 
There's good news and bad news regarding this story. On the plus side, you have a clear facility with the written word. Also, you have a definite story in mind and you've provided all the elements you need to craft a first-rate narrative. But there is much work to do, both in terms of narrative technique, and story structure.
Regarding the first issue, let me emphasize that you should never underestimate the majestic power of the simple declarative sentence in active voice. Subject > verb > object. Elements in action, affecting other elements. It's a template unsurpassed for saying what you mean, in a way that your reader will understand. In too many instances you are drastically over-thinking your words, reaching for images and metaphors that you think will make you sound "writerly," but which simply call attention to themselves, and not in ways that you want, as you sacrifice clarity for excess verbiage.
Look at your opening paragraph:
Glistening ocean water carried on for miles in front of him; reflecting the sunlight which had left its mark on Eliot far too many times. The water receded from the shore, over and over again it went. Rising, then falling. Eliot stood with his hands in his pockets, looking at a view he had become saturated with. The water didn’t have the same magic it had when he was younger. Its once pure enchantment had dissipated over the years, and Eliot couldn’t reclaim that faded wonder.
There's a nice kind of gauzy, hazy mood in the rhythm of your words, and that works well enough, but your content is far too imprecise. Note that ocean water is redundant. Unless otherwise specified, oceans conjours up images of water by default. Then you mention the sunlight which had left its mark on Eliot far too many times. What does that mean, exactly? The most immediate image it suggests is someone who fell asleep on a sunny day and spends the next two weeks with skin peeling off his face. Then we see Eliot, standing with his hands in his pockets, looking at a view he had become saturated with. Again, what does that even mean? Okay, we get the idea, but we have to do a little too much work to get there and the end result still misses the mark.
I usually don't like to offer rewrites of the words I review, but in this case, I think an example of what I'm talking about will make my point.
Eliot stood on the shore, hands in pockets, lost in the endlessly repeating cycle of the waves. Rushing forward, flowing back, over and over, the rhythms had once seemed magical, evidence of an enchanted realm, unseen but certainly real. Now, it was just movement and sound; the wonder was gone.
I make no claim that the preceding is particularly good, or that you should adopt it as your own. It does, however, incorporate the elements in your original, in a way that focuses the intent more clearly. Plus, we get a clear picture of Eliot at the outset, always desirable.
Paragraph two shows Eliot continuing his stroll down the beach.
He continued his stroll along the sand as per usual every Saturday morning. Saturday mornings and an empty beach during the summer were never one and the same. Crowds of people were scattered every which way. Some talking, others fast asleep with their buttocks pointed straight up for the sun to shine down its wisdom.
Here we have, again, too many words, and too much over-thinking of your images. You start by letting us know in the first sentence that Eliot is walking the beach on a Saturday morning, his usual routine. Good enough. In the third sentence you describe crowds scattering in all directions, also good, particularly since it contrasts nicely with the image of Eliot's isolation in the opening paragraph. But look at that second sentence. Not only do you add nothing from the first sentence, you make an awkward attempt to convey information that you repeat and clarify, to much better effect, in the third sentence. You need to revisit this paragraph and read the first three sentences, the read them with the middle sentence omitted, and continue to do so until you see why you should never have written that second sentence. About the last sentence, dealing with people's buttocks and the sun's wisdom, the less said the better, other than to point out that any images using the sun, the moon, or stars (or buttocks too, for that matter) are risky at best. Ninety-seven years ago, F. Scott Fitzgerald opened a minor short story like this:
The sunlight dripped over the house like golden paint over an art jar, and the freckling shadows here and there only intensified the rigor of the bath of light.
If you can improve on that language, go ahead and bring in the sun. Otherwise, search for your images in less worked territory. As for buttocks, I don't believe Fitzgerald ever incorporated them, at least not so literally. Probably best to follow his lead.
In the fourth paragraph, you open with this sentence:
Eliot’s feet carried him towards the rocky jetty that protruded up in an incongruous pattern.
One must ask, did Eliot go along passively, or did he resist as he was being carried?
Beware ascribing volitional attributes to items that are either inert or lacking in any form of consciousness. Every once in a while you might find a stomach growling from hunger, but the truth is, Eliot's feet didn't do anything that Eliot didn't tell them to do. Which is to say, Eliot crossed the sand... You can trust your reader to intuit that his feet performed as expected.
I'm going out of my way here, not to embarrass you, but because you also have this sentence in your opening passages:
Off in the distance were two boats weaving their own pathways along the water; their sails sometimes brushing past the sun’s light. They looked lost for a short second, but one followed the other. Where were they going? Eliot thought to himself. Nowhere too important. Where am I going? Nowhere too important.
This is nice, effective, and powerful in the way that it fuses a concrete image to Eliot's abstract musings, letting the elements in the text create the effect without you stepping in and telling the reader what to think. Best of all, it's simple, clean, and comfortable telling us no more than what is there without striving for awkward decorative language that brings the whole thing crashing down.
Alas, you follow with this sentence:
Words then floated into his conscious thought.
If what you mean is Eliot heard a voice off to the side, just say that. Good writing isn't about finding complicated ways of restating simple ideas.
That's all I'm going to say about narrative technique. It really can't be taught, but it definitely can be learned. You need to go back and reread all the writers you're already reading, not as a consumer but as a student, and keep reading until you begin to see why none of them would have used the passages that I mentioned at the beginning of this review.
On to story structure. I said at the outset that you have a definite story in mind here, and the set up is a good one: two lonely, despondent men, probably close to suicide, cross paths by random chance and in so doing, break each other's chain of decisions that seems headed for certain disaster. As set ups go, this has a lot of potential. Set ups, however, are not stories. They are the fertile ground in which the seeds of a story might take root, develop and thrive.
One of the most important requirements of a well-formed story is that Stories Happen Now. Your reader will be searching for that moving point of present time, focusing on that to reveal the unfolding narrative. Anything that happened in the past might be important, of course, but it's far more important to you, the author, than it is to any of your readers. It doesn't matter how dramatic or tension-filled the past might have been, there's no narrative in the past. The problem here is that you are spending far more time and effort on the events that have brought Eliot to this point in his life, than you are on whatever story is is that you want to tell about him in the present. It doesn't matter how great Eliot's loss was in the past, in the present, what you offer your readers is nothing more or less than two guys talking. Then one guy does a lot of thinking. Then they both talk some more.
Here's the truth about back story: if you give your readers a compelling story in the present—that is, characters forced to make decisions, take actions and deal with the consequences as they attempt to restore balance in their lives—they're not going to care all that much about back story. You need to care, of course. But what's essential is that you give your characters words and deeds that are consistent with their back story. In that way, much can be intuited without ever delving into the cludgy vehicle of a flashback. On the other hand, if you don't give your readers a compelling story in the present, they're still not going to care about the back story. They'll read through it all, but they're going to be checking their watches, wondering when the action is going to kick off in the present.
The challenge for you is to give Eliot something more than a situation. Figure out what problem faces him, right now, that he must solve. It doesn't have to be earth shattering or gut-wrenching. Perhaps he has a special stone he sits on every Saturday when he comes here to contemplate the sea, and this morning a stranger is occupying his place. It is through such seemingly small problems that large emotional issues can effortlessly be revealed. If you give Eliot a problem, force him to make a decision and take an action, and then cope with the implications and consequences, you'll not only tell us much about who he is and where he's come from, you'll keep your reader wanting to know how things are going to turn out. And then, they'll keep reading.
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