I promised myself I was not going to write about sargassum more than three times this season. This is No. 2.

To the City of Key West or whoever posted the beach sign saying sargassum was nature’s way of rebuilding sand dunes: Have you lost your pea-picking minds? Did you order some staffer to query AI about good things about sargassum — and then you picked the most boneheaded answer? Talk about smearing lipstick on that pig. Egads, Key West doesn’t even HAVE sand dunes. Dumb.

(More on this later, cuz I have to get to dumber first.)

To the visitors: No. No. No. None of us know how the sargassum will be for your (fill in the blank) on (fill in another blank). I am truly sorry you missed class the day the science teacher did remedial work on wind currents. As long as the wind is coming at the Keys — and all of Florida for that matter — from the east and the south or any combination thereof, there’s going to be sargassum along the coasts, dying in the water, killing the fish, decaying in black, slimy mountains and generally stinking the place up.

That sucks. I get it. You paid a lot of money to come down here and you were expecting your beach time to be exactly like the marketing photos that hooked your heart. You didn’t plan on wedding photos with chocolate pudding-like water slurping in the background. Just be glad videos don’t come with smell-a-vision.

Get a grip. No one in their right mind comes to Key West for the beaches. We ain’t a beach resort kinda place. Sure, we have half a dozen strips of sand we call beaches, but they’re a few blocks long and half a block wide. They ain’t natural. We truck sand in to make them because we have no waves — and without waves you don’t get sand. (Again, science class.)

That reef way out yonder? It protects Key West and makes us a great harbor in major storms, but it sure doesn’t do much for sandy beaches. You want beaches? Go to Sanibel or someplace else on the west side of Florida. But the fact is, there’s no place in the Caribbean, Mexico or Florida that isn’t at least ankle deep in dead sargassum.

Record-breaking sargassum is the new beach normal

I’m tired of doing your homework, so either trust me on this or hit a few keystrokes and ask AI to research it for you: This will be a record-breaking year for sargassum. It’s NOT NORMAL. Or better put, it’s the new normal. Since 2011, when sargassum escaped the Sargasso Sea and headed on the currents south and west toward South America, its massive golden mats of living algae — home to baby turtles and fish, microplastics and heavy metals — have blanketed the south- and east-facing shores of the Keys and Caribbean islands and the east coast of Mexico.

It ain’t going away and there’s not a darn thing we can do about it. Heck, it’s probably been too late since the Industrial Revolution, which has been on steroids for the past couple of generations. We’ve dumped and pumped so much crap into the air and water that we’ve ticked off Mother Nature, and her revenge is to wreck your vacation and our summer tourist season. Welcome to the 21st century.

If you’re still coming, and I hope you will, look up “charters to the sandbar” or some similar search phase. You’ll find plenty of choices for getting out past the sargassum, off the local beaches and into the Tourist Development Council’s picture-perfect, off-island water playgrounds.

The city and county do their best to keep the actual sand clear of sargassum, but they could clean it five times a day and the muck just keeps coming back. They can’t do anything about the sludge in the water. The state doesn’t clear its beaches, so Fort Zach, Bahia Honda et al, are all rimmed with piles along the shore and in the water.

It’s going to be that way until the wind shifts and we get some big-butt storm to wash it away.

And that brings me back to that dumb sign about rebuilding sand dunes. When I first saw it, I thought I’d missed some big new science thing. Who knew, I said to self, that sargassum on a beach could build sand dunes? I sure didn’t, so I went down the research rabbit hole.

Turns out that yes it can. In small research patches, hand-placed before it decays into a slimy stew and nurtured gently around the grasses and sea oats planted to stabilize sand dunes. But first you gotta have sand dunes. We don’t. Then you gotta have enough wave and wind action to create sand so it blows onto the dunes. We don’t. And then you gotta have a whole battalion of workers to scatter, pat, bury and manage it. We don’t. And nothing in the research says that mountains of DEAD sargassum does a thing for rebuilding dunes.

Take that sign down. Mary, Joseph and the Wee Donkey, what were you thinking? Dumb.

Learn more

https://ask.ifas.ufl.edu/publication/UW409

https://wildlifeflorida.org/seaweed-that-smells-like-trouble-but-isnt