Quest on the Loop: Marathon, FL

Wednesday was "give the boat a bath" day which it needed very badly since it hadn't been washed really good since the Gulf crossing. While I did that, Ricki spent most of the day trying to straighten out the prescription snags with her new health insurance provider. Neither of us accomplished our tasks until late afternoon so after a quick shower ... off we went in our dinghy for a cruise.

We decided to take Sister's Creek which is a couple miles from our dock, over to the Gulf side of the island.

The water in the creek is of course salt but really clear.

As usual, beautiful homes along the water.

A neat little hide-a-way beach.

Then we came to the Gulf after 2 or 3 miles.

This area is dotted with little islands or as they say here .. "keys".

This is Sombrero Beach as seen from the Gulf. A really nice place that has lighted walking/riding trails and brick sidewalks.

As we turned around to return to the creek we witnessed another awesome sunset.

The mangrove trees seem to grow right to the water. The story goes that these trees collect the sand that passes by and thus forms new land to develop.

The creek dumps us into the mooring field a couple miles from our dockage. Just guessing, it seems like there may be at least a couple hundred boats on the mooring ball field. The price to sit on a mooring is pretty reasonable but the down side is having to run a generator many hours a day for A/C. This part of Florida is a zero discharge so they have to have a boat come pump out at least once a week.

We came by Skip & Barb's boat at Sombrero Dockside and as we dinghyed up .. there she was looking out her stateroom window at us.

Since darkness was closing in on us pretty quickly, the first mate got the navigation lights out. The stern light has a suction cup on it to stick on the outboard motor. The bow lights will Velcro to the front but Ricki had to hold them this time.