Only in Florida.
So last night I was watching a storm chasing crew streaming live from Cedar Key on the eastern edge of the Big Bend of Florida just as Hurricane Helene was making her way through. The storm surge had been inundating the coast of this small island for hours and they were capturing video of the damaging waters as they rose up beyond the shores, past the low-lying streets, and pounding into the first level of the homes of an elevation at less than 20 to 30 ft.
As the storm moved past, making landfall some miles away to the northwest and beginning to weaken, a relative calm descended over the small weary island, drowned in murky seawater and pitch black darkness since, of course, the power was out, the film crew rolled cameras illuminated by their beefy SUV high-beams to show us quite the scene.
Just after midnight, as the camera focused out down a dark, lonely street, completely flooded with roiling, dark seawater, the crew spotted a person in the water.
"What the Florida?!," spat out one of the streamers as he spotted the dude. The swimmer wasn't in distress. They weren't escaping a trapped situation. The lanky shirtless dude soon made that clear enough by standing on something submerged in the water and gleefully raising their hands triumphantly like Rocky. Then they dove happily back into the decidedly sketchy water containing God-knows-what debris and flotsam. Got to get in those laps, Florida Man!
