Saturday 2/16/19….Apalachicola, Florida. Woke up this morning to beautiful weather. One of the best weather days we’ve had so far! Michael saw a River Otter swim by the stern that headed across the channel towards two Bald Eagles perched on a tree stump. Beautiful! We have a six seat golf cart at our disposal to scout-about in. Appears that golf carts are a quite popular mode of transportation here and we see them everywhere. We took our cart for a scout-about and passed some beautiful old homes (just can’t resist the real estate in each location) and ended up at the Piggly Wiggly for supplies. This store’s claim to fame seems to be bug deterrents. They have a whole section dedicated to bug repellents, bug candles and bug killers. We forgot with the warm Florida weather comes bugs. We headed back to the marina and took a short walk over to Oyster City Brewing Company for some beer sampling. What a fun spot and what a fun town this is! Back at the boat we walked a half-block to a great little seafood market – a couple of shrimp boats parked off our bow are right behind it and we bought fabulous fresh jumbo shrimp for Fettuccini tonight. Yum. Listened to live music from each of the two bars located just across the street from our dock. Life is good…..

Sunday 2/17/19…Apalachicola, Florida. Woke up to pea soup fog this morning but it burned off early and was again one of the prettiest days so far. Went for a walking scout-about and bought some books from the bookstore that was going out of business:(. Then again in the golf cart to find where we can get fuel before we leave. When we came in on Friday we passed a “looper” boat anchored across from where we are docked. It was such a beautiful afternoon we decided to go over and introduce ourselves. We cruised over to “Manatee” and met Sarah. Ted was working on repairing their generator so we didn’t see him. We made a date to have coffee together the next morning. We untied the dinghy, said good-bye to Sarah, floated off and pulled the cord to start the engine – nothing. Again and again and again and again…..nothing. Our new (used three times) engine would not start. Sarah yelled to us they would come get us and tow us back to our boat. Ted came out from the engine room and they hopped in their dinghy and came to our rescue. Great first impression! Back on the boat we listened to live music again from the two bars across the street. This town is called the Forgotten Coast. They say because that because it never developed like the rest of Florida and is still Old Florida. There are no buildings over three stories and no big box stores here. When I asked our host if there was a camera shop in town he said “Oh no, there are no stores like that here. Heck you can’t even buy underwear here”.  Again we find it extremely charming and the vibe is exciting, energetic and happy.

Monday 2/18/19…Apalachicola, Florida. Woke up to pea soup fog again this morning. Walked across the street to meet Sarah and Ted for coffee/breakfast. They are on their 29^th cruise around the loop. This is not a typo they are on their 29^th cruise around the loop! As you can imagine, they were great fun to meet and very interesting and experienced. They say people ask them all the time if they don’t get bored with so many times around. Their response was no way, it’s always different each time.  Today the pea soup weather turned to rain and a little cold snap.

Michael’s project today is to get Scout-About’s engine running again which he did. Seems the automatic safety kill switch had died after 3 uses. Michael bypassed it and ordered a new one. He also bought a bug zapper today. We have really only needed a zapper for a couple of nights on the entire trip so far but on Saturday night we REALLY needed one.  Sunday’s sunrise revealed hundreds of black gnats that committed Harry Kari by landing on any of the fog-dew covered surfaces. A big mess!

Appears we’ll be here a little longer. Our weather guy, Eddie, says it doesn’t look like we’ll have a good weather window to do the crossing until this weekend, maybe Friday the 22^nd. Will keep you posted. Did you know that today is National Drink Wine Day? Cheers!