Still staying in Clearwater Beach, FL!

We were going to cross to Carrabelle, FL yesterday but when we went out into the gulf the waves were 3 to 4 ft. and I could not keep the boat up on plane going fast without overheating my port engine. We needed to go fast all day to make the 150 mile crossing during daylight hours, so we came back in.

Then we had an excellent opportunity to cross that night with only 2 ft waves all across the gulf. You can run fast or slow all night and arrive the next morning, which is the way most boats cross. However, when we talked about the weather up in the Florida panhandle, where we were going, it was going to be awful... just severe thunderstorms for 4 straight days, so we'd be stuck there instead of here, and on the boat in severe thunderstorms instead of beautiful Clearwater Beach. So we stayed.

If we get a chance to cross in the next week, we will, but if not, we may leave the boat here until May. We haven't decided yet. Oh, well.... that's boating!

Grrrr! I hate the wind!

It has been blowing strong for 2 solid weeks. Currently it's blowing a gale here (34MPH+) with gusts to 47MPH at the boat in the Clearwater Beach Marina.

It makes for great surf though. There are solid 5 ft. waves coming in here and the Spring Breaker crowd is enjoying playing in the surf. This was taken from a fishing pier at the beach. There are miles and miles of beach like this here and it's very popular.

The waves in the open waters of the gulf are currently 8 ft. There may be a small window of 2 to 3 ft. waves Monday or Monday night for us to cross the gulf, but that's still uncertain. We'll just wait and see.

Still waiting at Clearwater Beach, FL for gulf waves to calm down. It currently looks bad through next week with 6 to 8 ft waves in the gulf. I went fishing off the boat at the dock yesterday and caught about 6 fish.

This one is a nice sheepshead, which we had for dinner. It was delicious. They're about tops on the "good eating" list, owing to their shellfish diet. They have lots of strong, sharp teeth and eat oysters and barnacles by chewing at the shells until they get inside to eat the shellfish.












Jane Stone helped me catch it by holding the rod and keeping it on the hook while I ran to get my landing net. The Stones brought over barbecue so we could share the fish and still have enough to eat. Worked out fine, but I wish I could have caught another.




This one is a ladyfish, which is usually a night feeder (see the big eyes?). They fight hard and jump and shake their head when caught, but I threw it back unharmed because they're not good to eat. I also caught another ladyfish, a small bluestriped grunt and a small sand perch, all too little to eat, but fun. Unfortunately, I also caught another bigger ladyfish that broke the line off when it snagged it on a piling.

We'll be here at Clearwater Beach quite a while, just enjoying the nice location while waiting for the waves to settle down.

We're in Clearwater Beach, Fl waiting for the gulf waves to settle down so we can cross the 150 miles to Carrabelle, FL in the Panhandle. So far, it looks good for Thursday 3/19.

We came up here from Sarasota on a beautiful 80 degree day. Almost every day for the past 3 weeks in Sarasota has been a beautiful warm, sunny day. This is a great time of year to be here. We were joined by out friends, the Bill & Jane Stone. This is their boat "Loose Stones" behind us after a bridge opening on the way here. They'll be making the gulf crossing with us too, as our boats can both cruise at 16 knots. We have shuffled each other's cars so we both have cars here at Clearwater Beach. Tomorrow, we'll preposition cars to Carrabelle so we'll have them in the Panhandle.

More dolphin pictures! This guy always jumped and turned over so he splashed upside down. He stayed with us for quite a while.










We took the ICW waterway instead of the open gulf and it always has beautiful homes and interesting views.








At some places the barrier island separating the ICW and the gulf gets very narrow, so there's just one road and you can see across to the gulf from the ICW.








I was watching the fishing boats come in at our docks today and it's interesting to see the big pelicans watch the fish cleaning stations, hoping somebody will feed them.







Sometimes they get really pushy! The guy cleaning fish told people not to try to touch it because they'll bite. They don't feed the pelicans even though they beg, probably because it'll attract more and make them more aggressive. The big brown pelicans are beautiful fliers, frequently sailing on still wings about 3 inches above the water, riding the "ground effect" to spot fish near the surface.

Visitors!

My sister, Beth, and her two friends, Barbara and Kathy were in Florida at Kathy's house and drover over to see us today. Barbara was Beth's very good friend (Barb Early) way back in high school in Des Moines Iowa. They stopped at the Sarasota Botanical Gardens before coming here, and Bath just loves all things botanical.

It was a beautiful day, so we went out for a cruise in the harbors and ICW for a couple hours. This is Marina Jacks Marina, seen coming back in. The dolphins cooperated nicely by surfing our wake in one of the wider bays once and surfing and jumping for Beth and her friends on the way back.



Then we went to Mortons, a local high end version of Whole Foods, and got stone crab claws and a couple nice salads to eat on the aft deck during sunset. Overall, a very nice day, and nice to have Beth visit, and of course, Daisy recognized her as "one of the pack" instantly.


Tomorrow, our cruising buddies, Bill & Jane Stone are coming to Sarasota or Longboat Key. We plan to do the Gulf crossing with them next week from Clearwater to Carabelle.

Nice cruising in Pine Island Sound!

Just for fun, we went out to cruise some bays near Sarasota Monday and Tuesday. We went about 50 miles South and anchored at Cayo Costa state park, which is the next island North of Sanibel and Captiva islands. It is a very nice island accessible only by boat.

