Ice Floes & Florida

I have a little hot news and a little cool news. I'm leaving on Saturday evening (Feb. 19) to drive down to Florida with my dad and my brother to visit my grandparents. We will be returning late Thursday evening (Feb. 24). My brother and I might hit Universal Studios again, but the highlights for me will be playing cards with my grandparents and hitting the flea markets looking for cheap comics. Florida in February. Now that's what I call a warm spell!

Speaking of warm spells, we've certainly had an odd one this past week. The Thames river runs parallel along the back of my property and it was frozen over last week. The weather was quite warm for several days earlier this week and on Wednesday God gave us an small display of some of nature's awesome power.

Shortly after I left for work on Wednesday morning my parents heard a series of explosions. They went to investigate the noise and the ice on the river was splitting. A series of large ice floes were breaking apart and it sounded like explosions for about fifteen minutes. I heard one such explosion on Thursday morning and it's surprising to hear how loud it can be. The ice was perhaps a foot thick and it was being broken clean through, as you can see in this next picture.



My parents explored our backyard afterwards and took numerous pictures. With the ice splitting and melting, the river overflowed the banks of our horse pastures. The water rose just high enough that it started to carry the newly-broken ice floes over our lawn. They were like mini glaciers being dragged across the ground, gouging trenches in the land and digging up enormous piles of dirt. You can see one large mound that was excavated by the ice in only fifteen minutes in the left side of this next picture.



The ice was broken so quickly and the water receded so abruptly that it stranded a catfish on land. Catfish are a notoriously robust breed of fish that can live for a fair amount of time outside of the water, and my dad came across the one shown in this next picture after the ice had stopped crashing. He went and released it back into the river after taking this picture and swam away. Nothing like a chilling river to get you back into the swim of things.



The child in the foreground is Hyun, one of the two children from South Korea that are staying with us while they go to an english school here. The child in the background is our other South Korean student, John. You can see several other pictures starting on this page on my parents' web site.