This is amazing…an interesting day at the Florida beach…

My two children and hubby were jumping in wave after wave in the Gulf of Mexico near Naples.

Before joining them in the water, my attention was riveted on the medical personnel who had arrived at the beach to tend to an injured bather who had stepped on something sharp in the water and cut up his foot. When the techs left with their stretcher, I joined my family in the ocean and for at least an hour the four of us played in the surf. The water was 88 degrees Fahrenheit. The sky was a gorgeous blue. And I was in heaven as our laughter pealed down the beach.

Exhausted, I had just come out of the water with my husband and plopped myself down on a beach towel when it seemed almost everyone else was heading out of the ocean as well…with our son leading the pack.

Two sharks had been spotted.

And they had only been ten feet away from our children and a group of other tourists from the Netherlands!

The kids had freaked out, telling me later they had actually seen the fins and the bodies, but not the heads!

My daughter had spotted the sharks first and said to her brother, “Hey, are those sharks or are they dolphins?”

He had taken one look at the back fins and seen they were straight up and down like a shark’s, and not side to side like a dolphin’s, and had immediately high-tailed it to shore, telling his sister to follow.

Well the Dutch people had overheard the query and looked at the creatures as well and yelled, “SHARKS” causing a mass exodus.

15 minutes later when a powerboat cruised along the shore, just past the buoys, and told everyone to get out of the water, my husband was on his way back to the hotel with our children who’d had enough.

And there I was, chatting with the Dutch people on the beach and getting their side of the story and waiting for my hubby to come back and pick me up.

Melanie Hack
Author of Who Killed My Sister, My friend
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