| 📅 Monday, November 2, 2026 Full Edition | Fernandina Beach 🌦️ 75°/68° |
Today is grey and showery, with surf still too rough to swim. Tuesday dries out at 76, and the weekend brings the first real cool-down of the fall, right on time for the Right Whale Festival.
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Showers come and go all day on a northeast breeze and taper off around midnight, with a rip current statement in effect through Tuesday night, so the beach is for walking beside. Tuesday through Friday run mostly sunny in the mid 70s, a cold front comes through Thursday night, and Saturday opens at 73 with nights near 59 for the festival weekend.
| 📰 | Top Stories |
Early voting ended Saturday, and the any-site rule ended with it. On Tuesday you vote at the precinct on your voter card, polls open 7 a.m. to 7 p.m., and the Supervisor of Elections puts it plainly: a ballot cast at the wrong polling place will not count, and some polling places move every election, so check yours before you go. Bring a photo ID that carries your signature (the voter information card is not an ID), and if you still have a mail ballot, do not mail it now; it must be in Janet Adkins' office by 7 p.m. Tuesday, and the office at 96135 Nassau Place in Yulee takes drop-offs 7 to 7 on election day. On the ballot: the Fernandina Beach mayor's race between Genece Minshew and Tim Poynter, the school district's one-mill renewal, Amendment 3 and two other constitutional amendments, Hilliard's council seats and charter questions, and the mosquito control district seat on the island.
Read More → Nassau County Supervisor of ElectionsThe Observer obtained the comment forms from the Oct. 24 master plan open house, and they read as a record of the island's oldest west-side grievance: repetitive flight-school touch-and-goes, low passes over Crane Island, Parkway North, First Avenue and Canopy Drive, and no way to make the airport's voluntary noise guidelines stick. A Crane Island couple, Warren and Doreen Byrd, say they have counted as many as 30 takeoffs and landings by the same training plane; one resident asked for a landing fee for outside flight schools, another for a non-pilot seat on the airport's advisory committee, and Shari Roan of Parkway North submitted a written proposal to cap each school at one visit a day and five touch-and-goes per visit, weekdays 9 to 5. The Observer is careful to say the forms are voluntary submissions, not a survey, and that they do not establish how often the planes actually fly or whether any flight breaks a rule; the master plan itself, as we reported last Monday, will map the noise and not recommend ways to reduce it. The city's separate airport noise workshop is Wednesday at 4:30 at City Hall, before the regular meeting.
Read More → Fernandina ObserverThe election-week commission meeting slid to Wednesday at 6, and the agenda is the one we previewed last week: the second and final reading of Ordinance 2026-16, which repeals the citizen ordinance passed in August and replaces it with a city version that keeps the referendum requirement, adds exemptions for the golf course, the airport and special events, and needs four of five votes to pass, as it did at first reading. Paid parking itself ends Nov. 18 regardless, and the ordinance would take effect the next day. Before that vote, Deputy City Manager Jeremiah Glisson presents the downtown traffic and parking study the city commissioned in May, when the meters were expected to stay, and the commission takes a first reading of the rewrite of the special events code that every festival organizer downtown works under. The Dog of the Month is back at the top of the agenda, and the airport noise workshop runs first at 4:30.
Read More → City Commission agenda (CivicClerk)About four hours after Friday's issue went out, the county's emergency management office warned that a major power line had been compromised near Shuckers, affecting both FPL and Florida Public Utilities, and that the repair would mean cutting electricity to the entire island. FPU said its crews had to de-energize the transmission line serving the island to work safely on the west side of the Shave Bridge; the county said to expect four to five hours. The power went just after 12:30 p.m. and came back about 3:10, with traffic onto the island squeezed to one lane at the bridge, deputies working the dark intersections as four-way stops, the city asking people not to come over unless they had to, and the Atlantic Rec Center early voting site running on a generator so nobody lost their place in line. The News-Leader followed it through the afternoon; neither utility has said what compromised the line or whether more work is coming.
Read More → News-LeaderWednesday's issue had the county's numbers; Sunday's Observer has the people. Amelia Island Sea Turtle Watch counted 298 nests this season, the figure the county's tally listed as monitored by the Watch, against about 200 in a typical year and 294 in the big 2019 season, and the last nest standing was destroyed by the late-October storm. The larger story is the handoff: Mary Duffy, one of the volunteers who founded the group in 1985 and the only founder still with it, stepped into the background this year while Bill and Ronda Bokram ran their first season as president and vice president of a group that now has nearly 150 volunteers. Two details worth keeping: 79 nests were laid on the Sadler Road to Main Beach stretch that was renourished in 2025, so the turtles came back to the rebuilt sand, and the Watch logged 17 nests disturbed by people, stakes pulled or nests stepped on, the most it has ever recorded, which is a federal offense.
