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Island Brief

Amelia Island • Nassau County • First Coast

Happy Friday, Nassau County! It is homecoming night at Fernandina Beach High, Saturday is International Talk Like a Pirate Day, which in this town is less a holiday than a description, and Sunday is the last day at The Surf after 69 summers on South Fletcher. Take the weekend in that order, because the weather does. Saturday is the day: 86 on the island and 89 to 91 across the river, sunny, storm chances in the single digits, and this time the mainland agrees. Sunday turns, about 46 percent on the island by afternoon and 52 to 64 percent in Yulee, Callahan and Hilliard, so put the outdoor thing on Saturday and the goodbye lunch at The Surf ahead of the clouds. The rip current statement that ran all week expired at 5 this morning. If you have a small child and nothing planned at 10 this morning, the city runs a free craft hour at the Teddy Bear playground in Central Park. And one thing before any of it: Hilliard, if you live west of the tracks, you are boiling your water this weekend. Details in Briefly Noted.

Fernandina ☀️ 86°/76° Yulee ☀️ 89°/72°

Callahan ☀️ 91°/69° Hilliard ☀️ 91°/69°

🎉	This Weekend

Fri 18

FBHS Homecoming: the parade at 5, the new scoreboard at 6, kickoff at 7 Parade on the traditional route downtown, starting at 5 p.m. • Then Fernandina Beach High, 435 Citrona Dr. • The FBHS Foundation dedicates the school’s new digital scoreboard at 6, and the Pirates host Clay at 7; downtown streets along the route will be slow from about 4:30

Fri 18

3rd on 3rd: Dr. Steve Knoll, “Many Revolutions” Fernandina Beach Public Library, 25 N. Fourth St., not the museum this month • 6 p.m., also streamed online • The museum’s third-Friday talk, on the revolutions that ran alongside the American one; $5, members free; 904-261-7378

Sat 19

Nassau County Small Business Expo Atlantic Recreation Center, 2500 Atlantic Ave. • 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. • Local businesses under one roof, put on by the Power Referral Group; the city’s listing gives no admission price

Sat 19

“Talk Like a Pirate” StoryTime with Ms. Dearsha Story & Song, 1430 Park Ave. • 10:30 a.m. • Free, no RSVP; it is International Talk Like a Pirate Day, and the featured book is “Set Sail for School” by Daryl-Lynne Gottie

Sat 19

Saturday markets, one on each side of the river Farmers Market on North Seventh Street and the Wildlight Market Place at 123 Tinker St. • 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. • Third Saturday, so Wildlight is on and the Arts Market on Centre is off until the 26th

Sun 20

“Get Closer,” a Linda Ronstadt tribute Story & Song, 1430 Park Ave. • 3 to 5 p.m. • Debbie Rider and her band, “Blue Bayou” to “Heatwave” in period wardrobe, back for a return visit; $35 through the performer’s ticket page

Sun 20

Last day at The Surf 3199 S. Fletcher Ave. • Open from 11 a.m. • Sunday is the final day after 69 summers across the road from the ocean; go early, because the afternoon is the wet half of the weekend and the rest of the island has the same idea; 904-261-5711

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Try This

If you have never turned off Centre onto North Second and kept going toward the port, Wicked Bao is the reason to. It sits at the corner of North Second and Calhoun in a building that lights up with lanterns after dark, and it does Asian street food: baos, dumplings and pot stickers made in-house, noodles, rice bowls and a drink list that takes itself about as seriously as the room does, which is not very. The Observer’s dining columnist Dylan Bailey called it “wickedly good” and singled out the flash-fried corn with the house Chongqing spice. It is one of the 23 restaurants on a set Dining Month menu through September 30, so this is the month to order the things you would not normally, and the happy hour runs 4 to 6 Tuesday through Thursday. Two catches: it opens at 4, and it is closed Sunday and Monday, so the weekend window is tonight and Saturday, and a table right after the homecoming game is optimistic. Saturday evening, after a day outside, is the one to plan on.

