Like Huntington Beach only.... frothier!
Do you like to surf after a storm or do you play it cautiously and wait to paddle for the prescribed sixty-odd hours? As a child, growing up on the Oregon coast, I loathed the perpetual drizzle, the non-stop wet and grey, but giant rain squalls often calmed the ocean’s angry surface enough for fun surfs. In southern California, though, I learned that rains bring toxic run-off. Very yuck. Very gross with hairy bubbles etc. gliding on the water and so try to avoid post-rain surfs for at least a few hours.
At least we don’t live in India, I suppose, for there a “toxic-filled froth” washes up on the beach after the monsoon and let’s learn about this new environmental horror. Let’s really dig our teeth in to Al-Jazeera, which means The Peninsula, I believe.
A menacing white foam covered one of India’s most famous beaches in Chennai for the fourth straight day on Monday creating a new pollution hazard for the country.
Children have been playing and taking selfies in the clouds of white suds on Marina Beach, even though they give off an acrid smell and fishermen have been told not to go into the sea nearby.
Doctors have warned that skin problems could be caused by the foam, which forms every monsoon season but has been particularly bad this year.
Word has not got through to the hundreds of families who throng India’s longest urban beach, letting children happily skip in the toxin-filled froth.
The Tamil Nadu Pollution Control Board said it is analysing samples from the foam which has spread several kilometres along the beach.
“It is definitely not good for people to go into the foam but they just do not understand the risks,” said Pravakar Mishra, a scientist at the National Centre for Coastal Research in Chennai who has seen the clouds of foam grow in recent years.
Much like surfers, I suppose, not waiting the prescribed sixty-odd hours, post-storm, for a paddle.
Also, can Kelly Slater’s Surf Ranch incorporate this phenom into its upcoming Freshwater Classic ’20? I think watching our professionals battle each other, and a toxin-filled froth, would be good viewing. I think numbers would certainly go up.