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John M. Henry
Archive · November 2026

The sea stood up

No hurricane. Five days of northeast wind, a Hunter's Moon leaning in, and the highest water the Lake Worth Pier gauge has recorded. What it took, what it showed, and a fable for the morning after.

Archive · November 2026

The sea stood up

Juno Beach · October 25–29, 2026

There was no hurricane. That is the first thing to say, because everyone who walked down to the beach this week asked the same question: what was that? A low sat stalled over the Bahamas. A high sat parked over the Northeast. Between them the wind blew out of the northeast for five days and would not quit, 20 to 25 miles an hour with gusts past 40, and the sea it pushed ahead of it ran 10 to 14 feet. Under all of that, the Hunter's Moon turned full just after midnight on Monday the 26th, two and a half days short of its closest pass of the month. The ocean does one thing when the moon leans in. It stands up.

At the nearest tide gauge, the Lake Worth Pier, the water on Tuesday the 27th peaked at 5.77 feet, a foot and three-quarters above what the tables promised and almost half a foot above the mark set by Hurricane Nicole in 2022. That figure is preliminary, the gauge was taking a beating, but the beach does not wait for the numbers to be verified. It went. The wooden panels on the Juno Beach Pier popped out the way they were built to, and the county closed the gate. In Carlin Park the stairs behind the Jupiter Civic Center, a bathhouse built in the early 1930s with Depression-era relief labor, fell away, and the county trucked in sand to hold the dune under a building that is nearly a hundred years old. Four of our own beach accesses closed over drop-offs and broken stairs.

Why the fall tide is the king

Every fall the biggest tides on this coast come in, September through November, and the reason is not the moon alone. The water off Florida is warmest in fall, so it takes up more room. The Gulf Stream runs slowest in fall, so it lets more water pile up against the coast. By the Lake Worth gauge's own monthly averages, the sea here sits close to a foot higher in October than it does in February, before any moon or wind gets involved. Then a full moon arrives two and a half days before perigee, the point in its orbit nearest the Earth, and you have a perigean spring tide: the kind that can run a foot or more above a spring tide with the moon at its farthest. Add five days of onshore gale. The weather service had circled October 23–31 as the highest tides of the year weeks before they came.

And the sand? It is not gone. This is the part Storm Season readers already know. Big waves cut the beach and carry the sand out to the offshore bar, where you can see them breaking far out this week on sand that was the beach a week ago. Calm-weather waves walk it back, a few grains at a time, over the winter and spring. The county pumped about 1.2 million cubic yards of sand, by its own count, onto this beach in the winter of 2020–21, from a borrow area 1.7 miles northeast of Jupiter Inlet, and the next round of Juno Beach nourishment is already on the state's funding list for this fiscal year. The beach lends. It is a slow lender, and it keeps its books.

Under the sand, when the sea cuts it open, is the old coast: the black fossil shark teeth everyone hunts, the coquina ledge that surfaces up the road at Blowing Rocks, and just off the beach at Jupiter Inlet, in ten or twelve feet of water, the wreck of the San Miguel de Archangel, a Spanish aviso that went down in a December storm in 1659 and was found by a lifeguard, Peter Leo, in July 1987. The famous 1715 fleet lies farther north. Jupiter's wreck is older.

Who climbed higher

The nesting season closes on Halloween, and the Loggerhead Marinelife Center's running count on its 8.5 miles stands at 13,870 loggerhead nests, 3,882 green, 310 leatherback and one olive ridley, which LMC says is the first ever documented nesting in Florida. The September king tide washed out several late nests; what this one took has not been counted yet. FWC's rule when you find exposed eggs: leave them. They will not have survived, and a mother lays several nests a season, so the odds are some of them make it. The hopeful detail, from LMC's own scientists: green turtles nest higher on the beach, up against the dune, and LMC believes it is an adaptation to seasonal swings in tides, weather and beach conditions.

Attached to this letter

The Turtle Who Climbed Too Far. A green turtle who nests farther up the beach than anyone thinks sensible, and what the ghost crab finds at the top of the new cliff the morning after the king tide. Three pages, plate first, signed. The full text is below, with the signed PDF and the two-page letter.

Two new ones on the shelf, and one on the way

Pip and the Pumpkin Moon — A Spooky-Fun Fable from Juno Beach. Pip is a ghost crab, not a ghost, a crab, and on the one night in October the Pumpkin Moon comes up out of the sea every sound on the beach is scary until it turns out to be a neighbor. Six sounds to shout, one brave thing to say together, a lighthouse to blink with. Written for the pumpkin patch at Holy Spirit Lutheran. Ages 3 to 8. Kindle $4.99 · Paperback $14.99

The Boat Called Caesar — The Salt Kingdom, Book Two. Nassau, 1718. The King has pardoned every pirate on the water, and every account is cleared except the ones written in people. A boat with no colors crosses the reef at night for one name. A complete story; begins three years after The Coast of Teeth and reads on its own. Kindle $6.99 · Paperback $16.99

The Widow's Walk — The Salt Kingdom, Book Three. Harbour Island, 1722. Every evening she climbs to the roof and watches for a ship that is not coming home. The sea did not take it. A signature did. Then the summer of 1733, a hurricane drowns the Spanish fleet on the Florida Keys, and a name called Caesar goes on trial. Coming in November. Tide Letter readers get the link first. The Widow's Walk

One ask this month: if you read Caesar, an honest review on Amazon is the thing that finds it its next reader.

