The fog is thick. I try to remember how beautiful the drive is, and so I start to peer more out the window and through the fog cloud. We see the gators and lots of bird watchers and then the birds, and then this fella:
BUT man there was a LOT of water in the AIR! We got wet just lookin' outside the truck!
As we headed toward the lighthouse ramp, a fellow drove by headin' out o' there, towing his boat. drayno remarked that it was "Kinda early to be callin' it a day." We forged on.
Then, as we pulled in the side road and approached the ramp area, I first noticed there was nobody else waiting to launch, then I noticed that the parking lot was empty, and then I notice why! I saw where all the water had been and that was now in the air!
This was 9 o'clock in the morning! And the water was gone!
We were gasping in disbelief! We drove by on the side rode, next to the now-dry ramp, and got out of the truck and saw this, the new Dry Dock:
Well, the 13-er doesn't draw MUCH water, but even if we got into the puddle, we weren't gettin' it out of the "canal."
So we drive down to the lighthouse proper to confirm that there was still water in the river itself, but we couldn't see any! The water had receded past the fog line!
But we wanted to go fishing! And even the wade fishermen we are, we didn't want to wade in the puddle and pick 'em up: I been stuck on THAT bottom before!
So I called Shield's Marina on my cell phone, and she says "yes, sweetheart" there's water here, for the barges ya' know. We headed out. This time, we saw the ranger there, and we stopped to tell him that there wasn't any water to put in with; but he said he had wanted to tell us that when we drove past his booth earlier, on the way in. And he said he couldn't give us our entrance money back. [He was in the process of warning the boat-towing incomers.]
When we got to Shield's, the lady said they were catchin' up the river, but that I better not try to go out the river, it was so low.
We didn't really believe her, but UP the river we went. drayno hadn't ever been up there, and it was different lookin' for all, as it was low, low low.
Of course the river was calm and beautiful, and the live shrimp were worth a lot of taps and, a little ways above the power plant, they were worth a coupla of grunts too.
Then we headed out to the Gulf. It was high noon and foggggggy!
But the river, heading out, was smoooooth.
[This picture doesn't do it justice, as it "corrected" the exposure to make it look like there was some blue sky. There wasn't: only fog.]
We headed out to the flats west of the river, wide open throttle on smooth as glass water, the 13-er at her best!
drayno is a fishin' machine! Good company and geared up and loves it. But no action on the flats! It IS January! And we didn't give it much chance. So we decided to go to a spot dbplug showed me, south of Gray Mare. We hauled buggy over to a point south of there, getting soaked by the fog, and began drifting in with the wind and the tide. We got a few hits, a short trout, and a keeper maybe 18" and we're lucky [if it's that big]. All the catches were on Seminole Chicken ["electric chicken" with garnet and gold sparkly top].
Meanwhile, the fog is thick and thicker. We finally noticed Gray Mare, and we were NORTH of it, and no way could we even see the shore!
The wind began to pick up and the temperature dropped, and so we turned on the weather on the radio. All was cool, it seemed. Then, about 3 PM it began to clear some
, but--oh, by 3:20PM--it had rolled back in again! And every where we went we were followed by a "fog bow."
It got to be 4 PM or so, and we decided to head on in.
I knew the area was full of rocks, and we had no idea, visually, where the coastline or anything else was. We didn't loose our marbles, but we almost lost our bearings.
But thank goodness for the GPS and the bottom machine! With drayno on the former, and me on the latter, we flew back in the thickest darn cloud of fog ever! We were getting dripping wet, with no windshield, and we were on instruments only!
We leaned forward, peering ahead into the wind for signs of any other boats, or that "telephone pole" we saw, belatedly, sticking up near where I think the stakeline is. [What IS that thing?]
Earlier, we had actually heard a fog horn! And we wanted to see that ship right before we hit it.
Finally, we saw friendly signs of civilization, the channel markers into the river.
As we motored in, we saw these guys and I thought it would make a good picture:
The afternoon sun was nowhere to be seen. At this point, drayno saw a chance to fish another moment, so we drifted some. As I steppedd up on my bench seat, somehow I had both of my feet fly out from under me
and I busted my shin and "bootemous" and scared away all the many fish. 
[Nothin' a couple of Advil couldn't fix, for me anyway.]So we headed in, up the river. As soon as we hit the no-wake zone in the St. Marks, drayno tried trollin' as we approached the dock. No luck.
..hope it clears up soon, still hazy here today.....Great report... 
