Tuesday July 18th 2023

The smoke from the northern forest fires drifted a little further south today. It was over the Jacksonville FL area as a high altitude haze. The overall impact was minimal. The haze may have saved a degree or two on the thermometer, but it was still hot. Amazingly, there were no thunderstorms this afternoon.

This afternoon I drove to the Cedar Point area on the southern part of the Nassau River tributaries. It was low tide. The Egrets were taking advantage of the lower water level to catch some yummy food. As I walked along the exposed sand, I saw some of their intended lunch. There were lots of little inch or smaller crabs running from hole to hole. Every foot fall I made scattered a few more.

It was a nice breeze in the open marsh area. A few people were out fishing in boats and one guy was using a cast net. I don’t know much about that form of fishing, but it looked pretty futile in that location to me. I spent about an hour wandering around and watching the nature. On the way back I stopped at another area, but I didn’t have bug spray. Before I got ten feet away from the car I was surrounded by bugs. I retreated to the inside of the car only to find that a good handful followed me home. Luckily, they didn’t seem very interested in biting. There are a few additional bug born diseases flying around this summer. A few cases of malaria have been reported in Florida. It has been many years since that last happened. I noticed that this RV park is spraying regularly, so there shouldn’t be any problems around my RV home.