Fla. Panhandle: It's Always Something

"I expected it to be lot worse than it is," said Keith Brooks, a neurosurgical nurse from Birmingham, Ala., here for a week with his wife and two children. Their condominium, the Sea Spray, had called after Dennis hit to warn them off, only to call back a few days later with word that the facility would be open after all. Aside from a collapsed set of steps over the sand dune and balky cable in one bedroom, Brooks has noticed little amiss.

"The hurricane's over. That doesn't worry us so much as the sharks," he says, standing ankle-deep in the surf watching his stocky 8-year-old son happily tumble in the waves 20 feet away. "My boy's robust. He'd be a good meal."

Brooks's wife, Amy, keeps even closer watch. They won't let their children swim more than a few yards off the beach. And when they're in the water, Amy stands sentry at the surfline.

It's one of the most noticeable things about Panhandle beaches these days, how closely everyone hugs the shore. Of the hundreds of people in the water at Fort Walton Beach, about half have ventured out to the shallow water of a sandbar, but only a handful have gone deeper than their knees. Those few in the deepest water stand out. "Look at them out there," says Bryan Murphy, a local veterinarian having a picnic supper with his wife, Debbie. "We know this is prime time for sharks, right before sunset. They're waist-deep in the darker waters, the worst place."

Sharks are the talk of the beach. That evening at the end of the public fishing pier, a young woman landed a baby sand shark and a crowd gathered to see the little villain. Several talked of being on the beach earlier in the day when a Navy helicopter came flying low over the water, reportedly trying to shoo a lurking bull shark on its way.

"People are a little spooked, no doubt about it," says Tommy Thillet, a lifeguard at Destin, the next beach town east of Fort Walton.

Destin, too, feels crowded and nearly normal. There's a 30-minute wait to get into the Big Kahuna, an enormous and fanciful water park on the main road. Andrew Pangle, a manager, says the park usually sees a bump in business in the days after a hurricane as people wait for the surf to clear of silt and seaweed. Sandpiper Cove, a massive condominium complex on Gulfshore Drive, remains all but buried under a blizzard of white sand. But most of the surrounding houses sport green "Inspected" stickers on their mailboxes, meaning city officials have dubbed them free of structural damage.

On the beach, Thillet surveys a crowd that he reckons is nearly typical for a July weekend. He gets dozens of questions a day about sharks, he says. It hasn't helped that the Discovery Channel has been running a breathless series on shark attacks all week. That night's episode, in fact, is "Predators in the Panhandle," a quickly produced report on the two recent attacks, one that took off a boy's leg at Cape San Blas and another that killed a 14-year-old girl just a few miles from where Thillet sits in his lifeguard tower.

"It's been crazy," he says. "A few days ago there was a manatee swimming over near the Crabtrap [restaurant] and we got a couple of guys running up and down the beach screaming, 'Shark! Shark!' We had to come along behind them, calming folks down."

But the lifeguards themselves will not hesitate to clear the water if they receive a report of a suspicious marine animal. Earlier in the morning, someone spotted a menacing shadow from the upper floors of a condominium building and got word to lifeguard Felix Romero. As a precaution, he whistled everyone out of the water for a 15-minute respite.

"I'd seen some dolphins in the area and that's probably what it was," Romero says. "But we don't take chances. People come out real quick when I blow the whistle."

Both lifeguards downplay the danger. Both say they swim every day, kayak frequently and have seen hundreds of sharks -- and even touched a few of them. The attacks are flukes, they say.