The early morning light woke us at 6:30 am on Monday morning, October 30th. It feels strange having it light so early in the day, but that will change in a few days time. After breakfast we got the boat ready to go and backed out of our slip by 8 am. We gave a big wave to the owners of the dock, then headed out of Little Sabine Bay into the Gulf ICW. The skies were clear, the temps were in the 60's (though warmed up to the low 70's by mid-afternoon) and we had a 10 knot easterly breeze blowing. With the breeze on our nose, it was fairly cool and I stayed in long pants and long sleeves most of the day.
We had a 38 nautical mile run east to Destin, most of it in Santa Rosa Sound. It was easy traveling - a fairly wide body of water with enough depth through the first half that we didn't have to pay particular attention. The second half of the trip was through a much narrower section of water with a well marked channel, requiring that we pay a bit more attention to our course.
Lucky for us, about an hour into our trip the dolphin came out to play. We first picked up three dolphin as they swam in from the side and started riding the bow wave in front of Golden. I stood on the bow and watched them, then all of a sudden they were joined by three more - six dolphin surfing and jumping in our bow wave! What fun! I traded places with Mike for a while so he could watch them also. They stayed with us for about 10 minutes, most of the time in our bow wave, but they also dropped back and played for a while in our stern quarter wake before disappearing. They were such hams, and they were so obviously having fun surfing along.
To the south of us all day was Santa Rosa Island, an almost completely uninhabited sandy barrier island, most of which is part of the Gulf Islands National Seashore. It's gorgeous beach - probably the whitest and prettiest sand beach anywhere in the world (I'm not kidding - I've seen a lot of beaches!!). It's taken a beating over the past few years of hurricanes and many of the taller dunes that we remember from our Destin condo years are gone, leaving simple flat stretches of beach between the sound and the Gulf. We hope that Mother Nature puts the sand back during the next few storms!
It was much quieter on the water today. It's been said that cruisers should move along in Florida from Monday through Friday, and stay put on Saturday and Sunday. It's good advice if you can live by it since every Floridian seems to own a boat and use it on the weekends, making the waterways a zoo. Yesterday was testament to that! Today we had the Gulf ICW to ourselves - with the exception of one tow that we passed early in the day.
There
are several places along Santa Rosa Island where we passed military
antennas of one kind or another, all (probably) associated with
either the huge Eglin Air Force Base or Pensacola Naval Air
Station. Most we'd seen before, but there was a new antenna that
must have been installed in the last few years because we'd never
seen it. It could almost pass for modern art with the intricate
support structure it had beneath its white dome. Very interesting.
At one point, just shy of Fort Walton Beach, we passed the approach end to one of Hurlburt Field's (Eglin Air Force Base) runways. As we passed, we could look down the runway and see big heavy cargo planes sitting on the parking areas. We wished aloud that a plane would come in while we were there to watch. We almost got our wish - we were only a half mile or so further on when a big heavy transport came in low over the GICW to land at Hurlburt. It was awesome to see!
From then on we could see a lot of airplane activity: big heavy transports, fighter jets, and helicopters. It seemed like a goodly number of our military folk were out practicing their skills on this gorgeous blue sky day.
Around 1 pm we passed under the Destin/East Pass Bridge, then hooked a quick left hand turn into Destin Harbor. This almost felt like coming home since we'd spent a lot of time in this area when we owned our condo here. There was a huge new building going up at the mouth of the harbor - very disconcerting since it dwarfs everything else around it. Beyond that, Destin felt the same as it had before, albeit with a some new buildings since we'd last been here. The harbor was jam packed full of charter fishing boats and privately owned sport fishermen, testament to Destin's reputation as the Panhandle's sport fishing capital. We did a lap of the harbor, looking at everything and remarking on what had changed and what hadn't. We had planned to go around to Joe's Bayou on the north side of Destin, but decided that dropping a hook in Destin Harbor would suit us nicely. That way we could watch all the boating activity going on around us.
After scouting out the whole harbor, we chose to anchor in the middle of Destin Harbor at its widest part, and fairly close to the largest group of charter fishing boats. The harbor's channels run along either side of water, leaving the center of the harbor as a safe place to anchor. We had about 8 feet of water and our anchor set well. We then happily sat back and watched the boats come and go on both sides of us.
We debated as to whether we wanted to avail ourselves of one of the many restaurants lining Destin Harbor, but decided in favor of walking over to our favorite seafood market, Sexton's, and getting fresh shrimp to eat on board. Nothing beats fresh shrimp, and we've got great memories of the shrimp dinners that Natalie cooked up for us through the years at the condo.
Mike went ashore in the dinghy on the shrimp run, while I stayed on board to take a shower and pick up the boat. He didn't take long and was soon back with a bagful of fresh headless shrimp. YUM!
The rest of the afternoon was spent on board working at the computer (we picked up about six open Wi-Fi signals from shore - free Wi-Fi!) and reading. We broke from whatever we were doing each time we heard an airplane, watching helicopters flying low down the beach, and waves of fighter jets coming overhead in 4-plane formations. Fun stuff.