The first cold front of this Fall season crept through The Swamp yesterday. Rained the entire day. Not hard, but consistently. The temperature dropped throughout the dim daylight hours. The rain stopped after sunset and started up again near midnight. I have no idea when it stopped since I was snuggled down in my sleeping bag.
Around daybreak I could hear the wind blowing through the tall trees that line the canal where my boat is tied to the bank. They sounded strong but had no effect on me forty feet below their tops.
I thought of the many times in the three winters I spent anchored off Anna Maria Island just below Tampa Bay. Days when the winds blowing out of the north and northeast would bounce me around so harshly that it was impossible to get any sleep.
About an hour ago, 7 a.m.ish, the thermometer in the cockpit read 56F. The prognosticators at WillyWeather say the mercury will climb up to, perhaps, 61 degrees by mid afternoon. There will be a gradual warming trend through the week getting to the upper 70s by Wednesday.
DeBary, where I am, is roughly 95 miles farther north than Bradenton Beach, but those 100 miles make a lot of difference in the weather. WillieWeather says it’s going to get up to 70F there, but windy. I’d be uncomfortably bouncing around in the waves from the winds they say will be gusting up out of the northwest to 30 mph. Makes me VERY glad I made the move to The Swamp.
Two hundred miles farther south, around Fort Lah Dee Dah, afternoon temperatures are expected to be around sixteen degrees warmer than they will be here.
All in all, it’s not too bad. Especially since I slipped into some thermals.
One More Good Adventure 
I laughed at ‘Fort Lah Dee Dah.’ I’m not sure which city it is, but I get the point. I presume you have the same humidity levels there that we do: or close. Even 60F can feel cold here when we get a steady east wind off the bay and the humidity’s up.
Fort Lah Dee Dah is Fort Lauderdale…my home, off and on, for some 45 years. There were breaks. Like 10 years in New Orleans, three in Antibes, France. three in Chicago. But Lauderdale was always the place I returned to.