Have we ever been on the go the last several weeks! We spent a day and a half at Great Stirrup in the Berry Islands after leaving Little Harbor in the Abacos. Several cruise lines also stop at this spot for the day. Instead of calling the cay "Great Stirrup", they call it "Coco Cay". From 10 am until about 4 pm, there are endless sea-doo tours. Each tour has about 20 sea-doos, and each cruise ship (the day we were there, there were three ships at anchor). That means there were about 60 sea-doos buzzing around the anchorage all day long. What fun! Once the cruise ships cleared out each day, though, the anchorage was as quiet as could be.

From Great Stirrup, we travelled directly to Miami, about 22 hours (April 24/25). The Banks were like glass that day, so the motoring was fast. By mid afternoon some wind came up, and we ended up having a great overnight sail across the Gulf Stream. We checked in with Customs and Immigration, and met up with Nina's brother who joined us for the trip to St. Pete. We anchored outside Hurricane Harbor for the night, and then headed for Rodriguez Key the next morning, then Marathon the next day. We fished over those couple of days, but only caught sea grasses and a half of a fish (that had been eaten by another fish!).

From Marathon, we travelled almost directly north to see Little Shark River, about which we'd heard from other cruisers as being a very special place. This was our no-travel day, as we explored the Shark and Little Shark by dinghy.

From the Shark, we then spent a day travelling to each of Sanibel, then Pelican Bay, then Sarasota and finally St. Pete. In Sarasota, we got our anchor down just in time for a HUGE thunderstorm. It was great, because we were so hot and sticky. We all had wonderful showers of really cold rain water. See the photo above!

We did no overnights during our trip around the Florida peninsula, but had some long and some short days.Just for future reference, from Miami Government Cut to St. Pete was about 7 days. It would be great if we could cut some time from the trip by going through the Okeechobee Waterway, but our mast is too high to take that route.

So...now we're back in St. Pete, getting Sunkissed "ready for bed" so to speak: painting teak, polishing stainless, packing things away, investigating plumbing updates, an extra solar panel, etc. Busy, busy, busy! But for sure, we will make some time to visit with the family members in town here.