June grass is back on Emerald Coast
OKALOOSA ISLAND — On the days he doesn’t have to work, Paul Floyd of Fort Walton Beach comes down to the island and gets slimed.
He’d rather swim in the Gulf of Mexico when the feathery algae called June grass is not floating in the surf. But these days he doesn’t have a choice.
“It’s annoying,” he said as he stood in the shadow of the Okaloosa Island Fishing Pier on Tuesday morning. “It’s nasty. It gets all over you.”
The June grass — so named because it’s common in coastal waters in the summer — washed in about 10 days ago, according to employees at the fishing pier.
Manager Dave Urie has a picture window in his office that affords him a perfect view of the beach.
“It’s not as bad as it’s been some years,” he said, shrugging. “It’s a cyclic thing.
“I don’t pay attention to the sun rising every day because I know it’s going to come. I don’t pay attention to the June grass every year because I know it’s going to come.”
The grass has been worse in years past, he noted. In 2006, there was so much that it was piled on the beach and had to be pushed away with a bulldozer. It dried in the sun and formed craggy peaks like green sand castles.
June grass blooms in warm water, and winds and tides wash it toward shore. It clumps up on fishing lines, sneaks into swim suits and tints the pale blue water a grassy green.
That’s what Susan Fanning, a visitor from Lynchburg, Tenn., notices most. She and her two children played by the water’s edge Tuesday morning, getting nothing more than their legs wet.
“It bothers me,” said Fanning, who is an annual visitor. “It’s just ugly. I’m used to the water being a pretty blue.”
Urie, who has seen everything during his 27 years at the pier, said June grass is up and down the entire coast, but tide and currents will make the water clear in some places and grassy in others.
“Even though people don’t like it, it’s good for nature,” he said. “In some respects, it’s a nursery for the little crabs and pompano.”