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One of my favorite memories with ASBPA was riding on the bus on a post-ASBPA-conference field trip to the San Diego area beaches in 1999 or 2000. I coincidentally sat beside Tom Campbell and he had me laughing and learning the whole afternoon. The field trip was very well planned by the local folks and we visited several beaches that were in the early planning stages of beach nourishment projects. Several different speakers, while introducing the next stop on the field trip, said something to the effect of “in California we don’t do beach nourishment like Florida does.” At one point, Tom (one of the pioneers of engineered beach nourishment projects in Florida) leaned over to me and whispered,… “Well, if they did beach nourishment more like we do in Florida, maybe their beaches would look a lot better!”The rest of the story is that at the 2025 ASBPA national conference, several of those north county San Diego beaches we visited 26 years earlier, Solana Beach and Encinitas Beach, won awards for the Best Restored Beach! I went and visited those newly nourished beaches and they looked great and had hundreds of people playing on them.
Scott Douglass