We never get tired of checking out this town. So many things to do and places to go. For example if you check out the picture it is worth a thousand words. I think I have more pictures of what I call W&B then any other place on this cruise. We did meet up with Wild Oats for a very good hamburger at the Mill. Then that W&B place followed by a pumpkin spice coffee ☕️. Back to the boat to clean up some to meet the Wild Oats crew for Happy Hour on the Marriott Vino veranda. We walked the street some to look at the folks in costume and ended up at Parkshore restaurant for a light dinner. The weather was just about perfect warming up in the day to upper 70's and night time mid 60's. After walking around a little more we ended up back at the boat. I needed to do some sealing work in our aft shower ( a little leak) while Lisa read her book.

Picture-- that magical place that is always fun to explore- this one in St. Petersburg.

It would not be a cruise is someone did not go up the mast. If you zoom in on the picture you can see that would be me. We had some wires break loose with the high winds so Richard came over and sent me up the mast to resecure them.

My ladies in full Halloween costume.

Coming out of St. Petersburg on the early morning of Nov 2nd I noticed this guy way back on AIS. I really like the AIS system because I could see him, his speed, and our intersect point. Originally it showed we would meet under the Skyway bridge at the same time. But because the system determines things based on the ships course vertor I knew he had several channel turns that would slow him down. I wanted to get through the bridge before him because I could see two more ships behind him. In the open ocean I would just call him but I knew that they had a Tampa Bay pilot on board and the channel restricted him. I was able to set a collision alarm point on his path that told me go/no go. If I was not under the bridge by that point I would turn up and wait. But as you can see because of the turns he had to make we ended up 8 minutes ahead of him. Without AIS I may have just waited it out.

Picture — Tampa Bay Skyway bridge freighter

As I indicated in the last blog the night was a nightmare. This will go down as the worst anchor night we have had. I would rather be in a big Thunderstorm then the side to side rolling that we did for 10 hours. So up anchor at first light then motored out and into the Boca Grand channel. Once in the bay we rolled out some sail and turned off the motor. We need to kill some time so we could go into Ponce around 2 pm. This set up a very nice sail all the way up the bay. We made Ponce Inlet right at 2 p.m. and home around 2:20. We decide to unload on Sunday so a few beers in the pool helped us recover from the night before.

Picture — the ladies on the foredeck of TA for sunset

We had an amazing night no the hook off Don Pedro beach. Layer around in the morning with coffee. We only had about 6 miles to go down to Boca Grand beach and with the forecast a carbon copy of the day before anchoring off the beach sounded great. Decide to try sailing off the anchor which worked ok then lazed down to the Boca Grand beach area and anchored about 650 feet off the beach. The water was pretty flat with wind out of the NE. We dinked into the beach taking a walk, going to the dog part, and then going to have some lunch. After lunch more beach walking and hunting for shark teeth. At 4 we decide to head back to the boat to get dinner ready and stuff. Once on the boat I notice we had swung around to the west and the waves are building some. This was not in the forecast. I am thinking this is a short event and we would swing back to the east and the water would flatten out. Lisa did suggest or ask should we maybe go over to Pelican Bay for the night but it was already late and we had planned some more beach time the next day. In hindsight we should have moved. Yet after dinner we are rocking pretty good on the nose. Then around 9 p.m. the wind shifts to the east but the waves don’t. For the next 10 hours we have beam swells with east wind. Side to side rolling so bad that D came back to curl up with me because she was scared and the boat was all over the place. After a no sleep night we pulled the anchor at first light and headed home. What I failed to do was to look at the wind forecast for way up the gulf in the Mobile area. That wind was out of the west with plenty of fetch and our local east wind did nothing to stop the waves.

But we did have a great day on the beach that is dog friendly and the shark teeth hunter was great.

Picture — Lisa, D, dink and me on Boca Grand beach nice day