Brrrrrrr!!!

We woke up in Tarpon Springs.

It was pretty cold.

In fact the fabled sunny and warm Florida was nowhere to be found.

El Niño has been making a lot of weather trouble so far. Everyone has been a little grumpy about it, including me.

When it’s colder in Florida than it is in Tahoe in December and early January, that just not right.

We are fortunate that Selkie is a warm boat.

Now that we had completed the Big Bend Route (the stretch from Carrabelle to Tarpon Springs), the pressure has come off.

It’s all travel now in sheltered waters. Weather is not as big an impact, so we can move much more freely.

Tarpon Springs is a medium-sized community just north of the Tampa metropolitan area.

The region around Tarpon Spring used to be a coastal mass of bayous and mangrove swamps fed by freshwater springs draining to the Gulf of Mexico.

Now it’s full of big box stores.

However, the downtown area is quite quaint.

In the 1870’s the region was settled by farmers and fishermen.

Some of the newly arrived visitors thought they saw tarpon jumping out of the waters and so named the location Tarpon Springs.

Sadly, the fish seen splashing were probably the lowly mullet rather than the flashy, sporty tarpon.

Sponge harvesting was quickly discovered, and a sponge harvesting industry developed in the 1890s.

With their own local fisheries depleted, many people from Key West and the Bahamas settled in Tarpon Springs to hook sponges and then process them.

A few Greek immigrants also arrived in this city during the 1890s to work in the sponge industry.

A decade later, sponge diving was brought to Tarpon Springs from Greece by recruiting divers and crew members from Greece.

Most Greek divers came from the Dodecanese Islands, which the Main Street along the spring docks is named for.

The sponge industry soon became one of the leading maritime industries in Florida and the most important business in Tarpon Springs, generating millions of dollars a year.

Chances are that if you are old enough to remember natural sponges instead of the synthetic ones available today, you used a sponge harvested from Tarpon Springs.

Selkie was moored at the Tarpon Springs municipal marina next to the sponge docks.

It was time for chores, replenishing groceries and some West Marine supplies, and getting our prescriptions refilled. We needed to get our chores done quickly before named Storm Finn was to hit our part of the Gulf.

Even though we made it safely, we could feel the influences of Finn coming, with ominous clouds and winds turning to the south east, a harbinger of a cold front coming.

We knew we had a couple of hours to get chores done along with some shopping before we need to be back on Selkie to wait out the storm.

The wind was blowing very briskly at 20 to 25 knots out of the South all morning.

Libbie and I rode our bikes and got everything we needed.

There was a little time to wait for the storm before it hit so I walked down the sponge docks to check the area out as expected.

The sponge docks reminded me of a mini Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco.

There was hardly anybody around because of the storm warnings.

There were a lot of tourist shops. I could see a very dark band of clouds coming, so I went back to Selkie. We waited for the storm to hit.

It came as advertised complete with tornado warnings. It was quite intense. We were glad to be in a tight little marina securely tied to the docks.

Typical of these intense cold fronts, the wind built out of the south to 45 knots and then within five minutes switched to the west as the front pass through and continue to blow it 40 knots or so.

It lasted for about an hour before the wind died down to a more reasonable 15 to 20 knots for the rest of the day.

As expected, the temperature dropped so we just stayed close to Selkie, made dinner and went to bed.

The next morning we finished our chores and went on a bike ride to check out some other places.

We came back and walked the sponge docks. There were a lot more people, musicians playing and hawkers calling for tour boat rides.

We went to dinner at a Greek restaurant downtown.

The food was very good and we stopped by the Greek bakery to get a little treat for Selkie.

The next morning, we left for Clearwater Beach. There was another Looper boat that we had met in Tarpon Springs, and they were had left the day before and were anchored.

We decided to join them in the anchorage, and it proved to be a very secure place.

It was a little different than some of the anchorages we’ve been used to, as it felt like we are in a concrete canyon, surrounded by hotels and condos and private homes but the location was excellent with good anchor holding.

Libbie tried her hand at fishing. She’s at least figured out how to catch bait fish.

We had dinner with the crew of the boat we followed in, as well as a another boat that had joined us in the anchorage.

Another cold front went through while we were there requiring us to reset the anchor a couple of times, but that’s pretty typical of this weather during an El Niño year in Florida.

Libbie and I dingied over to the marina where there was a dinghy dock to explore the area.

We walked the beach at Clearwater Beach several times.

We enjoying walking the beach.

When the weather cleared, we proceeded to headed to St. Petersburg Marina.

St. Petersburg is a modern city with excellent restaurants and museums, very close to the marina.

Libbie and I celebrated her birthday early at an excellent Italian restaurant.

The next day on her birthday, we went to the Salvador Dali Museum.

It was an excellent museum with a lot of very interesting and compelling artwork by Dali. The one thing about artwork by Salvador Dali is that you know that he’s trying to tell you something, but you’re just not sure exactly what he’s trying to tell you.

Walking around in St. Petersburg was fun, including walking out to the end of the very modern Saint Pete’s Pier. The marina was in the middle of everything, and it felt great to be there.

We spent two nights and then headed out to Sarasota.

Sarasota is similar to St. Petersburg.

It also has a vibrant downtown with lots of good restaurants and shops. The density of jewelry stores is a little astonishing. It seems that a lot of money is being spread around by tourists who come there as well as the residence who stay there.

We stayed at Marina Jack, a very nice marina.

We went out to dinner with some friends, and then proceeded to clean Selkie from top to bottom.

We’ve also been working on the bright work (Selkie’s exterior wood trim) a little bit trying to get that taken care of.

We haven’t had much sun but the weather in the future weeks looks promising so we’ll be able to keep warmer before we put Selkie on the hard end of February.

We sure hope so.

BRRRRRRRR!