dance of the coquina

We've had several interesting brushes with nature during the past few days. There was the shark we saw last week, then on Sunday we were surfing and kept coming in contact with a big school of stingrays that rode next to us on a wave several times. Chris accidentally stepped on one, but luckily didn't get stung. Then yesterday, a huge storm suddenly hit our area...I was driving back to the island from an appointment and within 3 minutes it turned almost completely dark, started pouring and I was on top of the Intracoastal bridge when the alert came on the radio..."a tornado is in St. Augustine and heading from the mainland towards the Intracoastal. Please seek shelter! We repeat - please get to the lowest section of your house and cover your head. If you are driving, please get into a ditch". um.....I looked back and only saw a big wall of black so I just drove faster and within 2 blocks of my house, things were flying across the street, all the streetlights went out and hail started hitting my car. I called Chris who had our computers packed up and we grabbed the cats and headed downstairs the second I walked in. After about 10 minutes or so, the wind died down and the sky lightened to reveal lots of downed limbs. Luckily we didn't have much happen except a 4hr power outage. The tornado did a lot of damage in other areas of town.

This evening we walked to the beach and were greeted by a full rainbow! I ran back to get my camera, but was too late. I did, however get to capture the thousands of little coquina shells burrowing in the sand between tides. A couple times a year, we see these come out in droves and it's so pretty with all the little colors appearing and disappearing between waves. I found out that this is called the "dance of the coquina" as they leave patterns in the sand as they dig. Here's a little video I tried to capture when they started to emerge from the sand (albeit not too exciting:))...