BRIDGETOWN, Barbados--You don't have to travel far or be an expert to witness the changes under way along the coastlines of Barbados.
Just look in the backyard of the people from Mullins and Road View in St Peter who faced the power of extreme weather as ten-foot-tall waves battered their beach all Saturday and Sunday.
A visible casualty of the rough surf was the Mullins Restaurant. Its deck collapsed during the early hours of Sunday after enduring more than 24 hours of pounding by waves.
The seawater also scooped away the sand below the main portion of the restaurant, exposing the old trunks of casuarina trees, which grew there long before the construction of the restaurant more than 20 years ago.
By sunrise on Saturday, scores of locals and visitors, many armed with cameras, were down at the beach. There were mothers with sleepy babies in their arms, families with their teenagers filming the scene with cell phones, and older residents like Leroy Searles, 64.
Searles said he had never in his entire life seen anything like the three massive lines of waves that met in the bay before crashing against the shore.
Early Saturday morning Mullins Restaurant manager Brett Clarke gazed out at the swirling water under the restaurant, puffing on a cigarette out on the deck.
Clarke said he was hopeful the restaurant would weather the waves. The structure, he said, had been reinforced two years ago after another bout of giant surf.
But by 3:00pm, restaurant staff closed off its staircase to the beach as salty spray chased customers away. With no beach on which to sit and water too dangerous to swim in, many took one disappointed look at Mullins and left.
The surf was bad for business, a server admitted.
Thirty years ago John Harris of Speightstown used to train by running down the beach to Mullins. Now erosion at the northern end of the beach has exposed rocks that present a barrier to beach runners.
A coating of slippery green algae covers the rocks - which residents say is due to the sea "coming up to the land".
That's what Leroy Searles, who lives just north of Mullins on the Road View beach, faces as his home falls piece by piece into the water.
Early Sunday morning Searles woke up to a sour Valentine's Day surprise: there was a small mountain of coral at his doorstep.
During the night, some of his homemade defences against the sea were washed away, holes left in the ground he uses as a sitting area.
Overnight water also crept into the yard of Darrel Carrington, 78, who lives in another of the dozen or so houses on the beachside of Road View.
"She's coming in all the time," Carrington said.
Her neighbours have installed large boulders and blocks of coral wrapped up in chicken wire to fend off the sea, but the high tide mark now falls way beyond the reinforced porch of Turtle Reef villa.
Just up the beach, Frank Branch and Roger Hutchinson built another block of coral on Saturday to keep the sea at bay.
The beach in front of his house has gone down by about four feet recently, Branch said, pointing to his back staircase whose last step now lies high above the level of the beach, where coconut palms and almond trees used to grow.
