Blustery Anastasia State Park

After the rains passed this morning, the sky cleared by noon, and we had a gorgeous, if Arctic, day. The sky was an icy blue through and through.  We took advantage of the good weather to wash the truck, and then, after a late lunch, decided to pedal to Anastasia State Park, which is about 2 miles from our campground.

The park covers grounds that were used by the Spanish as coquila quarries as early as the early 1600's.  More than 300 years ago, sites like the coquina quarries located within Anastasia State Park were busy with workers, mostly Native Americans, hauling out blocks of rock. By the late 1700s, the Native American population had died out and quarry workers were usually enslaved Africans and captured Europeans. With hand tools, they hewed out blocks of the soft shellstone and pried the squares loose along natural layers in the rock. The blocks were loaded onto ox-drawn carts then barged across Matanzas Bay to the town of St. Augustine. The blocks were used to construct the Castillo de San Marcos and many other buildings.

From its founding in 1565, St. Augustine had been a struggling outpost of Spain’s American empire. Spanish soldiers built their fort and their homes out of the plentiful pine trees and palmetto. Time after time their wooden settlement was destroyed by storms or burned by pirates and other raiders. On Anastasia Island, the Spaniards discovered a better building material—deposits of a rock made of broken shells. As early as 1598, they dug enough to build a gunpowder storage magazine, but they lacked the workforce, the engineering skills and the tools to excavate enough for a large structure.

In 1671 large-scale quarrying began in the stone pits. Coquina rock is relatively soft and easy to cut while in the ground and hardens when exposed to air. The Spanish learned to waterproof the stone walls by coating them with plaster and paint. When besieging ships bombarded the Castillo, the walls simply absorbed the cannon balls. Coquina continued to be a prized building material for the Spanish, British and the Americans.

As we entered the park, we found one of the quarries and walked around it.  Time and sedimentation have filled it in to the point where it is now just a small swale between hummocks of sand; but because the surface of the rock left in the quarries was dissolved by rain and groundwater, it became impermeable, causing low areas to fill with water and become perpetual wetlands.

Our bicycle ride continued out an isthmus of land bordered on the east by a saltwater inlet, itself bounded by sand dunes, with the Atlantic Ocean beyond the dunes.  Here, Kathy looks closely at very large oysters lining the interior bank of the inlet:

At the bottom of the inlet, the bike path came to the point of land where the inlet meets the ocean.  We walked out on the beach and had to take a selfy to document the location:

Not to be satisfied with a selfy, we continued with a shadow photo:

After exploring the beach, we walked back up the dunes and found a quarter-mile long boardwalk leading up to the top of the dunes and over them back down to the beach.  Here, Kathy is standing at the beginning of the boardwalk:

From this point, we could see the St. Augustine Lighthouse across the wetlands and inlet:

It was a blustery day.  Partly due to winds, and partly to rip currents, the red caution flag was flying. A purple flag accompanied it to warn of dangerous marine life - presumably jellyfish, but we didn't verify the specific reason.  Here, Kathy is inspecting the flags:

The day was so windy that the flags snapped smartly toward the northeast.  Here's a video of the flags snapping in the high winds.

Walking back to our bikes over the dunes, we encountered this blooming prickly pear cactus:

As we left the beach area, David couldn't resist anchoring himself to a park monument:

As we biked back out of the park, on the path paralleling the inlet, we saw numerous shore birds:  a great egret eyeing us suspiciously --

-- another great egret and friends busy fishing --

-- and a great blue heron wading cautiously in the shallows with one eye out for fish and the other on us:

We checked out the park campground for our RV friends and hastened back to our campground so that happy hour would not tire of waiting for us and depart with the sun.