Bob's Junkets: We Sail With The Tide- Encore

Fixed Again

As I write, Mechanic Steve is out figuring up the bill for the steering fix. We plan on going to sea at first light. And it will be to sea, for in about one and a half hours, we will be in the Gulf of Mexico waters. Then we'll sail northward up the Emerald Coast.

Next Morning
We set out at about 0800 hours and managed to wind our way out of our new found home, Fort Myers, Florida, without much incident. It wasn't long till the boys started spotting dolphins. How cool! They swam along side our boat in two's and three's. Every once-in-awhile one of 'em would look up at us, like he was checking to see if we were watching his show and then he would belly flop and spray water all over the boat. Untrained, he didn't laugh like "Flipper" did.


There's the playful little guy right there


The trouble is you have to have a quick trigger finger to get 'em jumping

Once out of the harbor at Ft. Myers, we started north. We made it to Sarasota late in the afternoon, and decided to make this our first attempt at dropping anchor and "Staying on the Hook". We found a quaint little spot just off the Inter Coastal Water Way (ICW). We dropped the anchor, it held, and we started cooking dinner. Mitchell kept saying we were moving, so we finally took him up to the bridge and showed him the GPS coordinates. We wrote them down so he could go back and make sure it was true that we weren't moving.

About 0330 hours (that's three in the morning, folks) I hear it raining awfully hard. I'm half asleep and then I realized, this can't be rain, or I would have had to close my window. I looked outside and let me tell you. WE HAD MOVED! About a quarter of a mile. We are near the dock of a residence that we were anchored near. I wake up Wayne and we debated whether to have a drink, make coffee or cry. Well, a fourth option worked out. I rowed our dinghy over to our new friend's dock and then he got ropes to me and were able to pull the boat far enough up the dock that we could start the engines without doing damage to any of our running gear. Then we started the generator and had a hot cup of coffee. And we did all this without waking up anyone else on the boat!

Here's a shot of Jeff driving the boat

We are now headed into Tampa Bay and can see the sky line. We are passing under a really remarkable bridge. The highway is called the Sunshine Skyway and we are assuming the bridge may have the same name.