January 30, 2012- West Coast Florida

Sea turtles head....they are not easy to take a picture of!

We had an unbelievable day today. The wind was strong, but because it was a NE wind the land kept the seas small and we were flying. We averaged over 7 knots, and we saw over 8 knots quite a bit. I wasn't too lazy to sail today, so we sailed from anchor up to anchor set. We had to keep one reef in the main and played around with the genoa as the winds picked up. We couldn't have asked for better weather for this trip.
We had hoped to make it to Marco Island, and we almost did, but we anchored just a mile south of there in the lee of Kice Island. We had to do a fair amount of steering around crab pots during the day, and rather than continue on another mile to Marco in the dark we decided to get in before all the light was gone so we didn't catch a pot on accident. We didn't see any pots on our way in to anchor, but better safe than sorry.
We saw two sea turtles today, right after Chris and I were talking about how we had seen a ton of manatees and hardly any sea turtles...two of them pop up one right after another. Dahlia would have loved it, they were fairly big too. Then, as we were heading into where we were going to anchor, I was on the trampoline near the bow of the boat looking out for crab pots and I was nearly scared half to death by the surfacing of two dolphins on our bow wave. We have been waiting so long to have dolphins swim off of our bow, and they show up when I can hardly see them. There is something really special about being able to stand only feet away from them while they were swimming along with us.
This is definitely one of those trips that I will never forget. Chris and I miss the kids terribly, but it was nice to have this time for just he two of us!