The Ocean Saves Its Best for September

There is a fact about the Atlantic that the summer schedule refuses to accommodate, which is that the ocean is warmest when the season is over. The water off Cape May spends June cold and July catching up, and by the time it finally arrives at its best, in the first weeks of September, the umbrellas have been folded and the lifeguard stands are coming down. The regulars have built their calendars around this discrepancy for generations, and they are not eager to correct the general impression that the beach closes on Labor Day.

September swimming is its own discipline, and a gentle one. The crowds are gone, so the swim starts wherever you put your towel down. The light comes in lower and kinder, the air runs a few degrees behind the water, and the first minute in feels warmer than anything August offered, since the ocean has been banking heat all summer and releases it slowly, holding into the seventies well past the middle of the month in a good year. Dolphins work the near water in September, close enough to see from waist deep, and the swimmers and the fishermen divide the morning between them without negotiation.

The town cooperates. Cape May has kept its season running late for more than a century, since the great Victorian hotels needed filling and the weather kept being good, and the porches, the dining rooms, and the evening promenade all continue at full strength deep into fall. What changes is the tempo. Dinner reservations soften into phone calls, the bicycles thin out on the streets of gingerbread houses, and the beach at the Point, where the bay meets the ocean at the very bottom of New Jersey, returns to the birders who consider it theirs.

There is a small ceremony the September regulars observe, mostly without discussing it, which is the last swim. Nobody schedules it. The water simply announces one day in early October that the account is closing, and everyone in it stays a few minutes longer than comfort recommends, because it will be eight months before the ocean is this kind again.

Book a September week and hold your nerve when friends ask if the season is over. Swim every day the flags allow, walk to the Point once at low tide, and eat dinner on a porch while it is still warm enough to argue about whether a sweater is needed. It is the same ocean the July crowds paid double for. It has simply stopped performing and started being itself.