Another wonderful day, and the best sailing we've had since we arrived. We started the morning with a short bike ride, then ate breakfast and took the tandem kayak out in order to push floating grass out of the way ofCaptain's Lady's outboard motor. Yesterday, leaving the dock had been quite challenging because so much floating grass had blown into the little cove where the boat is docked, blocking the engine, so Barry thought we should try to clean as much as possible out of the way, and it helped immensely -- leaving the dock couldn't have gone more smoothly.
The wind had shifted back to the north and was blowing 10-15 knots, finally. We finally felt like we were sailing again, managing to maintain speeds of 4 to 6 mph all day, instead of the paltry 2-4 mph of the previous couple of sails. We traveled west on a broad reach, jibing back and forth around the ICW channel, for quite a ways, then turned around and tacked back the same way we'd come. Twice, the pin on the shackle attached to the jib sheets and the clew of the jib came open, so we had to figure out how to get that back on (turn downwind so the jib doesn't fill), and both times we did fine. We are really starting to trust our instincts as sailors, and find that we can figure out what to do when things go a little awry, as happens more often than not!
A happy captain
One of the only other boats out today
We ended up sailing over 20 miles in 4.5 hours, and as a result, had a late lunch at 3 pm. Our leftovers from the previous night's dinner really hit the spot at that point.
After showering, we headed back to the Seven Mile Bridge and did the full four-mile walk to work up an appetite for dinner. On the way we saw a shark and a large sea turtle in the clear, shallow waters looking down from the bridge. We also saw and heard something large occasionally surface and splash back down, perhaps a dolphin, but we never saw a fin, just a large splash now and then. The sunset was even more spectacular than the previous night's.
Just another day in paradise...
We ate at The Island again, outside, of course. We had a wonderful meal of seafood quesadillas (Barry) and shrimp soft tacos (me) with all the fixin's, and we splurged on dessert -- key lime pie for Barry, and an extremely decadent and amazing fried key lime pie for me. The batter was heavy with cinnamon, making it taste like crunchy cinnamon toast around the pie. Mmmmmmmmm!