Parasailing is sold nearly everywhere there is a beach, and nearly everywhere the pitch is the height. Here the pitch should be the water.
The sand on this coast is close to pure quartz, ground out of the southern Appalachians and carried down to the Gulf at the end of the last ice age, and it is unusually white and unusually reflective. Light goes down through clear water, bounces off a white bottom and comes back up, which is what makes the Gulf here run the particular pale green the coast is named after. It also means that on a calm morning you can see the seabed from four hundred feet in the air.
That changes what the activity is. From a parasail over most of Florida you look at a coastline. From a parasail over Okaloosa Island on a settled day you look through the water: the ridged pattern of the sandbars running parallel to the beach, the darker patches of artificial reef the county has laid down offshore, rays moving over the flats, and with any luck a sea turtle or a pod of dolphins directly below you, at a scale nothing on a boat gives you. People who have flown elsewhere and then flown here report the same thing, which is that they spent the whole flight looking down rather than out.
The geography adds three landmarks you get for nothing. Look east and you can usually pick out East Pass, the jetties and the raft of boats over the Crab Island sandbar. Look north across the sound and the land is almost entirely undeveloped, because it belongs to Eglin Air Force Base. Look west along Santa Rosa Island and there is a barrier island running to the horizon with very little on it.
Flights here are short, and it is worth knowing that before you feel short-changed. You are typically airborne for something like eight to twelve minutes on a boat trip that lasts an hour or more, because the boat carries several groups and flies them in rotation. The ride out, the wait and the ride back are part of the purchase.
The rest of this page is about the part of parasailing nobody enjoys discussing. Florida regulates this activity by statute, with specific numbers attached, because people have been killed doing it. Those numbers are published below so that you can hold an operator to them rather than trusting a feeling about the weather.
