NAVARRE BEACH—When the clouds over the Gulf of Mexico began swirling, Trisha James put down her morning coffee just before 10:10 a.m. and armed herself with a camera before heading back out onto her balcony.
“You know, I had this premonition that with this weather that I would be seeing (a waterspout)," James said.
James, who lives on the west end of Navarre Beach near Ohio Street, and is no stranger to waterspouts. But Saturday was the first time she caught one on video.
“I was just lucky,” she said.
And what a spout it was.
In the video, the funnel travels from side to side for almost 6 minutes before dissipating. It formed into a “sting ray shape,” James said, before being sucked back up in the dark clouds.
James videoed from her balcony and observation deck the entire time it churned in the Gulf.
“What scares me is a hurricane,” she said. “This doesn’t scare me. This excites me.”
James’ waterspout wasn’t the only one seen over the weekend. On Friday afternoon, Navarre Beach and Holley-Navarre firefighters also spied a few in the Gulf.
Storms dumped about 2 inches of rain by early Saturday afternoon along the Emerald Coast as a cold front moved in from the west, the National Weather Service reported.
Several more inches of rain were expected to fall overnight.