The Storm Season

If you want the whole weather in fables, The Storm Season is the book for this week: the sea oats and the gale, the mangrove and the seawall, the shore the storm left. It is the one written for the months when the sand rearranges itself overnight. Kindle and paperback on Amazon, and on Spotify read by Grandpa Spuds. Kindle · Paperback · Spotify

Look ahead

The next king tides are forecast for November 5–10 around the new moon, and the Beaver Moon on November 24 is a true supermoon. The pier reopens when the county and LMC finish reattaching panels and inspecting the rail. The beach will be wide again by nesting season. It always is.

Thank you for coming down to meet the tide. Happy Thanksgiving from the Golden Shore.

John M. Henry
Juno Beach, Florida

P.S. Off the list anytime. Reply UNSUBSCRIBE. No hard feelings. The tide keeps coming either way.

Tide Letter fable · November 2026

The Turtle Who Climbed Too Far

A fable from the Golden Shore · Juno Beach, Florida

Pen-and-ink plate: a green sea turtle hauling up a moonlit beach past the wrack line and the nest stakes toward the dune, her track running straight up from the surf, a ghost crab beside her, the full moon over the water.

Late in the season, when most of the mothers had gone back to sea for good and the beach was already counting itself, a Green Turtle came ashore at Juno Beach to lay her last nest of the year.

She was a heavy, slow, serious animal, and she had been doing this for thirty years, and she had a rule. The rule was simple and nobody liked it. When she came up out of the water she did not stop at the first dry sand. She did not stop at the wrack line, where the seaweed and the sea beans marked how far the water had come last night. She did not even stop where the other mothers stopped. She kept going. She hauled herself up the beach, breathing like a bellows, over the tire tracks and past the turtle stakes, all the way to where the sand turned soft and cool and tilted up toward the sea oats, and only there, with the dune at her back, did she begin to dig.

A Ghost Crab who kept the books on that stretch of beach came out to watch, as ghost crabs do.

"You have gone too far," he told her. "Everyone says so. The others nest down there, where the sand is easy. You have climbed twice the beach you needed to. You will be exhausted. The eggs will be cold up here. There is no sense in it."

The Green Turtle did not stop digging. Her rear flippers went scoop and lift, scoop and lift, making the round room in the dark.

"How far did the water come last night?" she asked.

"To the wrack line. It always comes to the wrack line."

"And the night before I was hatched?"

The crab did not know that. Nobody did.

"Neither do I," said the turtle. "But I was hatched. So the nest was higher than that night's water, whatever it was. My mother went too far, and here I am. I go too far, and we will see who is here in November."

She laid her eggs, a hundred and some, white and round and warm, and she covered them and packed them and threw sand over the place with her front flippers until it looked like nothing, and then she went back down the whole long beach she had climbed, and the sea took her, and that was the last anyone saw of her that year.

The season went on. The other late nests, the easy ones down by the wrack line, hatched or did not, and the nights got longer, and the crab kept his books.

Then the Hunter's Moon rose out of the sea, big and orange and close enough to touch, and the water stood up.

There was no hurricane. The crab wrote that down, because nobody would believe it later. There was only a wind out of the northeast that blew for five days and would not quit, and a moon leaning in close, and the water simply came, higher than it had come in his lifetime, higher than the wrack line, higher than the stakes, higher than every easy nest on the beach, and it took the sand out from under them and carried it away into the dark. In the morning the beach was a different beach. There was a cliff of sand where there had been a slope. The stakes were gone. The easy nests were gone, or opened, or filled with salt, and the crab had to write that in his book too, in the column where he did not like to write things.

He climbed the new cliff.

At the top, with the dune at its back, where the soft cool sand tilted up toward the sea oats, the Green Turtle's nest was exactly where she had left it, dry, untouched, warm underneath, with the sand over it still looking like nothing.

The crab sat down beside it for a while. He had a great many things to say and found, for once, that he did not need to say any of them.

Nine nights later the sand over the nest began to move.

Moral: The ones who climb farther than they need to are the ones still here in November. Go past the line the last tide drew.

Signed PDF · The Turtle Who Climbed Too Far   The letter, two pages (PDF)

Sources

The letter's figures, in the order they appear. The 5.77 ft reading is NOAA preliminary data and may be revised.

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