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Savannah, Melora and Don (photo by Pepper C)

We participated in the Hands on the Sand protest against the expansion of offshore drilling in Florida. We walked down to Jetty Park where other protesters had gathered. While we had a fair number of people show up, at Lori Wilson Park in Cocoa Beach, they had 1,500 people participate.

OK, this photo was taken at our beach, where nobody showed up. We walked to Jetty Park and held hands with complete strangers for about five minutes and then called it a day. In all, we would guess about 100 people were in our area.

“Hi, can Rugg come out to play?”

A normal day, just working and futzing about and then…the dogs start barking. They’re barking like somebody is at the door, but nobody is. Still, they bark. Something is outside.

So we open the front door, and there’s a gopher tortoise standing in our doorway, face-on, as if to ask “can the boys come out to play?”

We love gopher tortoises, and to have one in our walk is an honor. They are an endangered beach species and we see them in our beach dunes, where they love the ‘fruit’ of the sea grape. And, we can’t touch them because they’re endangered. So we simply said “hello” and asked him to leave. And he did.

Sonny offers an iced tea and some grapes

Ruggadune II, mid-September

Our beach is looking great. All of the seaoats planted last spring are still around, and many of them have grown into full sized, oat-bearing plants. The whole row planted nearest to the ocean has thrived and are actually doing better than those planted up in the dunes. If we can get through hurricane season without any storms, we’ll have a great foundation for a new line of dunes. So far we’ve only had one storm this summer that pushed the seaweed up to “Fishkill Ridge.”

Sebastian Bridge spans the inlet

The barrier island we live on ends to the south at Sebastian Inlet, about 30 miles away. It’s also home to Archie Carr Park and  the Barrier Island Sanctuary. Although it was the middle of the week, all of Don’s projects were out to his clients and it was time to get away from the computer. So instead of doing our morning walk on the beach, we head south and did our walk at Sebastian. After the walk we hit the Sanctuary and learned how to tell apart the three different kinds of turtle tracks during nesting season. Loggerheads, Green and Leatherback turtles all leave a distinctively different pattern on their trek to make their nest.

The inlet also marks the southernmost boundary of Brevard County.

In 1715 eleven Spanish galleons sank during a storm off Florida’s coast, and there is now a shipwreck museum at the site where the survivors camped out. Diver still regularly pull up artifacts and treasure, but it’s been reported that more treasure washes up on shore than is found diving.

Sebastian inlet isn’t natural, 1895 the first ‘cut’ on the barrier island was made, but it quickly filled in within year. In 1924 the Sebastian Tax District recut the inlet 100 feet wide and 6 feet deep, but it often filled with sand. Due to concerns of U-Boats during WWII, the inlet wasn’t used or maintained and a sand bar formed an closed the inset. It wasn’t until 1948 that the existing inlet (the earlier ones were slightly to the north) was opened and regularly maintained.

On one of our next short day trips we’ll head to the north end of Brevard, to Playalinda National Seashore.

The fishing pier stretches out to the ocean

Archie Carr Park to the north of the inlet

Don’s Olympus camera finally died. The small, sturdy, weatherproof camera served a full life, bought during our cruise…yikes…5 years ago. So this run we dusted off the Kodak DC5000 ‘ruggedized’ camera and while bulky, she still takes great shots. She was bought on e-bay for $35 to replace the DC5000 that met it’s maker crossing Hampton Roads in bad weather (flew across the cabin, and was replaced by the Olympus).

Considering the abuse these cameras have gone through since we covered the first cruise of the Anonymous digitally in 2001, they’ve done pretty well!

Time to start searching for the current offering in rugged weatherproof cameras for Christmas.

Recent rains saved the sea oats

The sea oats in this photo are pretty representative of almost ALL the sea oats that were planted this spring. They struggled through our most recent drought, then we got a deluge of rain and they bounced back and are doing great. Even with the most recent storms and high tides, the sea oats planted closest to the ocean are doing great and are beginning to form their own dune line. If we have a mild hurricane season, this seasons plantings will make a significant improvement in our local dune structure.

The above photo is of Ruggadune II, the sequel to last year’s dune project, which was doing great right before the last storm of the season (Faye) washed most of it out to sea.

