"Unbelievable!" John Worley exclaimed.

A surfer and year-round resident, Worley, 56, was on his bike by the beach on the north side of Ocean City, N.J., pointing to the eroded canyon and breached dike where once stood a mountainous dune.

"I'm always amazed by the power of the ocean. In a matter of two days, all that sand, gone."

His reaction was common in towns along the Jersey Shore yesterday as saturated residents surveyed the damage wrought by the most destructive nor'easter in more than a decade.

The ugly meteorological progeny of dying Tropical Storm Ida washed away dunes and clogged streets with mounds of sand, muck, seaweed, and straw. Homeowners emptied the waterlogged contents of garages and first-floor apartments and storage rooms, and set to work sweeping, mopping, bleaching, and disinfecting in a valiant effort to keep mold and mildew at bay.

The weather today should help. The sun is expected to make a return appearance in the afternoon, creating favorable conditions for those who wish to examine the ravages more closely - as well as for dripping furnishings and possessions that need to dry.

Tomorrow, state environmental officials will survey the devastation, which is expected to top that of last month's nor'easter significantly and to cost multiple millions. The beach north of 21st Street in Avalon, N.J., for example, has virtually vanished.

Yesterday, the howling winds abated to gentle breezes, the pelting rain downshifted to drizzle, and the most welcome sound from Barnegat Light to Cape May was the gurgle of water finally draining into storm sewers from streets and intersections flooded by wind-whipped high seas and tides that refused to ebb.

"Welcome to Lake Haven!" shouted Jerry Phillips, standing high and dry with his wife, Carol, on the second-story porch of their house overlooking the submerged intersection of Haven Avenue and 15th Street in Ocean City.

Traffic had halted on these Venetian thoroughfares, they reported, except for a flotilla of ducks.

On Wesley Avenue, in the Garden section of town, Cindy Kahn, 40ish, who had driven from her home in Voorhees yesterday morning to see "if my house is still standing," was picking up asphalt shingles blown into her yard from the roof of a neighboring bed-and-breakfast. She would need to replace the canopy on her gazebo, ripped by the gale.

On the boardwalk at First Street, strollers stopped at the beach patrol's first-aid station and gawked at the pilings behind it, which once had supported two storage sheds, blasted apart by waves and distributed as flotsam.

Yesterday, Gena Murray, 43, was finally able to take her two golden retrievers for a walk around the block, but the ground-floor apartment of her house at 10th Street and Simpson Avenue was still under an inch of murky water, which at one point had risen as high as the toilet seat. A curled swath of vinyl flooring floated in the aqueous muck.

"Unrentable," Murray said in disgust.

In the 17th Street Lagoon section of town, Francis Davish, 55, and his son Patrick, 23, were using push brooms to sweep water from the garage of their new Victorian-cottage-style house. Davish, a contractor, built the house himself and had wisely used cement board instead of drywall for the first-story walls, as well as mildew-resistant paint.

"Down here, flooding is not a matter of if, but when," he said.

A water line on a skateboard airing out on the driveway showed that the invading sea had reached a height of eight inches, enough to soak and swell the house's wood baseboards, which had pulled away from the walls.

"We had minnows in the foyer," Davish said.

In Sea Isle City, N.J., Landis Avenue, the main north-south thoroughfare, was impassable, under a foot of water for at least eight blocks. Farther north, front-end loaders scooped piles of sand from the road and dumped them back on battered dunes.

The storm did not extinguish the spirit of enterprise. Wearing knee-high boots with only an inch of freeboard, Nan Lovell, 26, and Ryan Birkhart, 22, waded from house to house on Landis Avenue handing out business cards and seeking customers for their employer, Servpro, which specializes in water cleanup and restoration.

"We're trying to help people out because it's a mess," Lovell said.

While watching the news Thursday night, Cindy Dolan, 49, of Hockessin, Del., thought she saw a boat floating in the driveway of her family vacation home and rental property at Landis Avenue and 32d Street.

"We have to go down there," she told her husband, Kevin.

When they arrived yesterday afternoon, they discovered that Mother Nature, despite her foul mood, had merely tagged their garage with graffiti - a waterline about the height of a cinder block.

"I thought it would be much worse," Cindy said. "We are very lucky."

Neighbors across the street were not so fortunate. The bottom panels of two garage doors were bashed in.

A couple of blocks north, Marie Waters, 83, escorted by two daughters, returned to inspect the house she has inhabited for 13 years on 30th Street. On Friday, she was reluctantly evacuated by a National Guard deuce and a half after her worried daughters had contacted local authorities because their mother was marooned and without electricity.

Waters was pleasantly surprised. The only trace of the storm: some water in the garage.

A few doors down, at Landis Avenue and 30th Street, Anthony Milano, 50, walked across his bowed and twisted ground-level deck. The floodwaters had lifted, turned, and shoved part of it onto his driveway.

"My deck turned into a dock," Milano said. "I'll have to rip it up and start over."

Still, the storm was not without its pluses. His daughter, Hannah, 8, pronounced the whole adventure "cool" (except when the power went out, preventing her from recharging her Nintendo DS).

And Milano, a Shore house repairman, had received more than 60 calls the last few days. "Business is booming," he said.

His wife, Debbie, 49, like so many other coastal denizens, was philosophical.

"If you want to live at the Shore, you have to learn to put up with this stuff."

Contact staff writer Art Carey

at 610-313-8106 or acarey@phillynews.com.