SEC Beachfest to be held on one of America's cleanest beaches

Could your favorite beach make you sick? - USATODAY.com

Published on travel.usatoday.com | shared via feedly

For the first time this year, the NRDC has mapped more than 6,000 beaches nationwide, providing monitoring, closing and advisory information for more than half of them.

The searchable map includes a dozen beaches that earned the group's five-star rating for violating health standards less than 5% of the time and for following such best practices as testing more than once a week and posting advisories online as well as at the beach. They include:

• California's Newport, Huntington State and Bolsa Chica
• Alabama's Gulf Shores Public Beach and Gulf State Park Pavilion
• Delaware's Dewey Beach
• Maryland's Ocean Beach
• Minnesota's Park Point Franklin Park and Lafayette Community Club Beach
• New Hampshire's Hampton Beach State Park and Wallis Sands
• Texas' South Padre Island

Read the original story here.

The news highlights the conditions for the first ever SEC Beachfest, a four-day event featuring the Southeastern Conference's three most recent BCS Championship coaches and a host of legendary figures like Vince Dooley, Pat Dye and Gene Stallings.

If you've never been to the beaches of the northern Gulf Coast, you've been denying yourself the simple pleasure of enjoying some of the world's most beautiful. The sand is so clean and so white, you can hold a bowl of it and a bowl of sugar side by side and the only way to tell the difference is to pick one and taste it.

That's great, and remarkable, especially in light of the 2010 oil spill disaster. Nature and constant cleaning by machine and human hand have made that event's impact on the beaches a distant, if painful memory.

So, y'all come on down, and come on in. The water's fine.