In Florida, swimmers brave an ocean that feels like steamy syrup

FLORIDA - The water temperature near Key Biscayne, a barrier island just east of Miami, passed 32 deg C one morning this week.

Though the ocean off South Florida was slightly cooler than the

recent record highs

that had stunned scientists and threatened marine life, it remained phenomenally hot.

But on this serene patch of the Atlantic Coast, it was still a summer day at the beach, when nothing satisfies quite like a dip – even when the ocean feels like a thick, simmering syrup. Almost gooey.

“I like it warm,” shrugged Miami native Niki Candela, 20, moments after a powerful siren warned of approaching lightning.

Few of the heat-dazed people on the largely empty beach paid it any mind. The shore, usually clogged this time of the year with rotting clusters of seaweed, was pristine, no longer menaced by a huge sargassum blob that unexpectedly shrank in June in the Gulf of Mexico. The shallow water was a crystalline teal, rolling oh so gently, not a cresting wave in sight.

So the undeterred regulars, people who savour being hot and abhor the cold, came out to enjoy themselves.

“This is as close as America gets to paradise,” said Ms Lauren Humphreys, 40, who is originally from England but splits her time between Miami and Los Angeles. There, she prefers hiking to swimming in the Pacific, which on Tuesday reached about 22 deg C by the Santa Monica Pier.

Ms Humphreys was making her second visit to Key Biscayne’s beaches that day, having come earlier to meditate. “There’s something quite special here,” she said. “It’s peaceful.”

Off the coast of neighboring Virginia Key, measurements from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration showed that the water temperature peaked at 32.5 deg C on Monday, and the air temperature at 31 deg C. On Saturday, the water temperature at that location reached 33.6 deg C, a record.

The water in South Florida is always warm this time of the year, but unusually so this year, with six record-high temperatures measured off Virginia Key in July.

The sea surface hit 36.7 deg C in some areas of Florida Bay last week; the average ocean temperature in Miami in July is around 30 deg C.

Miami’s unrelenting heat this summer has meant 16 consecutive days with a heat index at or above 40.5 deg C – a record, according to Mr Brian McNoldy, a senior research scientist at the University of Miami.

The National Weather Service forecast a heat index of 43.3 deg C on Sunday, issuing its first-ever extreme heat advisory for Miami-Dade County.

At the beach the next day, the scorching sand was to be avoided at all costs. “Talk to me here, so I don’t burn my feet,” Mr Eduardo Valades, 51, told a reporter, beckoning towards the lapping water.

The water was “really hot”, he said, “but only as soon as you go in. Once you walk 50 yards (45m) out, it feels cooler”.

“I love it,” his wife, Mrs Jennifer Valades, 50, said.

The couple moved three years ago to Key Biscayne, an affluent village of about 14,000 people, from California.

“Here, you can literally swim for hours,” she said, though she conceded that the beach was more pleasant – “perfect”, in fact – during the mild South Florida winter when the water temperature is more likely to be in the mid-20s. Coastal temperatures are also more moderate than those inland.

Mrs Valades said she recently spotted six or seven manatees. Mr Valades showed a cellphone video he recorded in June of a large shark feeding right at the shore.

“We see one every three or four days,” he said, appearing far from worried about the sightings. NYTIMES