7 December 2014

Very foggy this morning, we didn’t get out of the marina until 8:30 AM. The fog was still out on the Gulf, we had the radar running for the first two hours. About a mile of visibility. Lucky for us there were no crab traps outside of Marcos Island.

The first ½ of the trip was pretty tame, we were well outside the crab trap zone. The second half had lots and lots of traps for us to make our way through.

We saw two batches of dolphins. They came over to check us out, surfed for a few moments and then were gone. We think that the ICW dolphins are more used to people and being fed, that’s why they hang out more.

We saw three sea turtles on the trip. The last one was huge, about the size of our salon table. We turned away to keep from hitting it. It looked up at us as we went by, giving a hard stare before diving under the waves.

We are anchored just off of Sandy Key in about 10′ of water. We have 130′ of chain out, about twice what we need. We’ve closed up the bimini so it does not act like a big sale and furled all of the flags. It’s amazing how loud the Looper flag is on the front bow rail.

We started off the evening with an orange full moon. It’s now white and putting a lot of light out onto the water. I can clearly see the island in the light. The nice thing is the moon won’t set until the morning, so we will have light all night long.

We also set the drag alarm and will make sure we take it below with us. The nice thing is that if we do drag it will be away from Sandy Key. We have about a mile of clear space behind us before we start seeing crab traps again. The water is a light chop since we are well into the Florida Bay.

We went slightly over 70 miles today with another 35 for Monday. Looking to be in the marina around noon.