Switched firewalld to iptables and that solved the problem for now.
according to what I found here: https://lists.fedorahosted.org/archives/list/firewalld-users@lists.fedorahos... https://firewalld.org/2020/09/policy-objects-introduction I have to do something with policy objects if I want to use nftables. I'm going to investigate that route.
Thanks to all who gave me suggestions in this thread Jouk