Thanksgiving Week: We are thankful for so many blessings, including new friends to spend the holiday with! All of our family is in Washington State. It seems like we’re never home long enough to make many good friends around our neighborhood here in Sarasota. Our dirt here is really just a home base for our many adventures. We were only home a total of 17 weeks in 2017, and this year we’ll only be here a total of 14 weeks by the time we get to 12/31/18. But we have a whole new Looper family, and there are a lot of loopers that spend the winter in Florida! It was our pleasure and fun to host Thanksgiving dinner at our home with our “Bay boat” friends – Bay Tripper and Parrot Bay. A delicious dinner with all of the traditional fixin’s, along with lots of laughter, conversation, and friendship.
Month: November 2018
Day 252: Island Girl earns her GOLD!!!
11/19/18 Monday: Hallelujah! I felt great when I woke up! Woo-Hoo!!! The dawn of a new day brings great promise! Today – we’d travel 65 miles from Clearwater to Sarasota and CROSS OUR WAKE! That’s what loopers call it when you complete and close the loop, so to speak, crossing your own starting point. For us, that will be marker 59, just south of Stickney Point bridge on the ICW in Sarasota.
Ahhhh! It is great to be back in the land of warmth! High temps in the 70’s for the next week. YAY!
Days 250,251: All systems GO for the Gulf Crossing.
11/17/18 Saturday: We spent the morning preparing for our upcoming adventure. We looked again at the weather forecast, and it actually looked like tomorrow night would be a bit better – a little bit calmer wind and sea. Now what?! It sounded like everybody else in the marina was planning to go tonight. We want to go with other boats. Not that there is really anything anybody else can really do if there is a problem – other than pick us up out of the water if there’s a fire or something. But for a journey across 180 miles of big water in the dark, we want to go with other boats! So – we decided to stick with the original plan of tonight. After all, tonight looked good, and things could change and tomorrow may not end up being good. Every weather source we checked looked like tonight would be winds under 15mph and waves under 2 feet.
This is our journey track…. A lot of big open water!
Day 249: A long trip through hurricane devastation
11/16/18 Friday: OK – this is getting ridiculous! 34 degrees?!? There is definitely a difference between the climate in the Florida panhandle, and southwest Florida where we live!
Day 248: A Foggy, Windy, Cold trip to Panama City
11/15/18 Thursday: The one thing you should never have on a boat, is a schedule. We keep looking at the possible weather window to cross the Gulf on Saturday night, and making tracks to get to Apalachicola to be ready to cross in time. But man, oh man is it ever cold! And foggy. And windy. If we didn’t want to take this coming opportunity to get across the gulf, we would have slowed down and waited for better weather. And enjoyed the panhandle a little more. We completely bypassed Pensacola which would have been fun. And there were plenty of other places that we could have explored. But – onward ho we go! I guess it was fortunate that the wind was blowing or the fog would have been way worse. With no power on the free dock at Fort Walton, we slept with no heat last night, so we had the blankets piled on! (We don’t like to leave the generator running all night.). It was 39 degrees at 6:00am… BRRR! We stayed warm enough, but getting up and dressed was done in super speedy fast mode!
Day 247: Cold, Wind, Rain-Welcome to Florida?!
11/14/18 Wednesday- We’ve officially been on the loop for 8 months! And it looks like we’ll be home within a week. People wonder why we did it so fast. But we really didn’t. We’ve been tootling along with the rest of the loopers on the seasonal track. We left the west coast of Florida in March, went up the Atlantic in the Spring, across Canada in the Summer, down the rivers in the Fall, and will do winter in Florida. We will spend the winter in Florida/Bahamas, just like the rest of the loopers…. but we will have crossed our wake. So that is why we can do it in just over 8 months. We just happen to live where many loopers spend the winters! How lucky is that?!
Day 246: Being touristy in Flor & Bama
11/13/18 Tuesday: We had planned for this to be a day that we would not travel along the waterway, expecting it to be rainy and windy. We were right. It was that. And cold. Our first mission of the day was to go get a rental car. Hertz was cheaper than Enterprise this time, and they would come pick us up at the marina. YAY! However, one thing we have learned about renting cars – don’t be in a hurry or on a schedule. It is a very slow process. Good thing we didn’t have a flight to catch or anything! We got our car and stopped at Publix for some groceries. It certainly is not the least expensive option for groceries, but they have a good stuff – including a good deli and bakery. We took our haul back to the boat, then went to meet up with our ‘Bay Boats’ at Lulu’s for lunch.
Days 244,245: Turning EAST on the GICW
11/11/18 Sunday: The weather settled today, we left Dog River Marina around 7:30 and made our way out into Mobile Bay. The water was fairly calm at the marina, and a little choppier out in the Bay. And it was cold! The wind was from the north and had a chilly northern winter bite in it. We were bundled up, and the wind wanted to blow us south.
Day 243: A down day at Dog River
11/10/18 Saturday: There were just a few things on the agenda today. The electrical crew got busy working on the fly bridge VHF radio. It has been extremely noisy and static-y, particularly on channel 16. Kenny figured it was some kind of ground or wiring issue because there seemed to be interference between it and the auto pilot. HUH? There has been something weird going on with it for a week or so. And for the last couple of days, people have not been able to hear or understand him very easily when he talks on it, saying his voice is all muffled. So he got up there and did some magic, and we’ll see if it performs better.
Day 242: The River Wrap-up
11/9/18 Friday: We tried to sleep in today since we didn’t have far to travel. All these 5:00 mornings reset my internal hopper, and I was awake. I finally got up around 6. We had such a peaceful and calm night! This little creek was great. The It’s OK2 boat was already gone. I rechecked the weather forecast, and it was still showing that there would be wind and rain in Mobile around noon. If we left here by 8:00 or so, we’d likely beat the yucky weather. Here’s our new First Mate enjoying the nice calm morning – not too cold out there, as you can see by the short sleeve uniform.
