Quick, pick an ocean setting for next summer's national park vacation. Are you heading to the Northeast, the Northwest, or looking South or somewhere else for your destination?

Tropical Storm Claudette strengthened with surprising speed before making landfall in the Florida Panhandle, but the Park Service was ready to protect Gulf Island National Seashore visitors on very short notice. With Bill and Ana gathering strength over warm tropical waters, more powerful storms could soon arrive.

With Tropical Storm Claudette scheduled to come ashore very early Monday morning, Gulf Islands National Seashore officials took pre-emptive steps by closing some areas of the seashore to the public on Sunday.

NOAA forecasters expect a normal- to low-activity hurricane season this year, but you never know for sure. There are 21 storm names pre-selected for use in 2009.

Hordes of day-trippers are once again converging on the Fort Pickens area of Gulf Islands National Seashore near Pensacola. Though still recovering from severe storm damage, this popular sun-sea-sand destination is very much back in business.

Two groups of boaters encountered problems recently at separate coastal parks, but the situations had vastly different outcomes. Seven teenagers in North Carolina fared immensely better than a group of adults in Mississippi. Four members of the latter group spent the night in the water and 1 is still missing.

There was an essay recently that brought to my attention a startling figure: Even though there are nearly 1,700 marine protected areas in U.S. territorial waters, 99.9 percent of all our territorial waters were open to fishing in 2008.

As Tropical Storm Gustav nears the Gulf of Mexico, three Gulf Coast national parks in the projected landfall zone of the soon-to-be hurricane have moved to a higher level of hurricane preparedness and are making preparations for possible closure and evacuation. Five other national parks within the five-day forecast cone are in planning and monitoring mode.

Fierce winter storms and shifting shoals gave birth to the "Graveyard of the Atlantic," where thousands of ships have foundered since record-keeping began in the 16th century. Beginning late in the 18th century, rescuers began patrolling the East Coast in search of such wrecks.

In an action sure to inflame some national park visitors, Friends of the Earth and The Wilderness Society have sued the National Park Service to reinstate bans against personal watercraft at Gulf Islands National Seashore and Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore.

A trio of conservation groups is asking the National Park Service to reinstate bans against personal watercraft in Gulf Islands and Cape Lookout national seashores as well as Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore. If the agency balks, the groups say they'll take it to court over the matter.

For years, summer trips to Cape Cod were an annual ritual for my family. My parents had retired to the Cape, and our boys loved romping in the surf and building castles in the sand. Lobster feasts, game-fishing, and whale watching were added benefits, as were exploring the seashore’s lighthouses, roaming its dunes, and looking for sea creatures in its mudflats.