Clumps of tar have washed up on a section of Cocoa Beach, making for an unsightly, sticky stretch of sand.
The gooey tar balls are on the southern part of the beach, from 6th Street South and up.
"The further we came this way, the heavier it got," said Terry Rials, a tourist from Oklahoma.
Rials and friend Jim Grant, who popped over to the beach from a conference in Orlando, didn't expect to see the mess on the pristine sand.
"You have a really clean beach until you ran into this bunch," Grant said.
The Coast Guard received a report at 7 a.m. Thursday. Officers showed up to survey how much tar had washed up and marked the affected section of beach with cones.
"So far, we are seeing about a half mile to mile stretch of Cocoa Beach covered with tar balls and tar patties," said Petty Officer Terry Clark of U.S. Coast Guard Station Port Canaveral.
The Coast Guard is encouraging beachgoers not to touch the tar.
"There are all kinds of chemicals oil is made up of," Clark said.
Kinsey Chittick, who is visiting from Indiana, and her boyfriend spotted tar on the beach Thursday morning and were careful not to come in contact with it. "It was a chunk of oil about (the size of her hands)," Chittick said.
They used shells to scoop some up in a plastic bottle "just so it didn't go back out," she said.
Where did the tar come from? It could be a spill from a ship or crude oil from the ocean floor.
The Coast Guard has a contractor coming out to clean up the tar, which could take several hours. After the cleanup, it will be taken to a lab for testing.