The Attack of the Red Tide

I live in Orlando Florida and it is known as a tourist town. However, even living in Orlando with great weather and lots of things to do; you need a vacation. So my boyfriend and I headed to Treasure Island. Treasure Island is located just a few miles from Saint Petersburg. I was super excited to stay on the beach, have delicious drinks, maybe go jet skiing, and do a dolphin sunset cruise. Something that involved the water, sun and drinks. Well, I got all of that except for the water part. No water activities because of the red tide.

I have actually never heard of the red tide until of this past weekend. We put our swim suits, headed down in the elevator, and we bumped into I nice lady. She was also there there to enjoy the beach and water activities. She looked at us and she said, “have you been on the beach?” We replied, “we’re about to go right now.” She replies, “it’s nasty, lots of dead things. I hope it get better soon. Enjoy your day.” And she walked away.

We looked at each other and we were like wait, what? So we started walking to the beach and halfway there we started to smell something dead. We then knew what she was talking about. We make it to the beach and we see dead fish, crab, stingrays, turtles, and hermit crabs. It was very sad.

A few minutes later, this guy drives by us on some kind of machine and he is cleaning off the beach. Well, I think he was intending to clean the beach, but he wasn’t on the part of the sand where the dead sealife was. This was very upsetting but it didn’t stop us from walking on the beach long enough for me to take a few selfies and have Jim take pictures of me, lol!

So, after my 30th picture, we head back to our hotel and we see a gentleman that works there on the elevator. He sees our faces and must have seen the disappointment and he says, “yeah it’s the red tide we thought it would be cleared up but now it’s not but I suppose to in a few days.” . This isn’t what we wanted to hear. I mean I didn’t really know what the red ride was but I figured since people weren’t in the water and there was dead Sea animals along the beach, it wasn’t good. So, I went on Google and found out!

Although we were not able to do water activities it didn’t stop us from having an amazing weekend.