scooterbug44
SoWal Expert
Depending on where you are walking, the "new" sand used for restoration or to cover seawalls isn't as nice to walk on as the stuff Ma Nature put there.
But what I saw in the pass was stumps not logs. They may be there, I judt didn't got very far down. After seeing the sharks swimming in the pass, my interest declined dramatically and I went to look for shells. The stumps looked to be about 4 to 5 feet tall and straight up like stumps would be on land. It just fascinated me how it looked. Weird and eerie....
It kind of sounds like the stump hole part of Cape San Blas right where you turn to get onto the peninsula. There's a huge broken concrete wall on the seaward side to keep the road from going under during storms. On the other side of the rip rap, it used to be a small beach area where forest came almost right up to the water line. Then a series of storms from George in 1998 onward took out a ton of the sand in the area south of the seawall. What had been forest was now under water, and the trees died from salt water intrusion in the roots.
Give it a couple more storms where the top of the dead trees snapped off, and more water washed away more of the sand at the tree trunks, and that area now probably has a pretty similar underwater dead tree structure as the pass/ Shell Island area does.
There are a lot of areas in between the pass and Apalachee Bay that get flagged as 'highly and frequeently erroding- we're not even going to try to put a shoreline line down' on official marine charts.