The Life and Death of a Beach Umbrella

Our umbrella on the beach at Lori Wilson Park in Cocoa Beach, Florida. It was a nice sunny day overall, although as you can see there was some rain out at sea. Still, we were thankful to have the shade of our umbrella to protect us from the sun when we weren’t in the water.

About the shot:
A single RAW exposure, processed in Adobe Lightroom. Read more about the photo software and gear I use at the camera gear page.
Camera: Canon EOS-M
Lens: Canon EF-M 18-55mm

Death of an Umbrella

We have enjoyed our umbrella for several of our beach trips now. In fact, we consider it a necessity while we are at the beach. That is especially true for me, because I burn much faster than Laura tans. Funny how that works.

Anyway, we are always glad to have our umbrella, although I do worry about it on the windy days. We have a gadget that screws into the sand to help hold the umbrella in place, because we have seen from others’ experience that just sticking the end down in the sand doesn’t work very well. At all. I’m sure there is nothing worse than being out in the ocean and looking up to see your umbrella blowing across the beach.

On our second and final day at the beach on this last trip, we were sitting under our umbrella enjoying the shade after eating our lunch, waiting the required time before going back out into the water. Okay, so we weren’t really counting minutes or anything, because I never can remember how long it is that they say you should wait. We just like to sit and watch everything for a while after we eat.

On this particular day, it was slightly more windy than usual, too. Nothing big, no huge wind gusts. Not enough to blow sand all over our stuff, which had happened once before when a tropical storm was out at sea. But just slightly more than the usual beach breeze. We had actually seen a few other umbrellas start to blow over, but someone was always there to catch them.

And then while we were sitting there, a slight gust came up. To the credit of that gadget in the ground, the umbrella stayed firmly in the sand. Unfortunately, the umbrella also turned inside out.  We quickly jumped up and got it flipped back the right way, and then we sat down to finish our sitting time.

A few minutes later, the same thing happened again, with another gust once again turning our umbrella inside out. But this time when it did, some of the smaller support rods came loose. And after one or two came loose, then the rest of them came loose, too. Apparently, the ring that was holding all of them broke.

So that was it. There was no fixing it after that. The sad end of useful life for our beach umbrella. We did stay at the beach a little longer, enjoying the water for a bit until the storm clouds got really dark and we decided to leave. And just in time, too, because as soon as we got our stuff packed up and out to the car, the raindrops started to fall. And just think, if we had needed the extra time to pack up the umbrella, we would have been out at the beach when the heavy rain started to fall instead of in our car. So that was a good thing, I guess.

Yes, it was just a beach umbrella. No big deal. But it had been quite useful on several of our beach trips, making it able for us to stay out on the beach much longer than if we didn’t have a beach umbrella.

Oh well, time to shop for a new one before our next beach trip. Whenever that may be.