Some Beach

Have I mentioned how nice the weather has been finally?  Wore shorts for four days in a row now.


Don Pedro State Park beach view from the nature trail atop of the sand dunes

We got up fairly early this morning after a very peaceful night's sleep with the sound of waves crashing just on the other side of the mangroves.  It made us even more curious to explore Don Pedro State Park, as you can only access that part of it by private boat.  After making my sister's favorite breakfast, that Ray could barely look at (he got his own stuff), we set out on the dinghy.  It was nice to walk off breakfast on the nature trail.  It was a beautiful unspoiled beach.
By time we got back to the mother ship and ready for departure, it was 10:00 a.m.  By 10:30 a.m. we were traversing through the Boca Grande swing bridge with two other vessels.  They left us in their wake as we were fighting the tide again of course.  It took us two and a half hours to go 15 miles to get to Pelican Bay, just on the south side of the Boca Grande Channel in Charlotte Harbor.  We anchored in just about the same place we did on the way up in the spring.

There are actually at least two manatee in this picture,
although hard to spot.

Ray was so excited to go see if there were manatees in the little cove in Cayo Costa.  Just after lunch we headed there in the dinghy.  We were not disappointed.  Our first wildlife sighting was an alligator sunning itself on shore in the entrance channel, which we disturbed, but it kept it's eye on us the whole time.  Once inside the cove we shut off the motor and couldn't count how many manatees were in there, coming up for air.  There seemed to be several juveniles.  They weren't as playful as in the spring, but their snouts surfacing was entertainment in itself, never knowing where the next was going to come up as the water kind of stays stirred up in there because of them.  We just paddled and drifted around for probably an hour giggling at them, but always noticing the alligator watching us.
We finally tore ourselves away and headed to the state park docks to explore the island for our first time.  This was a larger island, so the walk to the beach was a bit farther than this morning, but still a neat pathway through "Natural Florida" as their slogan says.  It was a nice beach also, though a much steeper drop off once in the water compared to the shallow shore of Don Pedro.  Funny how different beaches can be so close together.  It seemed more interesting to us to see loads of people brought onto the island via ferry with all of their camping gear.  A truck would put all the gear in the back and pull an open aluminum Featherlite trailer with bench seats to get the campers to the camping area.  There were supposed to be cabins on this cabin trail also.  We did see some real small buildings.  Not sure if those were it or not.




Our evening was ended with a beautiful sunset view back aboard "The Second Noelle".