The hospital I was born in has a view of Commencement Bay and Puget Sound. Not the ocean but the same salt water. I have/had relatives that lived in ocean side places in Washington such as Ocean Park, Long Beach and Westport so I was but a wee lad the first time I saw the Pacific. The Long Beach peninsula is on my short list of places I am considering moving to when I retire.
That’s so odd. I just yesterday met someone on his thirties who had been born and raised in Minnesota, and who, before yesterday, had never seen the ocean. I found that quite amazing.
I was born landlocked, in Southern Ontario. I didn’t get to see an ocean before I was 37, the first time I came down here to meet my wife. It was December, and too cold to do anything in the water, but I was impressed. I’ve still not seen the tide go out and come in, if in fact it even does at Jacksonville. I have since stood in the Gulf of Mexico, up to my knees, but that’s not an ocean. Nobody else in my family has done it, though!
Three years ago, we were in Los Angeles, but I didn’t get to see the Pacific; the logistics didn’t allow for it to happen. But someday…
I hitchhiked from Ontario to Vancouver, BC in 1976, and was disappointed to learn that to see the ocean I would have had to get to Vancouver Island, then all the way across it…so it never happened.
Sometime last summer. I was born in Tennessee and never saw the Atlantic but got to see the Pacific last year when I moved to Oregon, about an hour from the coast.
I was 22 and it freaked me out. Water is *NOT *supposed to go to the horizon like that.
well, if the gulf of mexico counts as the ocean, i wass probable 3 or 4 or 5. my great grandmother lived in Gulfport, a city on or very near the water in MS. the ocean, however was first seen by me in 2003. i was in jacksonville florida and saw the atlantic for the first time at age 15.
Born in Sydney, so I first would have seen it as a baby. My first memory of it is of being swamped by a wave when I was paddling in the rock pool at the north end of Bondi Beach. I can remember being swamped by “green”. Felt like a tsunami, but was probably a wave about a foot high. I would have been less than four years and three months old, as that is when we left Sydney. After that, I grew up a one minute walk from the beach, and was very much a “salt water child”. I moved back to Sydney, and lived at Bondi Beach several times, including one flat where I could see the ocean from my bedroom. It’s only in the last decade or so that I’ve moved away because I can’t afford the rents or real estate prices near the ocean. I still miss it, and I miss the roar of the breakers pounding the rocks at night. That is very evocative of childhood for me.
There are charities in Sydney which sponsor visits to the city by poor children in outback Australia - primarily so they can see the ocean. On a related note, my aunt tells a story of being in a Sydney boarding school during WWII, and a five year old child from the outback was there. One day it started to rain, and this little girl burst into tears. She was terrified, never before having seen water fall from the sky.
I was around 30 when I first saw an ocean, the Atlantic, 40 when I saw the Pacific. I’ve lived within walking or biking distance of Chicago’s beaches most of my life. A huge body of water is an everyday sight. So, no, I didn’t get all tingly or try to surf.
When I was born, my parents lived on Folly Beach in South Carolina about two blocks from the front beach. When she was six months pregnant, Mom busted her ass skimboarding and almost lost me. Then incident scraped the hide off of her right leg.
Well, if you count the Long Island [pronounced: Lawn-guy-land] sound as an ocean then I must of been about 4 months. If not, then it was the pacific when I was about 10 years old. Since then, I’ve seen the other 2 oceans, and the Caribean.
I’m grew up in San Francisco, so…I don’t remember. The ocean was only a few miles away, and the bay was even closer. Living near the water was just ordinary.
Now I live in Chicago. If you’ve never seen one of the Great Lakes, you just have to know that they are HUGE (as in, no, you can’t see the other side!). You don’t feel like you’re far from the water here, Lake Michigan is extremely important to our daily lives. On a sunny day in the summer, it seems like half the city converges on the lake, playing beach volleyball, biking, rollerblading, sailing, swimming, sunbathing, working out at lakeside gyms, etc. Everyone wants to be close to the lake.
Still, the first time I saw the ocean again after moving to the midwest, I was amazed. It was like I had never seen it before. The ocean is nothing like the lake.
I would have seen it when riding home from the hospital after being born. Not that I could have focussed my eyes, remembered or understood what I was seeing, etc. I do recall going down to the shore when I was about 3 & my brother was a new baby.
OTOH, the first time I touched snow I was in college. Yecch! I’d seen it before on distant mountaintops, but it’s a LOT worse in person; it’s cold. Except for that, it might actually be OK. Wouldn’t hurt my feelings a bit to never touch it again.
(underlining mine)
Obedient lot, aren’t we? 
But I was just born when I saw it, as well. My mom could see the ocean from her hospital bed when she had me. I assume I was no more than 1 week old when I went to the beach for the first time.
I went to my first baseball game when I was 3 weeks old, too. So when I say “life-long Angels fan” I mean it! Not that I said it out loud very much until a couple of years ago!
Let’s see now … It was in the summer of 1943 and I was 20. I was at the Army Air Force Pre-flight school at Santa Ana, CA. We went down to the beach somewhere around Huntington Beach, spent the day and fired every weapon up to .30 caliber machine gun. Ear protection was unheard of and when we got back to the barracks we had to yell at each other in order to be heard for the rest of the day.
Probably first saw the Atlantic when I was about 6-7 months old, in the form of Revere (or Reviuh, as the proper Bostonians say) Beach. Saw it many more times after that.
Didn’t see the Pacific until I was 19, now I live next to it.
Still haven’t seen the Indian Ocean.
If flying over the ocean counts, I was 20 or so. If you have to actually stand on the beach, I’ve never seen the ocean, and I’m in my mid-twenties.
Who needs an ocean when you have plenty of beach?
I first saw an ocean when I was 21, from a plane. (It was also my first time on a plane. The stewardess even gave me little plastic wings. :D) It was neat for about half a second, then extremely boring. I think it’s impossible to be impressed with anything when you’re scrunched into a tiny seat on a plane.
I saw the ocean in person a couple of days later from my destination - Ireland.
I had already seen Lake Superior when I was 18 or 19, so the idea of a body of water that stretched as far as the eye could see wasn’t a new one for me.
I remember being a very small child, maybe 3 or 4, playing on the beach. My swimsuit was pink with sequins. We went to the Gulf of Mexico every summer on vacation. When I was 16, we visited Myrtle Beach in South Carolina, for the “real” Atlantic.
Summer 2004, I got to go back to Myrtle Beach with my friend Andrea. She was 24-years-old, born and raised in Missouri, and had never seen the ocean before. I took her out and taught her to bodysurf. I’ll never forget the look of glee on her face.
Then I went to Florida on Disaster Relief and we went out on the beach in Sarasota a couple of times. We stood on the balcony of our hotel room and watched an electrial storm dance across the ocean. When Hurricane Jeanne was blowing in, we went out swimming in the 30-foot waves. Unbelievable. The sheer power was humbling, this knowledge that compared to the ocean you are but a tiny speck.
I’ve never seen the Pacific.
When I was maybe fifteen or sixteen, on a trip with relatives to Rehoboth Beach in Delaware. It was just like Lake Huron, only with bigger waves. Kind of a letdown.
I wrote about ocean a while ago. I can’t say that my feelings have changed much. I still miss it.
I was probably a toddler or 3 or 4 or something. I grew up an hour or two from the beach, and the family took lots of vacations and outings that would have taken them to the beach or by the beach (Highway 1 up California coast).