Day 207- Where is Shalimar?

Tuesday, October 12, 2021
Temp: 85/68, Humidity: 49/92%, Top Wind: E5 mph, Precip: bright & sunny, Miles Traveled: 48

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I don’t believe that wind number… we had whitecaps coming at us, which means we had an East wind of around 11mph. Not that it’s a big deal, but sometimes I can’t get good statistics. 😏
We did get up with the alarm today so that we could get a move on. Here is another picture of the Palafox marina, which shows that most boats are just tied to docks around the perimeter of the basin. It really is in a great location to access town, so I’m sure glad they had a spot for us last night!

We went south out Pensacola Bay, then turned east and had the morning sun straight in our eyeballs. Wowza that was a lot of glare on the water! Break out the hats and sunglasses! We went past a very interesting kind of water park, with all kinds of floating slides and boinkers for jumping on.

Along the way, out on the spit of land between us and the Gulf, was this giant tall unidentified tower. It must be some kind of weather station, but I couldn’t find any information about it. It must do top secret squirrel 007 stuff.

I got a text from our daughter in Spokane Washington that they had 32 degrees this morning, and it was time to dig out the Halloween leggings. I teased her with this picture, and told her that my Halloween leggings are the same as my 4th of July leggings. 😉. Standard issue Florida boating duds.

We tootled past lots and LOTS of sand dunes between us and the Gulf. It’s so pretty, I just wanted to get in a car and drive along the beach out there! Soon enough, I’ll get to go to our own Siesta Key Beach. I’m so ready!! I really miss the beach, the warm Gulf water, the relaxation.

We went past the free dock at Fort Walton that I originally thought we might stay at. Eek! Since it is hot and I had made plans to stay at a marina, I had not read the reviews. The dock was damaged in the storms and is no longer available for overnight dockage. It looked ok, but there were signs saying the docks close at 10:00pm – no overnight allowed. 😬 We continued on into Choctawhatchee Bay (Choc-taw-HATCH-ee, not Choc-ta-WHACH-ee … the W is silent 🤫). We turned north and found our destination: Two Georges Marina. We meandered in to the fuel dock and took on just 100 gallons of diesel, got our slip assignment for tonight, and got all backed into the slip. We are back in the land of fixed docks! We haven’t done these for awhile and we were a little rusty on our procedure. But we got in and settled without any issues. We didn’t leave the boat all afternoon, because there is no place to go! We’re kind of isolated in a residential area, so we just relaxed. I finally went outside just to walk a little bit. Lo and behold, there was a giant video commercial playing on a big screen at the outside end of our dock! 😳. I think it’s a big electronic reader board on a boat that tootles around advertising, kind of like the airplanes that fly around with banners advertising stuff. Weird! It really caught my attention, that’s for sure!

There were dozens of fishing boats here – these are just a few on the shoreline dock by us.

We’ve been rocked and rolled a little bit, since there’s no breakwater between the marina and the bay. We had a beautiful sunset out the back window, facing directly west.

Saturday is still looking good. You can’t read the numbers, but you can see that the blue bars on the graph are short inside the pink outline. That’s Saturday. The top section is the north section of our voyage near Carrabelle. The bottom section is the south end of the voyage near Clearwater. Winds are less than 10, and waves are less than 2. I’m praying it stays that way! We got on the interweb and requested a weather summary and voyage synopsis from Chris Parker’s Marine Weather Center. He does personalized weather routing and information for a fee, and we’ve heard excellent reviews from friends who have used his services. We should get some information from him tomorrow and again on Friday about the expected conditions on Saturday.

In the meantime, we’ll be hitting the road to move along another 70-ish miles tomorrow to Panama City. This shows our week: 1) Mobile Bay, 2) Gulf Shores, 3)Pensacola, 4)BLUE DOT is us at Shalimar today. Where we’re going: 5) Panama City, 6)Apalachicola, and 7) is Carrabelle. So now you sort of know where Shalimar is. Like it’s something you’ve always wanted to know, right? HA! 😁