We have not seen a single sea-turtle landing yet this year, so that’s putting us about one month behind when we saw our first landing last year. The ocean water temp has been colder than usual, and that could be the reason.

The pool at Third Landing

When Don was growing up, one of his favorite places was Rock Springs. The springs, now a well organized county park, is still there and still churning out a few million gallons a day. While hundereds of people splashed around in the main pool about a quarter mile away, we had our own little secret. There are three ‘landings’ on the springs. All tubers and swimmers must get out by the 2nd landing and a life guard is there to enforce it. BUT, if you take a short hike to the north, you’ll find the 3rd landing. We spent a couple hours there reading the Sunday paper, taking a swim and enjoying the view…and never saw another person.

Absolutely heaven. In Don’s book there is nothing remotely as refreshing on a hot Florida day than a dip in a Florida spring (72° throughout the year). Melora put her toes in.

Looking to the south at the landing, there’s a grand live oak that arches over the run.

If you want to canoe the run, you put in at Kings Landing, down the road from the park. For $20 you can launch your canoe, for $30 you can use theirs. They also charge a $10 shuttle fee, so either add that in or figure out how to get back to your car. The take out at the Wekiwa Marina, 8.1 miles down river and there are no launces after noon.

After our Sunday morning we also explored Wekiwa State Park, a few miles down the road. They have canoe rentals and a launch spot here as well.

The St. Johns River is a bit of an oddity. Like the Nile, it’s one of the few major rivers that runs from the south to the north. When asked why the river deviates from the norm, all we could get was a brunt “why not, what’s it to you?.” We quickly changed the subject to the origin of Peruvian coffee beans. We didn’t get far there, either. The river is what the river is.

We ran our dinghy up the St. Johns on a photo shoot scouting trip. Even in mid-day we were impressed with the amount of herons we came across. Being fresh water, we expected as much, but we were thick in both great white and great blue herons. We also came across five gators. We probably came across a lot more, but we only saw five.

Photos by Melora

Grand Cyprus. Out in the middle of no-where, this giant stood tall.

Heron in flight

A small, but impressive Florida Hammock.

A young gator sunning on the bank.

Heron Dance

One of the regular tours that blasted by us. We will give them credit, after every one blasted by, they did an S curve to look back to make sure they didn’t swamp us.

Every year about this time, the City of Cape Canaveral has a ‘Sea Oat Planting’ and volunteers from the community show up to help out. And every year about this time we wander over to Cherry Down Park with a box of doughnuts to recieve our assignments. This year so many people showed up that we could focus on our own beachfront area. In total,  7,500 sea oat seedlings were planted today. We had about a dozen voluteers from our neighborhood or friends of ours that just showed up.

Sand dune sequel

During last year’s planting, Don built Ruggadune, which evolved to a really nice, natural and beautiful sand dune…right before it was wiped out by tropical storm Fay. We still have a little of our beach reclamation project sand left (not much) so Don once again, on the northern most edge of the project, built another dune today. Everyone called it Ruggadune all day, so it’s pretty much destined to be Ruggadune II.

All the the photos below were taken by Ginny.

Chris on the job

Chris’s dad

Don preparing to start Ruggadune II©

Neighbors working on CharlesDune

Neighbor Lucy with her sea oat planting stick

Friend Terry with her hands full

Friend Hannah and her sea oats

Hannah and Terry planting

Ruggadune rises again!

Savannah, the Key Club representative at the event

Baby gator off Pine Island Road

We took a hike in the Pine Island Nature Preserve on Sunday to scout out possible future kayak/canoe locations. There’s definitely some possibilities here, but we’ll probably stick to the canoe given the fact that we wouldn’t be at the top of the food chain out there.

Spoonbill at Ulumay

We took a hike through the Ulumay Wildlife Refuge today and Melora captured this great shot of a Roseate Spoonbill. We actually came across a huge flock of them, but in our effort to quietly work through the brush to get the shot…they took flight. Next time we’ll sneak down on a canoe. Which is fine, because this was a photo scouting mission anyway.

This was shot about a 12 minute drive away from where we live.