Beautiful night on the boat!

Our last attempt at camping on our boat turned into a disaster. Just go back and read the blog post from July 6. We ended up in an hours long thunderstorm. What started out great ended up bad. But, since we did have a great start, we vowed to try it again.

It took a few weeks to find another good opportunity, but we finally found the perfect night. This past Saturday night, a weather front had just passed through, bringing clear skies, lower humidity, and cooler temperatures. That's a rare event in August around here. Also, it was the peak of the Perseid meteor shower! Overnight, there were supposed to be many "shooting stars" visible to the naked eye. All-in-all, it was the best night to try.

The water was a bit choppy when we started out, so we launched the boat out of Hurlburt, where the Sound is narrower and usually calmer. We got a late start, around 5 pm, so we just took a quick cruise to the Brooks Bridge at FWB, then headed west to find a sheltered spot. A little way past Hurlburt, to the west, we found a sheltered cove, of sorts. A point and sandbar sheltered the water fairly well from the wind and current. However, since a poker run with speed boats was underway, we still had to deal with some serious wakes.

We set the anchor and Wil grilled dinner...teriyaki chicken and grilled veggies, plus he warmed up some rice I had cooked in the microwave back at home. It was yummy! We watched a beautiful sunset. We watched pelicans swimming and fishing by the sandbar at the point. When it was quiet, you could hear the Gulf waves crash on the beach on the other side of the narrow island.

By dark, the dishes were put away and we settled in to wait for the meteor shower. I spent some time on Facebook. I can't leave my electronic media for too long! Wil watched part of a movie on his iPad. We heard the occasional fish jump, but couldn't see them in the dark. I played Sudoku on my iPad. The rock of the boat and the quiet stillness made me seriously wonder if I could stay up late enough to see any meteors.

Finally, it was late enough to put everything away and watch for meteors. Wil saw the first one and I missed it. A while later, I saw a small one that he didn't see. Then we both began to see them. It wasn't really very many, maybe 6 or 7 in the hour we watched. It was a really cool thing to see, but with the long gaps between seeing meteors, our eyelids began to droop.

We decided to get some sleep and set an alarm for 3 hours later. So, at 11:30, we made our narrow beds, hung a couple of towels to shield our eyes from the light we have to leave on for safety, and lay down to sleep. I slept pretty quickly, but Wil and I were both awake off and on, with the less-than-comfortable sleeping space and unfamiliar surroundings.

At 2:30, Wil's phone alarm went off and he got up. I woke up, but was so sleepy that I thought I would forego any more meteor watching. However, Wil said I just had to look at our surroundings. Something in his tone got me right up.

The once choppy water was as smooth as glass. Though some houses on the distant shore had outdoor lights on, it was pretty dark. Hundreds of stars were visible. The most beautiful sight was the yellowish crescent moon that had risen not long before in the east. It was reflected perfectly in the still water. I glanced up at the stars a few times, but the rest of the surroundings were so beautiful that I couldn't look away from them long enough to see any meteors.

I have been on the Sound in good weather as late as midnight before. I was on the Sound later than that during the storm. But I have never seen the Sound as beautiful as it was in the middle of that night. We stood and stared for several minutes. We tried to take photos, but our iPhone and iPad cameras couldn't do it justice. We just had to try to drink it in and preserve it in our memories. All too soon, the peaceful lull and sleepiness lured us back to our beds.

The next time I woke up, Wil was rummaging to find his blanket. I had put mine on when we first went to bed, but Wil was warm and couldn't imagine needing a blanket. However, the temperature dipped down near 70 and he got cold. He was glad I had packed one for him.

The next time I woke up, it was getting light, just before sunrise. It was quite cool at that point and we left our narrow beds on the folded out leisure seats to snuggle together on the floor of the boat. Once the sun was finally up, Wil could sleep no longer and got up, but I had no such problem and slept on until nearly 8.

Once I was up, Wil made a yummy breakfast on our camp stove--cheese omelets and Spam. Yup, Wil is a Pacific Islander and Spam is a staple food. It's a good thing I was raised on Spam with my southern backwoods roots. His good cooking, along with some Entenmann's cheese danish, made a delicious breakfast.

