It has been a while since the last time that we had wifi connection so although this is a daily post for the right day we won't have sent it to the site until later.

Having said that allow me to blather on about today's leg. First, even after walking Peri, having breakfast, and showers we were able to get away at 0740 and make our way past the rest of Port Myers and into the Gulf Islands or Keys. Everything was extremely well marked but even so this was one of the most nail biting pieces of water that I have had to navigate - the channels had plenty of water as long as you stayed in them which wasn't always all that easy as they are exceptionally narrow, there are often strong cross currents, the day markers actual location and their position on the chart doesn't always agree, and often there is one side of the channel or the other that actually has the required depth. As a sailboat skipper, it is your job to find out which one - tonnes of fun! In one case I was following a range up a very narrow channel that couldn't have been more than two Nelleke boat lengths wide and looking for the turn out of the bearing. I could have almost touched the small range marker with a boathook when I finally got into the channel to port. The whole situation was compounded by a two knot current so you can imagine that I was maintaining steerage and letting the current move Nelleke along.

On the plus side, we were accompanied by pods of dolphins pretty much for the whole day. They would swim in our quarter wave immediately beside the cockpit and could be quite startling if you weren't expecting them to surface and blow right beside you. They really freaked Peri out. Here is this mighty watchdog that would have you believe that he could lick his twice his weight in Rottweilers, diving for the floor of the cockpit and trying to hide behind my legs at the helm. There, Peri, I have outed you, you closet pussy! I'll even bet that the dolphins were squeaking at him at a frequency that he could hear but we couldn't challenging him to, "Come in the water and fight like a fish, fight like a fish, yeah!"

We have begun to see what we originally thought of as crab pot floats but on closer examination turn out to be coconuts floating in the water and then every once in a while you see one that has fetched up on one of the spoil islands that the dredging has created. It is easy to see how these islands become permanent wooded fixtures rather than simple sandbars - the coconut germinates and the roots hold the soil and keep it from further erosion, eventually a bird will sit in its fronds and in its droppings are more seeds to different plants and the "florification" continues, insects arrive, more birds, amphibians, and eventually some adventurous small animals will get there either my swimming or by floating on a log or patch of lillypads. Of course there are always the deliberately built islands. Those are the ones that the government has intentionally set up retaining banks to and has set aside as nesting preserves for the bird populations down here. I was particularly fascinated to see that. It might go a long way to explaining why there is so much wildlife co-existing with the urban development in the southern US.

Anyway, nothing untoward happened and we got through that and other obstacles. Our intent was to head for a place called Pelican Island which is right adjacent to a State Park and we were planning on making it a short day and take in the trails and the beaches. Unfortunately for the best laid plans, etc., etc., just before we arrived we were talking to another Canadian boat that had been here for some time and they told us that the current depth at the entrance was 4.5'! Scratch that good idea and Barb went back to the books to find us a place to overnight. The problem is that although this is a beautiful part of Florida - the sea is emerald green, the beaches are white coral sand and the sun beat down all day, most of the land is privately owned and landing is not permitted. Add to that the fact that the water is generally quite shallow for some distance out from shore and you have available anchorages quite a distance off and only a few places to land. Result? We went as far as Gasparilla and stopped at a marina there. Blatant expense but Peri must be walked. In fact, at $2/ft they are the cheapest in the area and according to the Admiral the washrooms and showers are the best equipped, supplied and laid out since Halifax. They have a new restaurant that is opening tomorrow and Barb and I plan to be their first customers for breakfast. They have a large number of huge boat barns with three and four layers of boats stacked up. In fact this seems to be the sort of place where most boats are docked on the hard with the staff launching them for the owners on request and then bringing them back up on the hard and into the rack after a day's fishing.

They have no wifi. They have everything else to speak of but not this. I guess that is because there are very few boats in the water here. Most are dry stored so there would be little use for wifi. The one design people back home would have conniptions of jealousy.

Tomorrow, after breakfast we will have a very short day putting us in a position for a jump to Tampa offshore on Tuesday.