Saturday March 12th 2022

The arrival of the cold front in this area made for a very weird weather day. The day began with scattered clouds and a constant wind out of the west southwest. It was very similar to yesterday. As the day progressed the clouds got heavier and the wind shifted to the west and increased to a steady twenty to twenty five miles an hour. Just walking was difficult with additional gusts to thirty or forty miles an hour. The temperature climbed to the mid eighties.

The front arrived in the Fort Meyers area around noon. A water spot in the Gulf of Mexico moved on shore as a tornado in Fort Meyers Beach and a trampoline flew down a street in Cape Coral. At my location, forty miles east of Fort Meyers, the front arrived just before 1PM. It wasn’t nearly as dramatic. About fifteen minutes of horizontal rain and it was back to wind. As the wind direction quickly moved to the northwest and north the temperature dropped by more than twenty degrees. On my last walk of the day I had to add several layers to be comfortable.

My day began early today. I made another unsuccessful attempt to book a Florida state park reservation for next winter. The new web based booking software continues to frustrate me. With the old software I could watch the clock and click on one button to commit to a site. I haven’t found anything that simple with this program. Tomorrow morning there are fewer available sites, but I’ll try anyway. Maybe another attempt will point me to an easier method.

The Ortona lock was busy this morning before the storm arrived. The yacht club from Naples that went up river on Thursday was returning westbound today. I missed the first group of five boats going through the lock, but watched the second group from arrival to departure. This evening there is a big sailboat at anchor waiting for the lock to open in the morning. It arrived after the 4:30PM last lockage of the day.

On this evenings weather forecast the presenter spent five minutes explaining wind chill to the residents of southwest Florida. It is a rare occurrence in this area. The overnight temperatures are forecast to get into the low forties and the wind will continue to be strong out of northerly directions. The wind chill calculation comes out below freezing at 31 degrees Fahrenheit.