By Friday afternoon, almost everything at the St. Marks marina in Wakulla County looked normal -- certainly not as if a major hurricane had been there just the night before.
The sun was shining, the boats were rocking gently on their moorings. The river was a little high, but that was to be expected in the wake of Hurricane Helene. Several people were spraying down the sidewalks, including a man named Michael.
“Yeah, everything was good at 12:30 last night," he said. "The storm stopped. The water was low. Everything seemed like it was over. And then a couple of hours later, there was two-and-a-half feet of water in the parking lot. So, it was the back end of the storm that came and got us, not the front end. [Then it receded again?] It receded right away, actually. It went down really quick.”
There was still standing water along some of Wakulla’s roads and on low-lying ground in Panacea. But basically, people were getting back to business.
