Life's a Coast

What might deceptively look like a big "fish" in the above video is actually a Florida air-breathing mammal that goes by the name of the West Indian Manatee, also known as "sea cows", said to be a relative of elephants. Notice about half way into the video it grabs a breath of air. The size of the manatee in this video may be deceiving, as it was about six feet long, but they grow to be much larger. There are supposed to be lots of manatees in the intracoastal waters, and the area at the north end of the boardwalk where we capture the sunset videos is a "no wake" zone where boats have to slow to a crawl to avoid hitting "sea cows". However, to actually see one like this is a very rare occurrence, and this was in fact the first time in our twelve years of residing here that we had ever sighted one. So, with the repeat performance of yet another cloudy gray overcast sunset, there was considerable deliberations as to whether or not to go over to the intracoastal boardwalk to see what was going on, or to just walk over to the tiki bar and watch the (lack of a) sunset from there, commiserating with the local yocals about the rotten weather here over the last year, although toasting to the lack of hurricanes last year. Anyway, for some unusual reason, the video guy opted to hit the boardwalk to see what was going on, and we lucked out catching our first video of a manatee. Things have been kinda boring here with the prolonged lousy weather, so you'll have to excuse our enthusiasm about seeing some big ole cow of the sea swimming along...

Sunset video was almost cancelled due to miserably lousy cold rainy dreary weather, and non-existant sun, but at the last minute the video guy got stir crazy cabin fever, bundled up, grabbed an umbrella, and walked over to the intracoastal to capture the rare phenomenon of steam blowing off of the water ("Smoke on the Water" was a song by Deep Purple back in the early 70's if I remember right). The video was captured at sunset with a temp of 42 degrees and a wind chill of from 32 to 36 in the area. So, day 9 of our relentless cold snap was highly unpleasant outdoors, no sunshine, heavy clouds, with winds of over 10 mph, with temps in the 40's, and a very relentless all day cold rain, making the air feel much colder than it was, the most brutally bitter cold day we can recall here. A rare scene was "steam" rolling off of the ocean making erie spotty pockets of fog. The local weather service has posted freeze warnings for both tonight and already for tomorrow night with wind chills as low as 25 degrees. Looks like lots of local vegetable produce and citrus is at risk, especially further north where they have had a "mix" of precip including traces of snow already. Local folks are having out of state friends and family purchase and ship space heaters in since they are all sold out here -- some people without any form of heat, which are many, are experiencing inside temps down to 50 degrees. And to think, just last month, in the midst of prolonged summer-like record breaking heat waves, we were saying that we would welcome a little cooler weather, but now we are wishing for some August heat.

The varied range of unusual contrasting colors made this sunset very unique, spectacular in it's own muted way. This video was captured just after a lead squall line of storms from a cold front blew through the area with high winds and a brief torrential downpour. The colors in the video do not come anywhere near to doing the actual colors justice, due to our low-end video camera and the fact that much of the resolution is lost by the video host (if downloaded, the video host effect is eliminated and the video is much sharper, although still lacking the effect of the actual sunset because of the cheepo camera and "pixelation").

This first take was well before sunset, but it shows a rare dense blanket of "popcorn clouds". Typically, it would be expected that this would transpire into a spectacular sunset, but as you will see in the second take, sometimes the light just fades without much if any color, "fade to gray" they call it. So, that is why we posted this video, it was early, but it was the best of the bunch... Take 2 of 2 has been moved to the archives, but again, as spectacular as the clouds were (they really were to the naked eye) the sunset just faded to gray, not much color at all...

Watch for a lightning bolt a few seconds into this next video, a "cloud beam", and toward the end a flock of sea gulls, way up high, coming back into the area after tropcial storm Fay finally departed.

(in the above video, Kolb Nature Center observation tower appears on the horizon, just to the lower left of the setting sun, and the next video below was taken from that very tower just a few minutes later)