Tranquility

Earlier today, to get away from my office and the burgeoning migraine that was threatening to form, I walked down to the harbor. I stood on the sea wall at the mid-way point and watched an unusually large school of small fish that looked like it stretched almost the entire length of the distance between me and the beach - about 10 to 12 feet. I kept an eye out for but didn't see the plovers that I've noticed on the sandbar recently. Earlier this week when I was out there I saw a horseshoe crab - for the first time in years. I was walking down the sea wall to get closer to the beach when I noticed a dark shape coming into the shallows. It was a large spotted eagle ray, followed by a slightly smaller ray right behind it. They swam a course of concentric circles for a couple of minutes, then disappeared back into the deeper waters of the harbor.

They look like this:

It was beautiful, but I was reminded of the fact that the last time I'd seen an eagle ray out there was a couple of years ago when we had a serious bout of red tide, and the sandbar was littered with the bodies of fish and stingrays. They had to bring a backhoe out and bury them all, there were so many and the stench was becoming so terrible. It started affecting sharks at one point, and I remember seeing sharks in distress showing up in channels and inlets, and it made the news a few times. We had a couple of incidents of bull sharks circling in the harbor for a few days around that time, too.