The rain started the second I had the drone up. A Gulf drizzle, the kind that blows in sideways off the water for ten minutes and quits before you've decided whether to pack up. My niece was in town. She'd brought her boyfriend, and my second nephew came along too, so the four of us stood out on the rocks at the south tip of Casey Key watching me fly a drone into weather I'd normally land it for.
Nobody wanted to leave. That's the thing about the North Jetty.
It sits at the very bottom of Casey Key, a skinny barrier island about eight miles long that runs down the coast just north of Venice. The rocks hold Venice Inlet in place and help control the sand moving along the shore. Practical, ugly, the kind of thing nobody flies across the country to see.
Then the rock did something useful in a different way. The jetty and the sandbar beside it can shape a rideable wave when Gulf conditions line up. On a coast that spends plenty of days nearly flat, that is enough to draw surfers. They built a wall to manage the inlet and ended up with a wave. I think about that more than I should. You set out to fix one small problem and the world hands you back something it never occurred to you to ask for.
From two hundred feet up, the inlet goes dark green where it drops off. You can see the exact seam where the calm intracoastal water meets the chop of the open gulf, sharp as a chalk line. Two guys fished the rocks below us with cut bait. Not moving. Barely talking. A dolphin worked the inlet for a minute, then gone.
And under all of it, in the dark band of sand the low tide leaves behind, the shark teeth.
People drive here for them. Black fossilized teeth, washed out of old marine sediment and pushed back onto the beach by waves. Find one and you are holding a piece of an ocean that existed long before the shoreline under your feet. My niece found two before the rain came. Didn’t make a thing of it, just dropped them in her pocket and kept her eyes down on the sand.
The drizzle passed. The light went soft and gray instead of gold. Better that way.
We stayed until the lot emptied out. Best afternoon I’ve had in a while, and I didn’t get one clean sunset shot to show for it.
Another flight from the same stretch of Florida coast: Stump Pass Marina From Above.
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