Well…as I predicted in my last post…we pretty much done nuttin’ since our arrival here at Pelican Roost RV Park on Naval Station Mayport FL.

We’re situated right at the mouth of the St. John’s river looking north towards the river…the Atlantic is visible off to the right and the channel splits just before the RV park with the left side heading into the Navy basin here at the base and the right side heading in towards the port of Jacksonville.

We’ve been watching the weather closely this year…we’re here earlier than usual and it’s still hurricane season down here in the southeast…in particular we’ve been watching what used to be called Invest 99-L and was upgraded to Tropical Depression Nine this morning. Tropical Depression 8 is up the coast off of NC and is turning eastward toward the open ocean without making landfall and Hurricane Gaston is well east and north of Bermuda heading northeast into the Atlantic…neither of those are a concern.

Tropical Depression Nine on the other hand…we’re keeping an eye on. That’s the one that dithered around  down in the islands for  what seemed like days and finally headed west between Florida and Cuba, passing about 60 miles south of Key West into the Gulf of Mexico. As of this morning it’s forecast to remain a Tropical Depression at least through tomorrow with winds of 35 knots as it continues northwest into the Gulf. Sometime Tuesday or Wednesday it’s forecast to turn back towards the northeast and then by Thursday morning when we’re due to leave here it will still be off the coast near Cedar Key with a track northeast. Landfall will be Thursday afternoon at Cedar Key and it will continue northeast through the Jacksonville area sometime Friday morning.

So…assuming it doesn’t speed up or turn farther to the east then we’ll be just fine…with us on the road by about 0800 or so Thursday morning we should see a little of the early cloud cover at worst and mostly we’ll drive out of it’s path as we continue another 320 or so miles south to Fort Myers. Fort Myers itself will be unaffected unless it turns to east instead of northeast and even then it would need to turn today and the winds make that highly unlikely. It’s a really unorganized storm so far…all of the cloud cover, wind and rain is to the southwest of the center of rotation…and although the weather guessers seem pretty sure of the path they’re all over the map on intensity. Fleet average of the models indicate a Tropical Storm near hurricane strength (70 mph wind) at landfall but we should be well clear. We’ll continue to monitor and if necessary we’ll just leave a day early on Wednesday to make sure we’re out of Dodge before it happens…we prefer not to travel in rainy conditions unless we have to.

We were up with our coffee around 0800 this morning and decided to sit outside and watch the Monday Morning rush hour…we figured that we would see several of the ships in the Navvy basin head out for weekly operations…these days the non-deployed ships tend to do that a lot and then come back in on Friday…the Navy keeps track of both time in port and time in homeport these days and to keep the time in homeport average to 50% ships tend to do a lot of M-F at sea periods.

Lo and behold though…although there was rush hour it was all coming in vice going out. First up Neil spotted a submarine sail down by the breakwater and we got a nice view of a fast attack submarine as it headed into the basin…Neil’s says it’s a Virginia class. The fairing at the base of the front of the sail means it’s either Seawolf or Virginia class…and the lower fairing height, antenna configuration and overall length make it pretty obvious…to him anyway…that it’s not a Seawolf class. Things were so much simpler when they had the hull number painted on the sail.

The other guy coming in was identified as the Eurasian Highway…a Japanese flagged car carrier coming in…that’s gotta be one of the ugliest ships I’ve ever seen. The owners built it for efficiency in cargo carrying and fuel consumption though, not looks I know…but dang it’s ugly.

Other than that…we’re just hanging out. We wandered over to the beach Saturday for an hour or so until we got too hot, made some homemade eggnog to age for the holidays, and try to sit outside on the veranda and watch the world go by every afternoon. It’s continued to be in the 90s with pretty high humidity most days…but it’s also been breezy and sitting in the shade it’s actually pretty pleasant outside. Not so much walking around in the sun…Neil walked over to get a haircut and some cash this morning after rush hour was over…and based on sitting there thought it would be ok to walk instead of drive around…he got back and concluded he was incorrect.

Interesting things on the net has been slim this week…these are all I found.

An Olympic one…Bolt crossing the finish line.

And no more monkey business…

Yeah…I know…those were both pretty lame but I can only do what I can do. There were several others that would have made the cut except I…mostly…try to keep this blog to G or PG.

Cyas.