After St. Augustine....

We've motored and anchored here and there, and are now in Smyrna Beach overnight where we can fortunately get some good wi-fi! Tiny anchorage - but as we pulled in, a guy in a tiny little boat with a fishing rod was screaming (with delight) - we turned to see what the fuss was about - he had hooked a HUGE fish and it was towing him along. It was ENORMOUS - probably about 5 feet long. We didn't see how it ended but as always, I hoped it got away. Poor fish. As I tell Phillip, if he ever catches a fish (or a crab or lobster) and puts it in a pail of water on the boat, keeping it alive - I will name that creature, make friends with it and put it back in the water. He knows how I feel about live creatures..... Even in the Caribbean, when we got those lobsters, I had to get Paul to dispatch them - couldn't have them on our boat or else I'd have put them back in the water. When he catches a fish, I take a photo of it with my eyes shut (so usually only get a blurred shot of the fish, or only its tail or head), then I disappear below and let P take care of everything - but I also ask him every time to say something nice about the fish, once it has been dispatched (he sprays alcohol into its gills and the fish just goes to sleep peacefully - none of this awful bashing and beating that a lot of fishermen do, ugh, so cruel) - so he says a few words about each fish i.e. you were a good fish, a kind fish, with lots of friends, and you will be missed. Something like that.

Don't get me wrong, I can eat the fish, but only when it has been wrapped in plastic and no longer resembles anything that's alive. I can't eat anything with a face. But yes, I can fool myself into eating something that came from the supermarket in a plastic-wrapped carton - the two are not related. And I ALWAYS hate seeing lobsters kept in tanks in supermarkets - if I could, I would grab them all and set them free.

Speaking of which, we ate our last two lobster tails last night (the ones we got in Petit St. Vincent in the Grenadines) with some tinned corn and engine-baked potato and butter sauce of course. I've been pleading with P to please make use of the heat the engine gives out - motoring all day long, that engine really gets up to cooking temperatures, so I finally persuaded him to put our one potato that we had left in the engine and let it bake. We wrapped it up in tin foil of course, wedged it in tightly, and let her sit for a couple of hours while we motored, and guess what - the PERFECT baked potato! Yum! Now we're wondering how we can rig up some baking trays down there - we can bake and cook all day long without using our propane.

Here are some pics of the foggy mornings we've been seeing. This morning we could hardly see the bridge! We knew it was there, but where?






It's very very hot and humid - at night there isn't a puff of air, and if anyone's been to Florida in mid summer and spent some time without air conditioning, they'll appreciate how hot and sticky you can get. Hottest we've had on this trip - well into the hundreds. Oh well.