I have always chased water. From my early summers on Little Bass Lake in northern Michigan to living on Beaver Island, then Nantucket, then Boston and New York and eventually on a houseboat in Sausalito, the ocean and lakes of my life have always been a place of inspiration and a place to relax.
So it was not totally surprising last year when my family and I decided to move to the beach permanently. We bought a house a few blocks away from the ocean and a few blocks away from the intracoastal waterway. The boat dock is a three-minute drive, and we are surrounded by a chowder of sort-of surfers, stoic fisherman, sun worshipers, and tourists.
The thing about the beach life for me is that’s always been a juxtaposition between the salty old Cape Cod types and the MTV spring break bounce-your-booty-on-TV types. I know reality lies mostly in between. The old salts drift off to sleep at night with the party sounds from the local bars drifting in the wind.
I fell prey to a few of the beach stereotypes when we moved to the beach. I bought a Jeep and drive around — as often as I can — with the top off. We bike everywhere on the island, though I have yet to get a beach cruiser The family took surf lessons. And while I hated laying around in the sun before, my mind is opening to the restorative benefits of the beach bum way of life. Fishing, of course, is the island life pastime. And yellow-flag swimming is the best. Beach bum training is a very relaxed school to get into, which is the point.
Of course, the culture of this beach scene is a tough fish to land. We do have the Miami party types on the weekends. They come in the summer months and seemingly lost their mufflers on the way. Bikinis come out around April. Sunburnt weekenders are always an interesting sight.
But most of us are somewhere in between: people who retired and wanted to be near the ocean, people who wanted to move to the ocean for a little bit of that sea breeze and saltwater therapy (as my old friend Scott Hechlik used to call it) and people who want to feel sand between their toes. It’s a dangerously stereotypical yet somewhat fulfilling existence.
The culture is there if you look for it. It can be a pool or an ocean or a hot tub or a lake or a river or a bay or anything in between. It can even be something not necessarily socially acceptable and that’s fine. The edges are where it’s interesting. The edges draw people we have nowhere else to run.
Much like the oysters, the old crusty eccentrics pop up around the edges. Some like the party scene, some like to go out fishing early and some like to do both. And I guess what I’ve learned here living on this island is that the Margaritaville-types and the crusty old salts share a lot in common even if the stoic faces don’t let it show:
So enter our little ode to the water in our life. This issue enters the bookshelf with just a slight hesitation to include the photos from the 1978 Over-the-Line Tournament. While we were excited to find a stash of unpublished photos from one of the longest running organized beach activities (party?) in America, there was still this underlying feeling of turning a cultural review magazine into a swimsuit issue. And a drunken one at that. But in the end, looking back on something like the Over The Line Tournament through a series of photos is exactly the type of cultural review the magazine was designed for. That was/is beach culture — good or bad.
So the quiet people fish and the loud people party and the beach makes space for all. Not a bad gumbo.
— Brett Van Emst
Carolina Beach, NC
June 2, 2026
