So we had to go down to Port St Joe to check things out , and onto St Vincent (actually a week later- but the photos are all here)  to check out the beach & salvage what we could.

The ride down was a little depressing – there was miles & miles & miles of broken forest back from the road as far as you could see.
Houses of course and agricultural buildings, mostly with roof damage or destroyed. There is a little town , (Wewa) with a nice little park where we’ve always stopped for the needed pee break on the way to the coast – it was heart breaking to see the park, with all it’s big beautiful trees, all broken and destroyed. The drive certainly humbled us, in that it showed how close the destruction came to our house.

This is a site of a quite large pavilion, at the end of the Port St Joe boat launch jetty. Fortunately the new boat launch looks fine.
The nice airy pavilion in the town park, where the launch parking lot is, was completely GONE.

St Vincent NWR:
  We were the first people out there since the storm – no ranger 4 wheeler tracks- nothing .
The storm completely changed the entire beach .

Tom & I like to collect shells- Well, there were so many shells that Mother Nature came up with the solution for transporting them.
This handy beach cart was a real labor saver, but kind of squeaky, and no WD40 handy.

But shells were only part of what we found, everything imaginable was washed up , and some things you couldn’t even imagine.
It felt like we were on a deserted island , and we were !

We had quite a load by the time we started back- everything including the kitchen sink , which will be installed out in Tom’s shop !

Good thing the wind had dropped by the time we had to paddle all this stuff back over to the mainland.
Sadly, we had to leave our faithful beach cart there, as there just wasn’t room, as the folding mechanism had seen better days.