Dear Reader,
Last night the winds stayed down, as if they had better things to do than flap at our tent fly, but by 2 a.m. they’d returned. And by 6 a.m., when it is still pitch black in Florida and you’d think it was still the dead of night but for the clock on your phone and the hunger in your belly, the winds were at full force and John scrambled out of the tents with the stakes, guying out the rain fly’s corners to prevent damage to our tent.
We weren’t going anywhere today. That we knew from the forecast. We’d missed our only window yesterday afternoon for imminent escape.
Watch the tide, instead, we did.
So close to the full moon, the tide was very low this morning when we finally scrambled out of our tent to stretch and look at the day. I put my wetsuit booties on and walked out to see what I could find.
Raccoon tracks. And a long bar of oyster shells. And rows of wind-churned foam along its edge.
In the distance, beyond John, a raft of white pelicans sits so tightly packed that I wondered if it wasn’t a boat.
A small raccoon came by, oblivious to us it seemed.
But no dolphins and no manatee and no flocks of choreographed birds dancing across the sky.
But we might of had our noses buried in our books, sitting tucked behind our tent where we could read in the lee, or with our back to a tree for a windscreen.
Our water supply is now uncomfortably low and our electric juice is now dependent solely on the sun’s uninterrupted rays hitting our two small panels to power up our battery packs. It feels like an awfully slow process though, when you find you start to lean towards urgent. So I relaxed on a tree limb and watched two crab boats work their way along the oyster bars.
Tomorrow we need to move on. The weather forecast, which by now you know we live by, says high winds the rest of today and tonight and tomorrow until around noon. That’s when we’ll be packed and ready to leave, routine or no routine of leaving only in the morning. We’ll be paddling south towards the mouth of the Suwanee River and then on to Cedar Key. But for now we rest. And drink. And read.
The tide is very high now, practically lapping at Miss Pink’s stern. The oyster bars are totally covered. And the wind has not let up. I’ve seen no bumblebees today. No butterflies. No mosquitoes either and no gnats.
Let’s see what tomorrow will bring, shall we? I know the gods are laughing.
We are alive.
We are happy.
We are adventurers.
Goodnight!
Cheers, Susana
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