Well we left Carrabelle at 11 in the morning after meeting with Buddy to discuss the weather on the Gulf for Friday and Friday night. Got out in the Gulf by 12 and started our journey across. Lots of Dolphins jumping around as we traveled. Basically the trip was uneventful. Auto did all the work after I set the track to get to Clearwater. We did travel a little too quickly in that we arrived abotu 30 miles outside of Clearwater by about 4 in the morning. It was dark and not really advisable to enter a harbour which is invested with crab pots in the dark. So we throttled back and basically coasted for about 3 hours until it started getting light again.
There were five boats that traveled together through the night - Navigator, Kim Joe III, Dream Fever, and High Spirits (also Canadians from Ottawa). We were glad we traveled in a group because it can be awfully lonely out there. Every hour we we touched base with one another on Channel 17 which kept us awake and attentive throughout the night. The stars on the Gulf were amazing. Of course you have no lights from cities out there and the sky was a filled with stars.
As it got dark, I took a picture of the sunset and was going to take a picture of the sunrise. Unfortunately at the time of the sunrise, we were dodging so many crab pots, the last thing on my mind was the sunset other than the fact that we were moving directly into the sun which made it difficult to see.
We finally arrived in Clearwater, got ourselves into a slip. We we greeted by a few Q'End which left the day before and traveled during the day since they were a go fast boat and could make the trip in the daylight hours. Once we got in our slip, we went for a big breakfast at the Hilton, staggered back to the boat and went to sleep for about 5 hours. That night we went to dinner with Q'End and Dream Catcher. Dream Catcher caught a crab pot which snapped a propeller shaft and he had to get towed in to port. they was lucky the shaft did not slip out when it snapped because they would have been swimming to port. After dinner, we immediately fell into bed and slept until 8 on Sunday morning.
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