A Season of Tides

Set along the shores of East Bay near Pensacola, Florida A Season of Tides describes the climb from poverty to greatness to a final realization of all the hopes and dreams of three teenagers. Wade, whose efforts to survive by pulling crabs from the bay, finds Alexis watching him on a dawn-lit beach one morning. It is the beginning of a long and dangerous struggle upwards at great cost to Wade. He and Alexis work together their first summer to form a business selling crabs to the markets in Pensacola. Alexis, who is driven to escape her unhappy life, drives Wade to try new ways of crabbing. Alexis, slender and blonde, with gray eyes that match the early morning waters of the bay, is almost a year older than Wade. And Wade is smitten. But Alexis is all business.



Then pudgy Carla who sits with them at the lunch table in school invites them both to a party her brother is throwing at her parents' house. That party precipitates events that change all of their lives. Carla is smart. Her father is a prominent lawyer. Her mother well educated. And as Wade and Alexis become acquainted with Carla's father, her father is reminded of how the hard times he had as the son of a roofer built the character he needed to succeed. He arranges for his out-of-shape, somewhat lazy daughter to work for Wade and Alexis crabbing the next summer. And Carla surprises them all. She learns to bait the traps, sail the little wooden skiff to work the trap lines and soon has ideas for making the business far more efficient and less labor intensive. To her father's utter astonishment she is soon working with Wade and Alexis from dawn to well into the night. But there is more afoot than meets her father's eye.



As the summer progresses Carla grows tanned and slender and eventually reveals a talent that changes the rather low esteem Wade and Alexis have had of her as a little rich girl. Eventually Carla's suggestions are all implemented and they find they have free time; something neither Wade nor Alexis had ever enjoyed. And so they finally began to use the old beach buggy they hauled crabs in for fun on the beach. Alexis toys with Wade's feelings for her and sets him up repeatedly in situations with Carla who, since her days as the plump girl at the lunch table, has admired Wade from a distance. It is a mixture that leads to consequences Alexis never intended. And then their successful efforts in developing a business set the stage for murder and mayhem beyond anything the three ever anticipated. But their business continued to grow and eventually expanded into shrimping and finally, through a contact Wade made in the Marines in Vietnam, they find themselves partners in a growing shipping partnership that leaves them all financially independent.



In a final irony Wade and Alexis, on vacation on their 70 foot Hatteras, are hijacked by drug runners and left forty miles off shore and away from any shipping lanes in the Gulf of Mexico with only two shot-up life vests and a bottle on water. As sharks bump them in the night they realize their millions are no use to them. Only the wits they developed in their early lives on the tides of East Bay have any chance of saving them. And the Marine in Wade wants to live through the ordeal to reap vengeance on the drug lord who left them to die.