still easy, you already know what I’m talking about.

Come wade in with me. Ankles first. We’ll let the rest follow.