I told you in the first post that I wouldn’t try to describe the water. That was mostly true.
I’ve had years to look at it since I lived and worked on the island, and here’s what I’ve learned: it isn’t just one color.
It isn’t even one ocean, not really.
Bermuda’s water changes its mind more than any person I’ve known, and once you start paying attention, you can’t help but notice every color, the strength of every wave or the calm, gentle ebb and flow of every splash against the shore.
Most days, it’s glass-calm, and not one color but a multitude of varying shades of blue stacked one on top of the other.
Right where a wave breaks, the water goes almost white, foam thinning out over sand so pale it looks pink in the right light.
A bit further out, the white gives way to a pale aqua that is clear enough to see your own feet through. Then, without ever quite deciding to, the water gets deeper and the color deepens right along with it.
Aqua into turquoise, turquoise into something closer to true blue, until out past the reef line it goes almost a deep navy, a color that has nothing to do with the sky and everything to do with the depth of the ocean itself.
Watch a wave pull back out and you can see the whole color sequence in reverse.
The pale sheet thinning toward the sand, the color retreating with it. It’s like the ocean is telling you exactly how deep it is by how blue it lets itself get. Sandcastles survive whole afternoons on days like this. The tide barely bothers to come in.
Dark and stormy skies
But even on a clear day, it can turn its shoulder on you.
I’ve stood near rocks in bright sun and watched a single wave throw itself into the air for no reason I could see — no storm, no wind worth mentioning, just the ocean deciding to show off what it could do if it felt like it.
You learn fast which rocks are safe to stand near and which ones aren’t. You learn it by watching, not by being told.
Some days it goes quiet instead. Grey sky, and flat sea. It’s a stillness that feels like the whole island is holding its breath.
Those were some of my favorite days, if I’m honest. The island doesn’t perform for you on days like that. It just sits there, and you sit with it. Peaceful, meditative, serene in a way that lets your mind meander with the waves.
And then there’s the other side of quiet.
Hurricane Leslie teasing the island
September 5, 2012. I remember the date because of a stuffed SpongeBob that washed up on the beach that evening. It was intact, but clearly having had a rough night of it. The water was already stirring by then, and I remember thinking something like: not even SpongeBob wants to be out in this ocean right now.
I found out afterward that September 5th was the exact day Hurricane Leslie became a hurricane, sixth of that Atlantic season. And Leslie did something strange. It didn’t rush toward Bermuda and pass through.
It stalled. For the better part of a week, it just sat out there, teasing the island and taking its time deciding where to go next.
By September 8th, you could see it coming without anyone telling you. The water had gone the color of a bruise. Waves that usually rolled in politely started arriving with urgency, each one bigger, breaking farther out than they should have.
I stood on a cliff that day, closer than I probably should have, and watched a wave hit the rocks hard enough to throw spray high overhead. Quite a few other people were out watching the storm come in too, because apparently none of us could look away.
A cautionary tale
Bermuda doesn’t pretend the ocean is only beautiful. There are signs.
I’ve always liked that about the island. It doesn’t oversell the calm and undersell the risk. Both are true at once, and everyone who lives there seems to understand that better than I did when I first arrived.
The island doesn’t just brace quietly for the storms, either. Every hotel runs the same standing protocol when a storm comes — guests move down to the ballroom level, blankets and pillows and food, and nobody leaves until it’s over. I wasn’t in a hotel. I rode it out in my rented cottage on the south shore in Warwick, close enough to the water to hear the whole thing.
David was in Arizona the entire time — thousands of miles away, watching a hurricane crawl toward the island I was living on, able to do nothing but wait and worry.
I remember that distance mattering more during that week than it usually did. It’s easier to be apart when nothing’s wrong.
Leslie never made a direct hit.
It drifted, strengthened, weakened, and eventually curved off toward Canada — less a storm that struck than a long stare-down that never quite ended in a fight.
But for most of a week, the ocean I’d fallen for was unmistakably showing its teeth, and I understood something I hadn’t before: the calm isn’t the water being polite. It’s the water choosing to be calm.
That’s a different thing entirely, and once you’ve seen the alternative, you stop taking the calm days for granted.
Some afternoons it’s neither calm nor angry, just blindingly bright with light scattered across the surface so completely that you can’t look at it straight on.
Those days feel less like scenery and more like something you’re meant to notice, the way you notice a particular kind of quiet in a church. I don’t think that’s a coincidence, and I’m not going to pretend I do.
Bermudaful glorious colors
And at the end of almost every kind of day, whatever mood the water had been in, it settles into this — orange going to red, one small boat heading home before dark.
I’ve watched that sunset from a hundred different moods of ocean. It never once looked the same way twice.
I used to think “the ocean” was a place. It took me a while to understand it’s closer to a person you keep getting to know — moody, generous, occasionally frightening, worth the attention either way.
None of this – the calm, the color, even Leslie – took years to see. It just took paying attention. A week is plenty, and most visitors get the version of this ocean I love best. The glass-calm ocean with maybe one dramatic afternoon thrown in for a good story to bring home.
If that sounds like something you want to see for yourself, let’s talk about it……we’re listening.
Next up: what’s underneath all that water, and what’s built into the rock it keeps trying to wear down.
