Our Voyage South

March 3, 2013

Two new boats and two new couples, Sal and Ina, and Tino and Carla have arrived on the dock this week. The one couple is from Picton, Ontario, and when we helped them dock, Sal’s first question was ‘Does anybody play guitar here?’ It turned out we had 2 guitar players on the dock, that sounded really nice with his harmonicas. This led to several pot luck suppers, jam sessions, sing-alongs, and a lot of enjoyable evenings during the week.

On Wednesday we were invited to go lobstering on Carla and Tino’s fishing boat. Dave was interested in learning how it was done and where to look for lobsters, so we took them up on their invitation. Tino took us over to the Gulf side of the Island to start on some of the spots on his GPS, that he had marked from his last trip. What we were looking for was small clearings in the sea grass that had some kind of rock formation that the lobsters could hide under. When we found a spot that looked like it had some potential, Tino would dive over the side for a better look. If he spotted lobsters, we would get in the water and help try to find them, usually you would see an antenna sticking out from under a ledge. To get them out, he would use a tickle stick to try and touch the lobsters tail at the back of the hole and make them shoot out of the hole and into his net. Tino made it look a lot easier than it really was because when the lobster decide to come out of the holes, they move really fast. In spite of this, we returned to the dock at the end of the day with 15 legal sized lobster. It was a beautiful day on the water and a good pot luck lobster supper.

Our time here is coming to an end and we have to start thinking about heading north next week. Our friends have suggested for us that it would be possible to go up the west coast of Florida to Fort Myers. We would then travel the canals to Lake Okeechobee to Indiantown. This would eliminate having to go through all the bridges between Miami and Lake Worth. We are researching it.