Stella, Jif, and Firehook Crackers for Me; Nap Time for the Admiral and Bosun: We Broke the 2000 Mile Mark Today!

What a day! We woke up to 24 degrees, a frozen hose despite best efforts to drain it last evening, lines frozen to the cleats, the pilings, the dock, themselves; but clear skies and a hunger for the day's adventure.

It was chilly to say the least. For the first time this trip, I wore the crew hat that my mother made for me in 1977 when I bought my first sailboat, SnowGoose. You needed it in Maine; I didn't expect to need it in Florida. Thank you, Mom.

And here's how frozen lines that can't be coiled look like once you get them undone and pried, scraped, and beaten off the cleat, piling, and dock.

Today's cruise started briefly in the bay off Port St. Joe, moved to the Gulf County Canal, and then to a channel through cypress swamp, Lake Wimico, more cypress swamp, a long run through Appalachicola Bay, and finally through the Carrabelle Channel and up the Carrabelle River.

Almost as soon as we left the marina, a pod of Dolphins greeted us, a harbinger of a wonderful bird and wildlife day. We encountered many more dolphins, two racoons washing food on two different beaches in the cypress swamp, thousands of wintering coots, bald eagles, great blue herons, a great white egret, osprey, kingfisher, a marsh hawk, loons, brown pelicans, terns, and, even way down here, Bangor geese--aka cormorant. All of these critters looked cold and I say that from the vantage point of our very warm, comfortable, and dry salon.

As you may be able to see in the photo of the Admiral above, night before last's ice storm, though nothing like Maine's famous 1998 debacle, still coated the trees in the cypress swamp 36 hours later. The photo below may show that more clearly:

Though we started out in mostly calm seas, by the time we got to Appalachicola Bay, it was blowing a hard 15 knots plus out of the north, north west which generated 1-2 foot seas--nothing particularly challenging but we took an awful lot of salt spray and the windshield wipers ran steadily for an hour and a half.

We're now tucked in at a well protected resort called the Moorings several miles up the Carrabelle River. It looks like Sunday might be the day for us to cross the Gulf of Mexico to Tarpon Springs. If so, we'll anchor about ten miles from here Saturday night at Dog Island and leave at the very first hint of light on Sunday morning. We'll be toasting the weather gods tonight and tomorrow night in hopes of a calm crossing.

Oh, and did I mention we've now traveled over 2000 statute miles on our Journey on Katahdin. For some that would be a solid third of their Great Loop. For us, I'm thinking it's between 25 and 30 percent.

The Bosun promises he'll write soon. 'Til then.