The moon setting over the anchorage in the morning was a spectacular sight. After Maureen took a few photos using the flash and brought the “night lights” in, she heard someone hailing “the catamaran anchored in East Bay.” It turned out to be the captain in the houseboat tied at a nearby dock. He said he saw a strobe flashing and wondered if we were having any problems. She assured him that there was no difficulty but thanked him for his concern. He also offered to pick us up in his little runabout if we were interested in coming ashore for a walk but she declined the offer saying that we would soon be lifting the anchor and heading out. It's good to know we have friends wherever we go. 
At 7 am, we motored back out to the channel and continued our eastward journey. It was a hazy morning, 70 degrees, mostly cloudy with a light northeasterly breeze. We saw a couple of small oyster boats out doing their thing, a few dolphins playing in the canal and many pelicans out fishing. It was a very enjoyable morning cruising along the eastern section of St. Andrews Bay, particularly Wetappo Creek. Neither of us remembered much about this section from our previous trip through and we wondered why because it was quite beautiful and very remote. 
After twenty miles of river, we entered the Gulf County Canal, a five-mile cut from the ICW to the protected waters of St. Joseph Bay and the Gulf of Mexico. We saw several small fishing boats out with two or three fishermen on board and most of them seemed to have at least one fish on as we passed by. Gale started getting the itch to get out there and see what he could catch.
We also noticed a couple of abandoned docks with several boats that hadn’t been attended to in a long time. We later learned that the locals called the dock “the pirate dock” because the company that owned it had gone bankrupt, nobody claims it and if you tie a boat there for a time and leave it, it will soon be picked clean of anything worth removing.
We passed under the Port St. Joe Bridge (Hwy 98) and entered beautiful St. Joseph Bay. It almost felt like “coming home” since we’ve enjoyed Port St. Joe so much on previous visits. We were at the fuel dock at noon (Central Time) but moved our clocks ahead one hour as we had crossed over into the Eastern Time Zone. It was a lovely 80 degrees and the clouds were beginning to thin out.
After fueling up, we settled into our slip at the end of the south dock and enjoyed our bay view. That evening, we treated ourselves to dinner at the Dockside Café and shared the blackened bay scallops entrée. Maureen was a little surprised to discover that scallops could be so small – they were only slightly bigger than a pencil eraser. We later learned that was typical for bay scallops – it’s the sea scallops that are the big ones.
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