Read More → Fernandina Observer| 📍 | Around Nassau County |
| ➤ | Yulee: New Season Treatment Center cuts the ribbon Thursday, 11:30 to 1, on the mobile opioid treatment unit it has been running at Gracie's Kitchen, 6 Koen Lane, with the program at noon. The unit has been parked in Yulee since earlier this year as an extension of the company's Jacksonville clinic, with two dispensing windows, crisis counseling and telehealth; it is at 904 Health on Lofton Square Court weekdays 6 to 8 a.m. and at Gracie's Kitchen 9 to 11, and the treatment line is 1-877-284-7074. (More) |
| ➤ | Nassau County: Two land-use boards meet in Yulee on election day. The Development Review Committee at 9 a.m. takes a first look at a storage lot at Wildlight and signs off on a revised Liberty Cove linear park, and the Planning and Zoning Board at 6 p.m., after two straight monthly cancellations, hears a half-acre land-use change on Halls Road and a rezoning of a half acre on the west side of State Road 200 between Page Street and Red Brick Road from residential mixed to commercial intensive. The South Eighth Street warehouses that need a conditional use permit are not on the agenda. (More) |
| ➤ | Amelia Island: The Amelia Island Parkway roundabout at Buccaneer Trail gets its light fixtures this week and its final layer of asphalt on Saturday, running into Sunday if the weather holds, after last weekend's rain pushed it back. The county says the lane striping follows at least two weeks later so the asphalt can cure, and asks drivers to watch for short-term traffic control during the weekend paving, which lands on Right Whale Festival Saturday. (More) |
| ➤ | West side: County Road 121 gets paved today through Wednesday on the stretch roughly four and a half to five miles north of the Duval County line, behind the temporary signals, with lane closures elsewhere on the project for pipe and drainage work through the week. The county posts the schedule every Friday. (More) |
| 📌 | Briefly Noted |
- Blue Fire Theatre's "Always … Patsy Cline" opens Friday at the Yulee Lions Club, 851023 U.S. 17, and runs through Nov. 14; the company's announcement carried no showtimes or ticket link, so check with Blue Fire before you drive out.
- FPU's pole replacement closures on Woodrow Drive and Island Walkway run through Friday, one segment at a time with the detour by Sadler Road, and the Simmons Road bike path stays closed through Dec. 11.
- The county's second workshop on its draft data center rules is next Monday, Nov. 9, at 3 p.m. in Yulee, and written comments are open until Jan. 8 at nassaucountyfl.com/1528.
- A week on, there is still no public record of the county's Oct. 26 Wards Creek decision or the Waterfront Advisory Board's vote on the park expansion; we checked again at 7:30 this morning and will print both when one exists.
| 🗓️ | This Week on the Island |
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Tue
3
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Your assigned precinct only • 7 a.m. to 7 p.m., and anyone in line at 7 gets to vote • photo ID with a signature; mail ballots must reach the elections office in Yulee by 7 p.m.
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Wed
4
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City Hall, 204 Ash St. • workshop 4:30, regular meeting 6 p.m. • the parking study, the special events rewrite and the Dog of the Month are on the same agenda; across town, Les DeMerle's birthday bash is at Story & Song at 5:30, $35
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Thu
5
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Peck Center gym, 510 S. 10th St. • Thursday and Friday 9:30 to 5, Saturday 9:30 to 1 • thousands of donated books sorted by category, most $3 or less, proceeds to the Fernandina branch; the members-only preview is Wednesday 3 to 6, and you can join at the door
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Fri
6
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1430 Park Ave. • 11:30 a.m. • $25, the sit-down opener to festival weekend; Friday evening has the Plantation Artists' Guild's free "Nature's Rhythms" reception at 5:30 and Amelia Island Opera's Sock-Hopera fundraiser at Amelia Community Theatre, Friday and Saturday
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Sat
7
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Main Beach Park, 32 N. Fletcher Ave. • Saturday 10 to 6 with a movie in the park until 9:30, Sunday 10 to 3 • free; the same Saturday morning has the Cross the Line Veterans 5K from Central Park at 8 and the police department's Community Appreciation Day at the station 10 to 1, and the Parkway roundabout is being paved, so leave early
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Sat
7
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The Hoyt House, 804 Atlantic Ave. • 3 to 5 p.m. • big-band standards from the community band Dr. Marc Dickman leads; RSVP to innkeeper@hoythouse.com or by text to 904-676-1419
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Sun
8
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Story & Song, 1430 Park Ave. • 3 p.m. • $25 for the Japanese fingerstyle guitarist, with a $40 guitar workshop at 1; the festival's second day runs 10 to 3 at Main Beach if you want the whales first
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The island went dark just after 12:30 Friday and stayed that way until about 3:10. Where were you when it happened, and what did you do with the afternoon: the kitchen that kept cooking, the nap, the errand you gave up on, the neighbor you finally talked to? Hit reply and let us know. We read every response.
Amelia Island Sea Turtle Watch just closed a record season, and it has been counting nests since the 1980s. Who trained its first volunteers, and why was the state so interested in a few people walking the beach at dawn?
Answer: Greenpeace, by founder Mary Duffy's account in Sunday's Observer. In 1985 the state's wildlife agency asked the environmental group to train volunteers because nobody knew how many sea turtles nested in Florida; about ten people answered a small notice at the Atlantic Rec Center, and the group began collecting data in 1986. Duffy led it for 40 years and handed it to Bill and Ronda Bokram this season.
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Your morning guide to Amelia Island & Nassau County
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Fernandina Beach, FL 32034