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Florida: St. Joseph's Peninsula State Park on Cape San Blas across from Places Visited: Florida: St. Joseph's Peninsula State Park on Cape San Blas across from Port St Joe August 24, 2003 St. Joseph's Peninsula State Park on Cape San Blas near Port St. Joe, Florida $22 per-night, (Summer Rates) 30-amps & water with central dump station. Winter Rates are cheaper. We arrived in St Joseph's State Park mid-afternoon and called our friends Pat & Louie that have a beach house on the Cape. This is scallop season and we are here to spend a few days scalloping with our friends. After getting set up we headed to Pat & Louie's for the afternoon and evening. Pat Cooks. VBG (Very Big Grin) August 25, 2003 St. Joseph's Peninsula State Park on Cape San Blas near Port St. Joe, Florida $22 per-night, (Summer Rates) 30-amps & water with central dump station. The sun does not get high enough in the sky to find scallops until around 10:00am. That is when we are instructed to meet a Pat & Louie for the day's adventure. Scallops are located in grass beds in water generally less than 5' deep. The best method of finding them is to swim along with a mask and snorkel until you spot one on the bottom. When you spot one of the camouflaged bivalves it is a simple matter to dive down and grab it with your hand. Scallopers carry mesh bags to deposit their catch in. You have to have a Florida salt-water fishing license to catch and keep scallops. There is also a limit on how many you can catch and keep in one day. With the three licenses on our boat we were able to catch and keep 6-gallons of scallops in the shell. That is about 3-pints of shucked scallop meat.
Scalloping is fun. It has been described as an adult Easter egg hunt. When looking for scallops you always see a wide variety of sponges, horseshoe crabs, conches, welks, clams, pin-shells, pin-cushions, octopus, sand dollars, sea-horses, crabs and a wide variety of fish. Speaking of fish Louie carries a spear to harvest flounder when any of us spots one. Flounder burrow in the sand where they are well camouflaged, or lay on top of the grass where they are equally hard to see. They don't swim away since they think they are "hidden". We spotted three today but Louie only managed to spear one of them. That one was 17" long and will make a good meal when Pat works her kitchen magic on him. I spotted a nice flounder hiding in the grass and called Louie over to "harvest" it. As I was standing there pointing to it Louie eased over and shot and missed. The escaping flounder flew between my legs. Talk about heart failure! I know it was only a flounder but that bad-boy side-swiped my leg as it went by. When something like that runs into your leg in the water you can't help but think of JAWS! Back at the State Park we notice that schools of sting rays have positioned themselves in the surf on the Gulf side. We only saw a few sting rays while scalloping this morning. We also took note of a flock of barn swallows and a few mixed cliff swallows feeding above the sea oats. These are obviously adult birds that are migrating south already. I would have thought that this was early for them to be migrating south but they are only in this area during migration. We did not see them again during our stay. I suppose they fed hardy then headed for South America. We spent the evening with Pat & Louie. She fixed scallops and a host of other things. Did I mention that Pat cooks?
August 26, 2003 St. Joseph's Peninsula State Park on Cape San Blas near Port St. Joe, Florida $22 per-night, (Summer Rates) 30-amps & water with central dump station. Today was a carbon copy of yesterday. We met Pat & Louie at 10:00am headed out in their boat and had a limit of scallops within an hour or so, then it took 30-minutes to clean them. Pat is FAST with the knife, Louie is close behind and I drag up the rear. Pat cooked again. In addition to scallops we had seafood gumbo complete with crabs and scallops fresh from the bay. Ain't life good! August 27, 2003 Back at home in Pensacola, Florida We slept late then headed back to Pensacola, via Panama City where we had lunch with my Mother.
Click here for more Florida travellogsUntil next time remember how good life is. More Florida AdventuresAdventures by State ** 2003 Travel Adventures
Mike & Joyce Hendrix
Mike & Joyce Hendrix who we are We hope you liked this page. If you do you might be interested in some of our other Travel Adventures: Mike & Joyce Hendrix's home page Travel Adventures by Year ** Travel Adventures by State ** Plants ** Marine-Boats ** Geology ** Exciting Drives ** Cute Signs ** RV Subjects ** Miscellaneous Subjects
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