So I finally got my laptop back—YAY! And now I can get caught up with blogging about our super awesome trip so far.

Our adventure began on Friday, June 27th and our first stop was Ballard Oil to take on 100 gallons of diesel. It had been about a year since we topped off the tanks and so we decided to get 100 gallons for the trip as a precaution. Once we were fueled up, we were on our way.

Our original float plan as outlined in this post was to anchor near Indian Key on the first night. We cruised along a calm Gulf of Mexico for a couple hours until we saw some weather up ahead. We decided to push on through it and eventually the wind and lightening chased us down below deck. We already had the generator and air conditioning running so we drove the boat from below. Things got pretty rocky for a while and I had just about everything on the floor for fear of being thrown. Poor Sophie was wedged between my feet. With steep 4-6 foot waves, we were only going about 2.5 knots and were barely moving so we saw an opening in the weather and decided to anchor near Isle of Capri, just south of Marco Island. We didn’t reach Indian Key, but we were close enough and glad to get into some smoother water.

Video taken during the storm

The anchorage was very nice and calm and with an early stop of about 4:30pm, happy hour commenced a little sooner that day. We immediately launched Corey’s kayak since he wanted to go fishing. We gave him our new handheld radio so we could communicate from shore. Shortly after he reached the beach and started fishing, he hooked up. We watched him from the boat reel in the fish and he paddled it over by kayak. He had caught a very nice snook.

Later that evening we had a beautiful sunset over the Gulf of Mexico. The sunset the next morning was even better!