Went back to your first pic, and you did at some point have refraction at water setting. Been a long time since I've been there, but in the Options settings for Bryce you can choose whether new objects have the last texture used or a randomly chosen texture appropriate to the object. Terrain textures for terrains, for example. Perhaps you had been playing about with a water-textured object?

This is not my "second childhood". I'm not finished with the first one yet.

Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana.

"I'd like to die peacefully in my sleep like my grandfather....not screaming in terror like the passengers on his bus." - Jack Handy