Of course, on the way through the ICW and the inland bays, the dolphins picked us up surfed and jumped in our wake. Even thought I've seen them a hundred times, I'm always captivated by them. They usually always turn sideways in the air so they don't belly flop when they land, or maybe it's to see the landing better. This one was easy to take a picture of him jumping because he'd surf the surface and then go down deep before jumping.

After we anchored, we took the dinghy into the beach on the inland side. They have a very large unpopulated gulf beach too, but dogs are not allowed on the gulf beaches and Daisy loves chasing a stick into the water. Kathy loves finding seashells, and this is a good shelling beach because it's not walked by hundreds of people every day. It's pretty secluded.

I liked walking in the shallows because there are interesting things to find, like this live starfish. Kathy found one too.









This was a pretty seashell, but I didn't keep it because it was occupied by a hermit crab.












... and this live sea urchin. This is not a spiny urchin, just the regular kind, like a Japanese restaurant would serve raw as "uni".








I found this empty sea urchin shell, but didn't keep it either because they get very fragile when dry. Kathy probably kept 2 dozen seashells for her collection including a few small conchs and a whelk shell.





When we went back to the dinghy, this Great Blue Heron was standing there and didn't want to leave. When we got very close with Daisy, he just casually walked about 50 ft. away and watched us until we left his beach to him again.





We had dinner on the aft deck and watched a pretty but unremarkable sunset... even though I just remarked about it.










Then, yesterday we cruised back up to Sarasota out in the gulf instead of the ICW. It was a very calm day in the open gulf, almost glassy at times. I tried fishing by trolling again for an hour, with no success. I thing you have to try longer and harder than that to actually catch fish, but it was fun.



I planed it for a while to feel the props because I had touched bottom in the ICW when I turned too late at a turn and got out of the very narrow channel. It really makes a big disturbance in that calm water. We decided that there was some vibration, so today we had our primary props put back on. We have been running on our backup props since October when I took the good Nibral props off to have them tuned after putting 6,000 miles on them doing the Great Loop Route 2 years ago. It turned out that they didn't need tuning up after all that use and even touching the bottom in the ICW in Georgia 2 or 3 times. The bronze props we took off today did need work as one had a bent tip of one blade.

Tomorrow my sister, Beth, and some friends are coming to Sarasota so we'll go out for a little afternoon cruise again.

Just more touristy stuff in Sarasota today, but fun. After getting some parts together for a boat project this morning, we went to the Sarasota Botanical Gardens this afternoon. It's an easy walk from the marina, right on Sarasota Bay.

They had a very interesting orchid and jungle flower greenhouse, set up to make you feel like it was in a rain forest, with lots of beautiful orchids. However, the orchids I found most interesting were these, which were growing in a tree near the sidewalk and just happened to be in full bloom today. The ones in the jungle display were all grown in a greenhouse and they cycle various plants through when they come into bloom, which is very infrequently for any one plant. That way, their display is always fresh and blooming. But these growing outside naturally probably don't look like this often so we would never notice them.

On the expansive grounds, they also had numerous subtropical and jungle trees. I really liked this Banyan tree. This is ONE tree, that grows like this by sending down air roots like 30 ft. strings in the air that take root when they touch the ground and build up another "trunk" until there are dozens of huge trunks all combined into a massive jungle grove that's really a single tree. The entire large grounds are very well done and show what you can do with enough money and the great growing climate for sub-tropicals in Sarasota.

They had an exhibit of poison dart frogs. These are the real colors of this frog.... electric blue. They also had electric green and electric yellow frogs.

They also had a display of hand carved Borucan Masks from Costa Rica. Kathy bought a mask
mostly covered with colorful frogs, for her frog collection back home.

Tomorrow we're getting up to go walk to the downtown Farmers Market, which is quite nice. For breakfast, we'll probably graze on donuts and whatever they have. I have to get a couple of the local Meyer Lemons too. Kathy doesn't believe that the juice is sweet, right out of the lemon.

Just enjoying Sarasota.

We have had beautiful weather here until March 1st, when big winds and colder temps came through. It's still 60 degree days, so lots better than Chicago, and it's supposed to go back to the 70s and 80s by March 5th.

Just regular fun stuff.... We went to a musical play "Patsy Cline - Always" which was quite enjoyable, mostly because the lead actress really had the Patsy Cline voice down pat (down Patsy?). We had 4 Saint Charles friends over to the boat on Monday, went to lunch with them and went to see their beautiful Sarasota condo. I loved their huge outdoor screen porch "lanai" overlooking a water channel and wetlands behind their home.

Then we went to Mote Aquarium today. It was unimpressive after seeing the excellent aquarium in Chattanooga, but I really liked watching this octopus creepy crawl around the tank. It looks out through the glass and almost looks somewhat intelligent, which I understand they are.


We also drove to Lake Suzy, FL today to drop off our Winslow life raft to get re-certified. Winslow is a good, working, American manufacturing facility with a very good rating for quality in the life raft industry. They also showed me that they recertify all of United Airlines' airplane rafts and door exit slides, which are huge when they're just blown up and laid out on a factoryt floor. It's nice to see some US companies making it OK in this economy.

We're talking about maybe cruising down to the pine island sound for 2 days, just to see it again. It's a very nice place to cruise and we're only half a day away. Then we plan to leave here about 3/14 or so to go to Clearwater and wait for calm seas in the Gulf to cross to Carabelle.