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Grand Turk Seaweed


jandkshaver
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We are cruising on the Horizon on October 20th to the Southern Caribbean. We saw a video on YouTube about the seaweed at the Grand Turk Cruise Center. We were wondering if someone who has been recently could tell us what the current condition of the beach is?

 

 

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We were there last Saturday on the Horizon. I had been there years ago and my son was there several years ago. We both remember it being pristine. Not so now. Lots of floating bits of something (maybe seaweed?). However, we did walk farther down the beach to Jack's Shack and the water was clearer there. Chaises are free and $10 for an umbrella. Once back on the ship, I talked to a woman who went to the beach close to the ship and took one look and got back on the ship. Another woman did a scuba/snorkeling excursion and loved that.

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Its all over the Caribbean and can change from week to week, day to day, how much is in any given location. Just came back from Cancun where the beach is basically deserted because of it. There is no way to tell what you will experience a month from now. It “should” clear up in the winter but who knows...

 

 

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I thought it was pretty bad last week. Near the ship was really full of seaweed. We also walked down to Jack’s Shack and while it was better in the very front of the water, the seaweed was only a few feet out and it progressively made its way towards the sand. I know it can happen anywhere so it was just an unfortunate situation.

 

I personally find that amount of seaweed to look disgusting all packed together and dense like that so I just played in the areas where I could kind of avoid it.

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Storms churn up the seas and can cause seaweed to wash up on shore. This can happen on any beach anywhere.

 

To help put your mind at ease, I have been to Grand Turk 3 times and I have never seen a seaweed problem.

This particular situation has nothing to do with the current storms and while a natural phenomenon it's unusual to see GT like this.

 

It will go away over time, but it was out in full force last month. I guess it's harmless, but I opted out of playing in it like some folks. We stayed by the pool the whole time this visit. bc98b72b4df64bcfee1bede790db8072.jpg629bc0a83b90907ef256f45c53378961.jpg

 

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Sargassum has been known since the days of Columbus, when the area east of the US was named the Sargasso Sea because of the vast quantities of the seaweed found there. When the boundary currents that form the gyre known as the Sargasso Sea change, the floating weed will travel hundreds of miles into the Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico. It's presence is cyclical, and this is just a bad period for it.

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Sargassum has been known since the days of Columbus, when the area east of the US was named the Sargasso Sea because of the vast quantities of the seaweed found there. When the boundary currents that form the gyre known as the Sargasso Sea change, the floating weed will travel hundreds of miles into the Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico. It's presence is cyclical, and this is just a bad period for it.

It appears, based on the info from one of the links provided in an earlier post by fyree39, that the sargassum washing up on a lot of Caribbean shores recently is not from the Sargasso Sea population, but rather coming from further south - Brazil to be specific.

 

http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/06/mysterious-masses-seaweed-assault-caribbean-islands

 

Dunno whether the article's statements are true (I am not involved in that field), and dunno whether in previous years it has been Sargasso Sea sargassum that typically plagued the Caribbean islands, but now things are different...

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We were there Aug 23 and the seaweed was bad. It was my third time at Grand Turk and only time I saw seaweed. We walked down to Jack's Shack and it was still bad. If you went out a bit the water got clearer but I can't swim and the water was about 5 feet deep, too high for me to stand, so I didn't enjoy myself at all.

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We were at Grand Turk this Wednesday 19th September and we went straight to jacks shack. We noticed no seaweed there in the water and very little on the beach. There appeared to be some to the right of the pier by the ships but nothing like some of the prior pictures.

 

 

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