Those who say you can't take it with you never saw a car packed for a vacation trip...

Posted by: Shari 7/26/2008
The weather may not have been great for sailing this past week, but it was a great week for seeing our friends on vacation from TN. Thursday night we enjoyed dinner at Grazie's on Restaurant Row in Destin, FL. It's a little Italian place just around the corner from the Front Porch. There we had dinner with Pearl, Rick, Zack & Isaac. The food was great, and Isaac really liked the lemons and the cheese! :) Saturday we had the pleasure of sharing a meal with Curt, Susan, Zack & Jacob. As you can see in the photo above we enjoyed seafood at Pompano Joe's on the beach. I highly recommend the coconut shrimp! After dinner we were off to Bruster's for ice cream.
Have a great week!

Honey, Don't Forget The Camera

Posted by Shari 7/23/08
I suspect that you may be wondering why we have a picture of our lunch on this post. We like to eat just as much as we like to sail. Only while sailing we like to pretend we're health conscious and enjoy delights like that in the picture above. Speaking of pictures--famous last words "Honey, don't forget the camera" is what I called out to Mike as I stood on shore and he took off in the dinghy headed for the Sea-Me-Knot which was, of course, anchored a short distance off shore. We had a lovely sail, experienced no wind, and then motored to a less inhabited part of Santa Rosa Island. If a picture is worth a thousand words, you can calculate that you have missed at a minimum 5,000 words. But who's 'a counting? While at the beach we saw crabs in the water, under our feet and even chased a few. We learned that Robbie and Jonah could easily be nicknamed sand-crab cowboys as we laughed while watching them try to catch a rather sizeable one on the beach. That's two photo ops, and three to go. As we strolled down the shore each of us scattered a few feet from the other we spotted a stingray gliding along in the water. He was at least 4ft wide and for me this was a 1st to see one of that size in its natural habitat. Then there was two large schools of not-so-small fish (I was more concerned about what would be chasing fish that size), and the best missed picture of all... The dolphins! They were so close to us as we traveled back to the Sea-Me-Knot in the dinghy, we thought we'd get to touch them. They were awesome.
The pictures we did take

Naval Air Museum 07/15/08

Posted by Mike 07/23/08
On July 15th my sister Robbie and her family came to see us and we decided to visit the National Museum of Naval Aviation. We had called ahead and reserved time in the F-14 Top Gun Air Combat Simulators. These four simulators, are the real deal. They were used to train more than 1,000 F-14 pilots during the 30 year length of service of the Tomcat. The ride costs $25 for one or two people and includes a pre-flight briefing and 20 thrilling minutes at the controls. The simulators are two-seaters with the pilot in the front seat and the radar intercept officer in the back seat. During my time at the stick I soon realized, that even though I have real flight time (single engine Piper Colt) I'm no match to a 14 year old with countless hours of Nintendo, Play station and X box training.

We plan on visiting again and hopefully we will take one of the guided tours through the museum because this trip was spent riding simulators and shooting parents out of the sky.

The museum is located on the Pensacola Naval Air Station also home of the Blue Angels. When the Blues practice sometime we can sit on Sea Me Knot and get a free show.

A few pictures of our visit.

Mystic Seaport 08

Well I'm inching my way closer to getting this blog updated. I visited Mystic Seaport during the second week of June. If you like seafaring history then this is the place to be. For me other events led me here three years ago, but this is the place that started my interest in sailing and it was nice to visit again. While there, I sailed on Argia (a reproduction of a 19th Century coastal trading schooner) in the Fisher Island Sound and also on The Breck Marshall, a 20-foot Crosby catboat reproduction in Mystic Harbor. I have a couple of videos of Argia and I have included the links below. One is of Argia going thru a tack and one of us waiting for the train bridge to turn and let us back into Mystic harbor. There is also a link of some pics I took.

Pictures from Mystic
Video Argia Tacking
Video Argia and the Train Bridge

Memorial Weekend 08

We spent Memorial weekend sailing in Pensacola Bay and out to Santa Rosa Island. It was our first time to just get out on the bay and have some fun.

Memorial weekend pictures

On the River 2008

We left Grand Rivers Ky at the end of March for the 10 day trip to Mobile Al . Along the way we shot about 2000 pictures so here's a link to about 200 of them. On the River
People always ask what was it like traveling on the the river and the best way I can describe it is it's alot like sailing in general, peaceful tranquility with moments of complete terror.

We Made It

To all our family and friends that have followed our sailing blog and wonder why we haven't updated the site in a long time, lets just say we have been very, very busy. In the last year we have pulled up our anchor and moved our family to the Gulf Coast, lived on the beach for six months, (sometimes life gets tough), bought a house just moments from Santa Rosa Sound, prepared and motored the Sea Me Knot down the Tom BigBee waterway to Mobile Bay from Grand Rivers, Kentucky, and (the final step in our move) made the 70-mile trip from Mobile Bay to Pensacola Bay.