Day 58 furthest South on our Loop?

The Admiral refers to this as "anchor jewelry"... When we pulled up the anchor at Cayo Costa this morning, this "big" (5 or 6 inches) shell was impaled on the pointy end of the plow anchor. I sincerely hope that the anchor was actually dug well into the sand bottom when it pierced this shell. The air temperature on the mainland got down to 72F last night. We did turn off the generator (and air conditioning) when we went to bed, but since the water temperature is 79F, we ended up turnng the generator back on a couple of hours later.  After our dingy adventures yesterday afternoon, we left the

dingy in the water to gain additional towing experience today.

As you can see in the second picture, the weather was perfect for the early part of our trip today. We had planned to anchor out again tonight, but the brown water in the bays has such limited visibility that we decided not to try out our snuba diving system. Yes, I did mean to type snuba and not scuba. In snuba diving, the gear is the same as scuba, but the air source is on the surface and connects to the diver via a long hose. The air source could be an air compressor or as in our set up, we have a regular scuba tank with a 60 foot hose on the boat. After deciding not to try the snuba and after checking on Tropical Storm Chantal, we decided to head for Port Sanibel Marina on the mainland.

Thus our trip for the day lengthened to 28 miles, which is still an easy 4+ hour trip.  At the south end of Cayo Costa we did go out the Sanibel Pass into the Gulf of Mexico since on our Great Loop trip we will not be back into the Gulf until probably early in November, 2014.  This is because we plan to cross Florida through Lake Okeechobee.  The picture shows Cayo Costa on the right (north) and Sanibel Island on the left (south). After that little detour we continued on south while watching several black clouds form and grow in size in the area of our destination for today...

There is a several mile long causeway/bridge that connects Sanibel Island to the mainland. The entrance to our marina is about a half mile north of the bridge. The marina itself is only a hundred yards off a fairly major highway, but our route to it was about 1.5 miles through mangrove islands and small bays. Thus, it feels quite isolated. This picture shows the marina ships store, which also has a nature walk, pool and of course a great restaurant.

This picture shows the Admiral in front of the restaurant. After all of the grouper that I have been having, I decided to have prime rib, which was really, really good.

After dinner, we retired to the fly bridge to enjoy the great view, including this (near) sunset.

Well, that sums up a really fun day, except for some rain in the final half hour of the trip. I mentioned the "black clouds" earlier, and we followed them on the regional weather radar. We did slow down for the final hour and a half so the storm could move out of our way. As a result, we only caught the light rain on the back side of the storm as it moved northwest and out of our path. Our plans are to stay here tomorrow, so during the day, we plan to use the dingy and do some.... -now you really didn't expect me to give it all away did you?