"Grayton Beach is kind of the perfect beach, if there is one. It's a well-maintained state recreational area, has good facilities for visitors, sugar white sand, a lake nearby and beautiful, clean aquamarine water," said Stephen Leatherman, director of the University of Maryland's Laboratory for Coastal Research and a geologist who has been dubbed "Dr. Beach" by his colleagues.

Leatherman has studied beaches for more than 20 years, visited all 650 of the nation's public beaches, and written or edited nine books about beaches. He has released a springtime "Best Beaches Survey" for the past five years.

Each beach is rated on 40 criteria - including width; softness of sand; water temperature, color and clarity; number of sunny days; pollution; crowdedness; noise; wave size and currents; seaweed and jellyfish; and lifeguards.

The professor concedes the survey reflects his preference for natural, nearly deserted beaches over crowded, highly developed ones.

"The most popular beaches aren't necessarily the best beaches," said Leatherman, whose office door has a sign proclaiming "Science Can Be a Day at the Beach."

Beaches in Hawaii or Florida have always topped Leatherman's list. In declaring Grayton Beach this year's winner, he cited its wide stretch of soft sand, warm water, good fishing, and its lack of condominiums, crime and pollution.

Twelve of this year's Top 20 beaches are located in Florida, four in Hawaii, two in New York and one apiece in North Carolina and Massachusetts.

Leatherman dismisses California beaches as overcrowded and polluted. He said the Pacific water on the U.S. West Coast is often too chilly, even in summer, and the big waves and strong currents are dangerous to average swimmers.

Georgia beaches suffer in the survey because their sea water - although warm - is cloudy and gray while the ideal is clear and aqua- blue, Leatherman said.

"It isn't horrible, but it's not clear," the professor said. "You go underwater, you can't see more than a few inches."

The survey also favors soft sand over hard-packed beaches like those of St. Simons Island, Ga., although runners and walkers often prefer the firmer surface. Many of the attributes of the Georgia barrier isles - the moss-draped live oaks of Jekyll Island or The Cloister resort at Sea Island - aren't reflected in the survey, Leatherman said.

Unlike his past surveys, Leatherman did not publish a list of America's worst beaches this year. However, he said most beaches face growing problems with erosion, development and pollution.

"Ninety percent of all beaches are eroding - on all three coasts," he said, with the biggest losses of sand coming along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts.

Meanwhile, the fragile coastline is being urbanized at twice the rate of the rest of the nation, Leatherman warned, saying, "You've got to keep development in balance with nature."

The professor cautioned beach communities that they risk "killing the goose that laid the golden egg" if they succeed too well in promoting themselves to attract tourists.

New York's Jones Beach is the nation's most popular beach with up to 10 million visitors a year, he said. From the air, he said, the sand can barely be seen as the coastline looks like a "patchwork quilt" with row after row of beach towels touching each other.

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