While forecasts show clear skies ahead, some residents still may be cleaning up small debris from the winds and rain that moved through the area with little damage on Monday.

“Our yard looks like I haven’t raked in six months,” Colonels Island resident John Henderson said on Monday, describing the small limbs and clusters of moss that took over his Youman’s Road neighborhood after a windy weekend. 

Winds whipped the marshlands all weekend, and after Sunday night’s rain, the marshes looked more like ocean, Henderson said. One of his neighbors recorded 5 inches of rain in his rain gauge by Monday afternoon, he added.

He even saw small whitecaps during the high tide, measuring between 6-12 inches, and heard the wind whip through the nearby oaks and palms with a high-pitched whistle, he said.

“It’s just been squalls coming. It’ll clear up. The wind keeps blowing. The wind will get really, really strong and another squall will pass,” he said. “When it was dead high tide, you couldn’t see anything but water from here over to St. Catherines Island. It was cloudy and hazy. It just looked like water.

“This is usually real calm here,” he added. “Since I’ve been down here … I’ve not seen whitecaps.”

On Monday, a tornado watch was in effect for much of the morning until 1 p.m. in Liberty, Long, Bryan, McIntosh and 12 other Southeast Georgia counties, according to a news brief released by the Liberty County Emergency Management Agency.

on Monday afternoon, the National Weather Service issued flash flood, high surf, wind and lake wind advisories through Monday evening and early Tuesday morning.

But the advisory and accompanying flash flood warnings mostly were precautionary, according to LCEMA Director Mike Hodges.

“This is all coming from a system that built up down in the Bahamas and it has ridden from Florida up,” Hodges explained Monday. “It looks like it’s just a rain event, which, Lord knows, we need.”

Still, the storms left scattered customers from Georgia Power and Coastal Electric Cooperative without electricity for varying amounts of time overnight Sunday and Monday afternoon.

Georgia Power spokeswoman Konswello Monroe said about 600 customers lost power overnight, and outages lasted anywhere from two to four hours. Their cause?

The outages were caused by typical storm-related activity, such as limbs and trees on power lines, Monroe said.

Coastal Electric customers also lost power due to downed trees, according to Vice President of Communications Mark Bolton.

Among the outages was one on a Coastal Electric line on Barrington Ferry Road just south of Highway 119, Bolton said.

More trees downed near the coast claimed only power lines, and a docked boat went down at Merchant’s Wharf, according to Eastern District Fire Department Chief Joe Martin. No one was injured, and the boat was recovered.

“There’s just a lot of debris everywhere,” he said Tuesday morning. “It’s rainy and cloudy, but no wind though.”