Port St. Joe to Mississippi

11/24/2008

We had arrived in Port St Joe yesterday around 5:00 after our big 33 hour jump from Tampa and motored up to the dock in light winds. We checked in with the harbor master, took showers and went up to the restaurant to have dinner.
The restaurant had a fairly extensive seafood menu as many do along the coast, but one item on their menu appealed to us more than the others, “Cook your Catch”. In other words, they would cook the tuna we caught the day before and we wouldn’t have to clean it. We ordered and the waitress said most people cleaned their own fish, but one of the guys in the kitchen would do it for a couple of bucks.
The guy came out and we walked back to the fish cleaning tables by the dock. A nice gentleman at another table informed us that we were Americans and wouldn’t like this fish. It turns out that we hadn’t caught a tuna but a bonito which is not really considered an edible fish. We ordered dinner and quickly went to sleep.
The next morning we fueled up and walked to a nearby grocery store and filled our fridge. We also stopped at boating/fishing store and got some more fishing gear, as I was determined to catch dinner some day. (fyi, if you are 3 miles offshore, you are in international waters and do not need a fishing license. )
Our destination today was Panama City which was a mere 45 miles or so west along the Florida panhandle. The day was pretty uneventful and we ended up motoring the last bit across the bay to the Panama City‘s city Marina. As we motored across we saw flocks and flocks of pelicans, seagulls and a slew of other types of diving birds feasting on the fish in the bay. They would all swarm to one area and then to another as a group, taking off, diving and landing in waves. It was a beautiful thing to watch.

A Flock of Pelicans

A Flock Of Seagulls

We pulled into the marina at 5:15 only to find out that we were finally back in the Central time zone and it was 4:15. Not that we have much use for clocks or calendars, we actually have more use for docks and colanders (yes, we cook real food on board). If the weather is good and the sun is up we sail, we don’t often know what day it is or have a clue as to the date.

We walked to the downtown district and enjoyed window shopping for a bit. It was nice to stretch our legs and see some of the Christmas decorations. Going back to the discussion about time, it’s almost feels as if time has stopped for us, but it keeps on marching in the world around us.
The next day our goal was to make it to Destin Florida so we headed out into the Gulf of Mexico. It was cool with a so-so breeze, not much in the way of waves, so we motor-sailed. The day was pretty uneventful until we got to Destin.
As we approached the harbor mouth we talked to a couple of marinas about staying the night. They said that the last hurricane had pushed a sand bar across the mouth of the channel where they were all located and the depth was 6 foot max. They suggested that we come into the harbor and anchor at the west end near the highway bridge.
We were a little worried about entering the harbor itself since the guide book we were using claimed that the sand bars at the harbor mouth shift on a regular basis and that the buoys aren’t moved all the time. Sounds just like our mast misadventure back near Tampa but this time there were only 1-2 foot waves instead of the 3-4 foot waves that we had back then.
We motored slowly into the harbor mouth without incident and found our anchorage. We were about 150’ from a bridge with 30 foot clearance and just around the corner from the ocean. We dropped 2 anchors each facing a different direction since the tides and currents going in and out ran as high as 3 knots in either direction. We didn‘t want to wake up with the boat at sea or against a bridge.
We also set the anchor drag alarm on the chart plotter for 75’. If the GPS in the Garmin detects that we have moved more that 75’ it will set off an alarm.
I went to Radio Shack to pick up a replacement TV antenna since our previous one fell apart. It picks up both standard TV and the new HD signals. HD is awesome, it can be further off target than the regular channels with amazing clarity.
We took Ziggy to the beach so he could do his thing and he went absolutely nuts. Destin has the whitest beaches that I have ever seen. The sand was incredibly fine and flew around him as he ran and cut in tight circles. He was acting the same way he did when he used to play in the snow back in Illinois.
The next morning we took off heading further west along the Florida panhandle the date was November 25th, it was 2 days until Thanksgiving. It had dawned on us a couple of day before that we had first sailed into Florida on October 28th, we had been in Florida for a month and wanted out.
We joked about calling the consulate so they could help us get out or confessing to a crime in another state so we could get extradited. But this wasn’t funny anymore.
We had originally planned on getting to Corpus Christi on December 1st and yes that is in 2008. We thought this was very do-able since sailing straight thru at 6 knots would take 2 weeks. But with less than a week left on our original deadline we had about 800 miles left to go……. It wasn’t going to happen.
Our goal for today was to get out of Florida and into Alabama, nothing personal all you Floridians, but we wanted to get done.
We started motoring and a couple of hours later we were joined by a family of dolphins who stayed with us for a good half hour. The water here was clearer than anywhere else we had seen, and maybe even clearer than in the Caribbean, so we could see the dolphins when they would dive down to 20 feet or so.

