Thursday, December 17, 2009

At 8 am, we walked up to McDonalds for a little breakfast and the intention of using the WiFi connection for awhile again this morning. We were also meeting our friends Russ and Cindy of Ladybug, at 9 am for a short visit. Russ and Cindy live in the Tampa area and keep their boat at Maximo Marina, just a few hundred yards from our current location.

When our friends arrived, they suggested that we ride with them so they could show us around the St. Petersburg downtown area. We saw the municipal marina and the central park where many community events take place. They showed us where their friends had a nice Espresso Bar and took us to a new and used book store that claimed to have 300,000 titles in stock. It was a St. Petersburg “institution” in that it had been around since 1933. The book store did, indeed, appear to offer thousands of books. They also stopped at a liquor store and a WalMart so we could pick up a few items we needed. Before delivering us back to our boat, we stopped at the Maximo Marina and they showed us the setup they had at their dock. It was a very “homey” little neighborhood in itself with the covered slips, decorations, a Jenn-Air cooktop, a small bar with a couple of stools, and a large, maybe 27- or 30-plus-inch screen TV mounted high on a dock post so the neighboring boats could see whatever was on.


After Russ and Cindy left, we took a few moments to regroup and decided to have some lunch while we set our sights on Sarasota. Before casting off, we made sure we filled a shopping bag with oranges from Bernie’s tree. The oranges we had tried earlier were perfect and every bit of the taste sensation a Florida orange should be! Just before 1 pm we were away from the dock and headed out with partly sunny skies, 80°F, and NE winds between 14 and 20 knots. Soon we were sailing past the magnificent Sunshine Skyway Bridge and remarked on the many times we had crossed that same span in a car dreaming of the day when we would be on one of the boats cruising leisurely in the bay. The dreaming was fun – but the “doing” was even better!




As we traveled through the channel, we came upon the remains of an old shipwreck that the birds seemed to like very much. Tampa Bay is extremely shallow in places so it is important to stay in the channel and/or keep an eye on the charts.

The wind helped us to make today’s passage in short order. We were at the Cortez Bridge, located between Bradenton and Sarasota, in time for the 5 pm opening and anchored just to the other side of the bridge with several other boats. Many of the boats looked like they had been there for some time.