Something fishy

This morning, it was the Great Onetangi Beach Surf Casting Competition. The person who catches the biggest fish wins a thousand dollars. So the beach, which normally has a couple of dozen people wandering aimlessly along it, and a few kids playing in the sand or shallows (depending on the weather), was this morning filled with people fishing.
Well, they were trying. Nobody seemed to be catching anything but seaweed, although I did watch a couple of people catch one another (ooh - nasty).
The remains of the shipwreck were still visible at one end - the tide has washed over it many times now, so there's only part of the prow sticking up through the sand and shells and seaweed. It has become part of the beach - part of the ocean. One day there'll be nothing at all left.
It was very hard to think while I was walking along the beach. Usually, I write stuff in my head while I walk, or think about what will happen next in the books I'm writing, or completely change my mind about something I wrote the day before. I can mutter dialogue to myself and nobody can hear me. If I get confused I can stare out to sea.
Once I wrote a whole story in my head , and then rushed home to scribble it down - it's set in that bay, but many years ago, during World War One. After the initial scribbling, of course, I rewrote it and tweaked and polished it until it was finished. But everything that happens in the story, and the cast of characters in it, was invented while I was walking, because I was staring at the farmhouse on the headland and imagined what it would have been like to live there before all the holiday-makers came.
The story is called Anzac Day, and you'll be able to read it in a Random House anthology, History: Hideous and Hilarious, later in the year.
But I have to admit I didn't write anything at all in my head this morning - I was too busy watching everyone else, and wondering where I'd put my trusty old fishing rod.