Clear water and a Pod of Dolphins

There was mom and dad and 2 smaller ones that seemed to swim as fast as and jump as high as their parents, it was incredibly entertaining.
We motored westward and entered the ICW at Santa Rosa Island and continued on about 15 miles to a small lake and up to what had been a marina complex but after a hurricane a few years back was only a restaurant and bar. There was no current in this stretch so we anchored at the end of where the docks had been feeling comfortable about where we were parked for the night.
The restaurant was called Pirates Cove and was a cool looking building with metal siding and roof. It had a large screened in seating area on one side and had the look of a great summertime party place. The sign on the front door said that they were closed for the Thanksgiving weekend but we had read on their website that they were having a community potluck Thanksgiving dinner that evening.
Some hippy looking guy in his mid 20’s was sitting on an old ugly sailboat on which he appeared to be living. We talked to him and asked about the restaurant, he said that it was closed for the holiday. I asked him about his boat and he said that it was only about 15 years old and that it was a custom built boat off the lines of a wooden boat. Looking closely at the boat you could see the weave of the heavy fiberglass that it was made of, it was some of the worst fiberglass work I had ever seen.
Looking into the boat, it was full of clothes and other junk with a small area cleared on one of the bunks to sleep on, it was kind of like a nest or something. Hard to believe that someone was living like this but it takes all kinds.
It was about 4:30 so we went back to the boat and hung out waiting to see if anyone showed up. About 6:00 we noticed a handful of cars parked by the restaurant so I went up to see what was up. Walking into the bar there was about 20 people chatting, I walked up and asked who was in charge. I was informed that the owner was in the kitchen and they pointed past the bar where I saw the kitchen.
There were 2 men there, one heavyset younger guy and a trim old guy with longer white hair and a full white beard. I walked in, introduced myself and told them that Julie and I had been on the road for 6 weeks and would like to join them for Thanksgiving dinner.
I must’ve sounded pretty pathetic because the skinny guy with the Santa Claus hairdo stepped forward, gave me a big hug and said that they would be glad to have us join them. I thanked them and told them we would be back in a little bit with mashed potatoes, since that was the only thing we had enough of for the potluck.
We showed up 20 minutes later with our pot of mashed potatoes made of 4 packets of seasoned instant mashed potatoes and were welcomed by quite a few people in the group.
The party was underway so we got in the end of the buffet line and filled our plates with turkey, ham, sausage, vegetables with melted cheese, all sorts of potatoes with melted cheese and more dishes with cheese. You gotta love the south, they’ve yet to embrace healthy eating at the cost of flavor.
With our plates full we wandered out to the screened in porch and sat at a table that happened to be next to “Santa Claus”.
We talked as we ate and found out that Santa and Mrs. Claus had lived on a sailboat in the Caribbean, much of the time on a boat without an engine, living off of the fruits of the sea and land. They lived this nomadic lifestyle for almost 20 years, but ended up in Alabama 10 years ago and started building small wooden boats for a living.
The next morning we awoke feeling a little more content and headed down the ICW for Mobile Bay. Mobile Bay is pretty good sized, 10 miles or so across and 30 miles long, stretching from the Gulf of Mexico up to Mobile. There is some ship traffic running north and south in channels that run thru the bay which aside from the channels is only about 5 feet deep. The bay has dozens of oil and natural gas rigs dotting the horizon.
After motoring east thru Mobile Bay we entered Mississippi sound which is a body of water defined by the coast of Alabama and Mississippi to the north and a string of islands to the south. Beyond these islands was the Gulf of Mexico. We left Alabama and entered Mississippi, this was the shortest time we had spent in any state. We were very happy to have another state under our keel.
There were no marinas on this stretch of our journey and we hadn’t picked an anchorage for the night since we were not sure how far we would get due to the weather. Now we were looking for a safe place to anchor for the night. The winds were out of the south so our thought was to anchor on the north side of one of the barrier islands that defined Mississippi sound. Looking at the chart plotter, Google Earth and internet searches we decided to tuck in behind the end of Horn Island. It was the tallest island around and long enough to give us some shelter from the winds and waves coming in off of the Gulf.
We dropped anchor and both of us jumped in the dinghy with Ziggy to go ashore for a bit. The island was about ½ mile wide and about 10 miles long, with the highest point, a dune, about 40 feet tall.

Notice Ziggy, our 70lb mutt to the left in the picture.

We landed near a huge channel marker that was sitting on the beach about 70 feet from the water. It was about 30’ tall overall and the lower portion was about 15’ across and it had to weigh several tons. It must have broken loose and washed ashore during a hurricane to get something that big that far ashore.

We goofed off for a while and headed back to the boat before sunset, we ate well and slept well that night.