📍 232 N. Second St. • Tuesday to Thursday 4 to 8 p.m., Friday and Saturday 4 to 9, closed Sunday and Monday • 904-775-5577

📰	In Case You Missed It

Here is the number we promised you Wednesday: 4.8530 mills, adopted Tuesday night on a 4-1 vote with Vice Mayor Darron Ayscue the no, the same rate and the same split as in July and at the first hearing. Under the state’s rollback arithmetic that is 9.24 percent above the 4.4425 rate that would have raised last year’s money on this year’s values; the rate it replaces was 4.6849. The budget itself passed 5-0: $228 million across 30 funds, about $93 million of it reserves, with the general fund up from $45 million to $50 million and the contingency line at $2.04 million, most of that the roughly $1.5 million commissioners chose to hold back against the November homestead amendment rather than spend. The one change made on the night came from Commissioner Joyce Tuten, who moved $25,000 from that contingency to the Nassau County Council on Aging, which she said had lost funding and staff positions when the county’s tentative budget wiped out its nonprofit line last week. Genece Minshew wanted to wait until after November 3; Ayscue said he did not want to pull support from a local nonprofit without warning, and the money went in. So a week that opened with the county cutting every nonprofit off closed with the city writing one of them a check.

Read More → Nassau NewsLine

The city said Wednesday that the Area Six stormwater project is complete: a new pump station at the river end of Ash Street and bigger drainage lines under the blocks between there and Central Park, serving close to 30 acres of downtown that used to hold water after a hard rain. It is the job that closed Ash Street a block at a time for most of the summer and reopened most of it on temporary asphalt in June; the last stretch, between South Second and Front, is where the pump station went in. The money came from the American Rescue Plan and a Resilient Florida grant from the state Department of Environmental Protection, and the city says the system now pushes water out of downtown instead of waiting for it to find its own way to the river. Sunday afternoon’s forecast is the first small test.

Read More → Action News Jax

The Observer’s nature columnist drove up to the Okefenokee Swamp Park, the north entrance just south of Waycross, for the first time in a couple of decades and found the Pogo memorabilia she remembered mostly gone. The park is now run by the same group that runs Okefenokee Adventures at the Folkston entrance, and apart from a re-creation of cartoonist Walt Kelly’s studio it is all swamp now. What is left is plenty for a family: a 45-minute train ride with a 20-minute stop at a pioneer village, a boat ride she skipped, pines scarred into “cat faces” by decades of turpentine tapping, the 14-foot skeleton of Oscar, an alligator who lived to nearly 100 in and around the park before dying of natural causes in 2007, and at least one very live one in the weeds by the boat dock. Her one piece of advice is not to touch the pine sap. With Saturday dry and Sunday not, Saturday is the day for it.

Read More → Fernandina Observer

📌	Briefly Noted

Dining Month runs through the end of September, and everybody who lives here has a first-night restaurant: the place you take people the evening they arrive, to explain the island without saying anything. Which one is yours, and what do you make them order? Hit reply and let us know. We read every response.

Pat Foster-Turley’s column this morning comes from the Okefenokee Swamp, which most people file under Georgia and leave there. It is closer than that. The swamp is the headwater of two rivers that leave it in opposite directions and end on opposite coasts, and one of them is our county line. Name them.

Answer: the St. Marys and the Suwannee. The St. Marys drains out of the swamp’s east side and wanders to the Atlantic, forming the Florida-Georgia line the whole way and reaching the ocean between Fort Clinch and Cumberland Island, which is why it is Nassau County’s northern border. The Suwannee leaves the southwest side and runs down through north Florida to the Gulf of Mexico. Both are blackwater rivers, tea-colored from the tannins the swamp steeps into them, so the red water you sometimes see at the north tip of the island started life in the same place as Stephen Foster’s river.

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