As we finished breakfast, some people came roaring up to the sandbar on the point on their personal water craft. Those things are like motorcycles on water. The peaceful mood was a bit ruined. The intruders stayed to fish and it felt like having strangers in our bedroom. We cleaned up, packed up, and left our sheltered cove.

The rest of the day, was fun, but unremarkable. We stopped at Hurlburt to buy ice and use a proper bathroom, then we were off to Crab Island for a typical jaunt on the boat. We headed home mid-afternoon and got the boat unpacked, washed, and put away.

The boat will be dry-docked for a while now. Wil is having more surgery on the vertebra in his neck, so he'll be sidelined for a month or so. I'm so glad our last boat adventure before school and before his surgery was so perfect. I couldn't think of a better way to finish out our summer!

Rainbows and dolphins

Rainbows have always been a good luck charm for me. On several occasions in my life, rainbows have appeared just when I needed them--to boost me up from despair or give me a competitive edge or just give me the reassurance that everything was going to be all right. Lately, dolphins have been that same kind of lucky charm for Wil and I when out on our boat.

Sometimes, when the Gulf is calm enough for our little boat, we'll cruise just outside the Destin pass where there are always dolphins around. We follow them around as they cavort around the boat. Occasionally, we have been lucky enough to find them in the sound. Lately, that has been happening more often. I don't know if the dolphins are in the sound more often or if we have gotten better at spotting them or if we've just been lucky.

Today, while headed toward Crab Island with Madison and Riley, we found a pod of 6 or so dolphins just west of the Brooks Bridge at Ft. Walton Beach. They were swimming in the channel just ahead of us. We slowed down to a crawl and followed them. I videoed them swimming, surfacing, even jumping out of the water ahead of us and beside us. A couple of times, they swam under the boat. One flipped over on his back and stared up at us as we stared down at him. The smallest ones in the pod were especially playful, jumping out of the water right next to the boat.

Finally, we left them behind and headed on our way. Wil remarked about how lucky our day was going to be since we saw dolphins. It was a great day. The sun shone as we floated and played and swam and ate. Then around 4 pm, we decided to head out so that we would have some time for tubing on the way home.

As we left Crab Island, I saw the sky darkening to the northeast. Then Wil saw a raincloud ahead of us to the west. It was not a large storm, but you could see the rain pouring down. I pulled up radar on a weather app on my iPhone and realized that we were positioned between two storms. The smaller one ahead of us was moving south and the large line of storms behind us was moving south southwest.

Our challenge was to move slow enough to allow the storm ahead of us to blow by, but fast enough to out run the storm behind us. We dawdled around the Brooks Bridge nervously waiting for the weather radar to update every few minutes and glancing over our shoulder watching the sky darken ominously.

Finally, we decided that we could cruise ahead full steam and just the storm in front of us. Our little old boat did us proud, running at top speed, even though the water was quite rough, having been churned up a bit by the squall that had blown through. The sun broke through and shone brightly, even as the dark line of storms to the east chased us.

We raced back to the boat launch at Navarre. We trailered the boat and unloaded it. We headed to wash the boat and get it put away before the storm hit. We knew it would be a race. However, just as we headed back to the mainland over the Navarre Beach Bridge, Madison spotted a rainbow. The whole rainbow wasn't visible, but the end of it glowed against the black storm clouds.

We sped to the self-serve car wash and rinsed the salt water off of the boat. The sky got darker. We hurried home and unloaded our stuff from the truck while Wil flushed the boat's engine. We began to see lightning in the distance. We drove the boat back to the storage lot. Thunder rumbled ominously. In record time, we got the boat cover on and got the boat unhitched.

As Wil drove the truck out of the gate, the lightning was close enough that I was nervous holding on to the metal gate to close it. I even got my hand stuck in the chain link fence at one point, trying to get the lock cable through so that I could lock it. I managed to get it done just as Wil hopped out of the truck to help me. We both jumped back into the truck and breathed a big sigh of relief.

A minute later, as we turned for home, the rain came. With the rain came bright flashes of lightning and deep rumbles of thunder. We had barely gotten the boat safely put away in time.

But then again, with dolphins and a rainbow in our day, how could we be anything but lucky!