Higgs is the first beach you come across coming from Old Town (we were on our bikes). It's located between two jetties, so a lot of seaweed tends to collect on the beach. We were just looking for sun, so we laid out our towels and got some sun. Higgs wasn't very crowded. Later in the afternoon, we were annoyed by an old man in a van playing his guitar, so we headed down the coast.
Here we found the craziness of Smather's Beach. It was PACKED. There were people EVERYWHERE. Vendors all over the sidewalks, big RVs parked across the street playing music, pretty much what you'd expect at a popular beach on Spring Break. Two of my friends went kayaking here for a half-hour. They had fun and got to go pretty far out and have a nice view of the beach from the ocean.
Both beaches provided about 50 feet of cream-colored-ish sand from sidewalk to the nicely colored blue, seaweed-infested water. The water is very shallow (less than 3 feet) unless you get really far out. There are also patches of slimy goo and seaweed in random places as you get farther out. The water was perfectly cool for March, with the outside temps being in the low 80s.