Well we needed to go test the watermaker in the ocean so we went for a little day sail yesterday. The water in the bay may not have as much salt as the Ocean. The watermaker passed and that will give us a lot more independence as we wander the world. We are leaving for the world on the first if not sooner.

By the time we got back to the pass I determined that we only had an hour of daylight left by counting the number of fingers the sun was above the horizon. You can measure that using 15 minutes per finger width. We are not into AM or PM here. Our watch is the sun and the tides. Even though we could I would rather not pull into a harbor in the dark so we went to a favorite anchorage just inside the pass for the night.

We only shared the anchorage with another couple and their dog in a 40 foot Benneteau. We met them on the beach when we went to excercise our dogs. They had just returned from the Bahamas 2 days ago. They are based out of Bahia Mar just across the bayou from us and they recognized Paradox. Not too surprising since we are the biggest thing around here.

The conversation we had convinced me that we should head south after crossing over to the Bahamas and following the tongue of the Ocean.

In the morning we woke to the sound of an offshore storm. We see storms all around us every day and we seldom know that we are going to get hit, but we had the sails up and were headed back to the marina early in the morning. The storm hit us just as we arrived at the pass to Gulf. Dad and I had already donned our foulies and life jackets. We truly enjoyed sailing through the storm except for our cold feet. The ladies went below. Sometimes we could not see 50 feet but we had the GPS and radar going and we have gained confidence in our tools over the past weeks since we closed on Paradox on July 20th.

About 5 miles out Dad looked back and said "You've got a fish" We had been trolling an Alien(Fishing Lure) on a reel attached to the lifeline. The fish looked small at first especially with the storm still obstructing vision but when we got it to the boat it was a 27 inch King Mackeral.

To make the day complete the sun came out when we got to the marina and used their table to clean the fish. I threw one scrap to a seagull and his cry which translated to "mine" drew 12 more seagulls screaming "mine" in seagull. Their cries drew in a Pelican. Before the cleaning was done I had 13 Pelicans in the water and about thirty seagulls in the air. Here is my first movie post on Sailblogs so I hope it works. You probably need quick time to view it.