Return to St. Joe, Florida [October 1 - 6, 2017]

Lovely, lovely St. Joe

Over the years, we have accumulated a list of special places that we just HAVE to revisit some day.  St. Joseph Peninsula State Park in Florida is one such place.  It is the first of these spots to which we have returned.  But, I am getting ahead of myself.

A morning panorama

We had finished a week of Granny Nanny taking care of little three-month old Asher as his Mama returned to work.  It would be two weeks before the young family needed us again, so we headed off on adventures. As we listed all of the places we could go, St. Joe bubbled up as a possibility.  It was not too far away from Knoxville, AND their scallop season had been rescheduled to the Fall, ending October 8. 

Natural dunes

Deer family seen on a bicycle ride

St. Joe is just as breathtakingly beautiful, and relaxing as it was 3.5 years before.  Long, uninterrupted fine grained, white sand beaches beside the emerald green waters along the Gulf side of the peninsula.  Shallow, scenic St. Joe Bay on the other side of the peninsula.  Deer, egrets, heron, terns, gulls, pelicans, shorebirds.  Such a lovely, natural place.

Cape San Blas lighthouse, moved to the town of Port St. Joe

We rented a car and drove into the town of Port St. Joe.  The town was founded in the 1800s, but decimated down to 400 residents by a Yellow Fever epidemic.  The historic part of the current town are buildings dating from the 1930s.  The car also enabled us to take Tiki to a beach where dogs were welcomed.  The water was so clear that we could see her little paws as she swam toward us.  It was glorious swimming for us as well.

This is how you scallop in St. Joe...

Salinas Park pier, it is a long walk out to the submerged grass beds

Scalloping, it turns out, is done while wading in knee (or ankle) deep water in the submerged grasses of the Bay.  We were told that scalloping was hard this year; not many had been found.  In fact, over the years, they had been over-fished.  Then we were told that the Florida conservation folks had scooped up a bunch of scallops over the summer and had taken them away in cages to deeper water.  The animals would be brought back to spawn at the end of October in an effort to give the population a chance to recover.  We went to the southern end of the bay where they were said to be more plentiful, off of Salinas Park, where the locals go to scallop.  We waded through knee high water for several hours.  We did not see any scallops.  We did see many horseshoe crab couples, a few rays and a handful of blue crabs.  Even though we didn’t catch any scallops, it was fun to be out on the water.

Sunset

We weren't the only ones out to see the full moon in the morning...

We went out to the beach to see the sunset in the evening, and again to see the full moon set in the morning.  Even after 5 days, which if you have been following this blog you know that is a very long time for us to stay in one place, we had not done everything we wanted to do.  Guess we will just have to return again.  

We think we should return, don't you?

Coincidentally, Hurricane Nate was forecast to make landfall some place on the Gulf Coast, several days after we departed St. Joe.  As we headed North and West on to our next adventure, we shared the roads and campgrounds with RVers who were evacuated from the projected path of the storm.