Hobe Sound Beach, Florida Live Cam

The St Lucie Inlet cuts through the barrier island south of Stuart, on the Atlantic coast of central Florida. The webcam looks over the sandbar and the water at the gap.

The inlet is man-made. Settlers dug through the island by hand in 1892 to let boats out to sea, and the sea took over from there, widening it and shifting the sand ever since; it has been dredged continuously for a century.

The water inside is the Indian River Lagoon, which takes the overflow released from Lake Okeechobee when the lake gets too high. Those discharges carry nutrients and have set off algal blooms that close the beaches in bad years.