Clearwater Day 1

I'm writing this blog entry off-line as I'm not net connected at the moment.

I'm sitting by the side of the Clearwater marina, it's 08:05 and the sun is streaming over the waterway. It's actually quite hard to see what I'm typing the sun is so strong.
The first of the Pelicans has just flown past trying to catch up with one of the early morning deep-sea fishing boats that has just left. Linda is sitting next to me, shades on, reading her book on a lounger.

Clearwater is odd in some ways. It's idyllic right here where I am, but 50 yards closer to the beach and it's a complete building site - and is due to stay that way until 2009 from the plans we've seen. There's a live web-cam here that shows where we are. Photo 3 is just to the right of where we're sitting!

We spent the early part of yesterday travelling from Orlando to Clearwater. TomTom proved a godsend as we hit the Clearwater area. We were diverted at least twice due to closed roads. but TomTom kept us heading in the right direction.

We're staying at a small motel right on the edge of the main marina in Clearwater. The room is a reasonable size and quite well equipped. No internet though.

Once in the room we changed into swim wear and headed to the Marina to catch the 'Sea Screamer'. This is one of, if not the, largest speedboats in the world at the moment. It must be able to carry 50 people I guess. Their main trick is to go out into the Gulf Of Mexico and spot a pod of dolphins. They then get everyone to the back of the boat and churn up the water, producing a massive wake. The dolphins seem attracted to this churn and as we speed along, they dive and jump along right behind the boat, in and out of our wake.

As luck would have it, we sat right at the back of the boat and had an excellent view of the proceedings. I was a bit worried about the camera, as we did get sea spray all over us at one point (we had been warned and I did have the camera under my shirt, but we still got sprayed a few times. Fortunately, this spray stopped when we were doing the churn runs.
Got some pretty good pictures, mainly of wash, but some were from the dolphines as they played behind us.
Only down side to sitting at the back was we were partially deaf as we left the boat - the rumble of the two engines (I forget how many horsepower, but it was a lot!) was pretty loud wherever you were in the boat and we were sitting right on top of them!

Once back at the marina we went for a walk down to the pier and beach area for a hour.

Finally, at 18:00, we returned to the marina to visit our second boat. This was the "Kai Lani". She is a catamaran sail boat. Once we left the marina, the captain switched off the motors ans put up the sails. We then sailed around the Gulf Of Mexico for an hour until we'd watched the sun set. Once again, it was a glorious sun set here (as it had been in 2005). Got some nice pictures once again. There were only 12 of us on the boat, including 2 crew, so it wasn't busy at all. All in all it was a very relaxing way to spend a couple of hours. Best of all, nobody was sea sick!

We returned to the marina and found somewhere to eat before bed.

I've just noticed there's a low, but free WI-FI connection around here somewhere. I'm going to post this now and add some pictures later when I have a better connection.