Schooner Appledore V

Our friends Bill and Leslie bought an afternoon cruise on the Schooner Appledore V in Fort Myers through Groupon and didn't get a chance to use it. So they gave us the coupon. When I called the Appledore to make a reservation, they said they weren't doing the two hour cruise the coupon was good for, but we could use it for the three hour "Go Fish Family Cruise."

We were supposed to be at the dock at Salty Sam's Marina fifteen minutes early, but I messed up when I put the address into the GPS... I gave them a call and they waited for us -- we ended up only about five minutes late --

Fortunately when they had sent a confirmation email, they mentioned they left from Dock A, so we were able to go right there --

And there is was, and they were waiting for us --

The schooner had a crew of three who tended to the sails --

They referred to the Appledores (there are five of them) as traditional sailing schooners --

The sails are gaff-rigged. That is they have a wooden boom at the bottom and a wooden gaff at the top of the sail, making the sail a big rectangle.

Part of the uniqueness of their "Go Fish" cruise is dropping a trawl net overboard weighted to skim the bottom of  San Carlos Bay in the Gulf of Mexico. They left it down for fifteen minutes or so.

Then they hauled it in and dumped the contents into some plastic tubs --

This was the first time they had caught a ray --

They very quickly took a look at it and then dumped it back over the side (there are regs about what they can keep on board for a bit.) --

We were able to take a good look at the other critters that the net had brought up. This interesting bottom feeder is called a bat fish --

This is its under-side. It uses those orangey pectoral fins to help propel it across the bottom sand --

This one was called a Lizard Fish. That mouth is something else again!

I think this was the cutest of the critters the net brought up. It's a Spider crab.

There were three anemones in the net as well --

We thoroughly enjoyed our afternoon on the water. We ended up stopping at Big Game Waterfront Grill for a delicious shrimp dinner on the way home.

Finally, THE KEYS!

It seems like we've been heading in this direction for a l-o-n-g time and now, we are finally in the Florida Keys! We're a long, long way from Washington State.

We basically drove down Highway 1, which goes all the way from Homestead to Key West, the end of the island chain that makes up the Keys. The mainland portion of the highway skirts Everglades National Park and is very swampy --

As you get further down the Keys, the highway is a two-lane road with a blue concrete barrier down the center line. (I have a feeling that there used to be head-on crashes from impatient drivers...) The Atlantic Ocean was on our left and the Gulf of Mexico was on the right -- as we crossed the many bridges we could see them both at the same time.

The battery on my camera went dead, so I didn't get any more pictures until we got to Sugarloaf Key where the KOA is located. Believe it or not, these are residents of the RV Resort --

 I think we spotted three roosters and the one lone hen strutting in and out among the RVs --

It was getting towards dusk when we went for a walk around the park. This Brown Pelican flew into the mangroves to roost --

I almost missed getting a shot of this one, beginning to show breeding colors on the head.

This is the swimming area at the park --

And here's one more Brown Pelican (the American White Pelican is not on this coast) sitting on the bridge --

Fort Morgan, Alabama

Fort Morgan sits on the westernmost tip of the peninsula that encloses the bottom portion of Mobile Bay in Alabama. Mobile Bay is on one side and the Gulf of Mexico on the other. The fort was completed following the War of 1812 when Congress realized how vulnerable the US coastlines were. This building was built to house the Fort Morgan Museum after the fort was deactivated and turned over to the State of Alabama.

The brick fortifications were mostly destroyed during the Civil War by rifled cannon and steam-powered warships. This was pretty much proven in 1864 when Admiral D.G. Farragut led his fleet past the guns of the fort into Mobile Bay with the loss of only one ship. (This was when he gave his famous order, "Damn the torpedoes (mines), full speed ahead!") That ship, the ironclad Tecumseh, was struck by a exploding mine (then called torpedoes) and sunk within a minute thus disproving the view that the ironclads were invincible...

Concrete batteries were built following the Civil War from 1896 to 1905. These batteries were manned during the Spanish-American War and World War I.

Some of the powder magazines below the gun batteries still exist --

 Fort Morgan was mainly used as a training base during the World War I. It was deactivated and put into caretaker status in 1923; then reactivated and manned in 1941. In 1946 it was again deactivated and turned over to the State of Alabama.
 

Looking out over Mobile Bay from the top of one of the batteries --

There are a lot of what we assumed were oil platforms and other rigs in the Bay --

The last time we drove along the Gulf Coast a year or so after Katrina, there wasn't much left of any of the beach houses except for some of the pillars they had been built on. The trees that were left were mostly broken and bare. Some of the shoreline still looks that way --

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But most of it is once again built up with beach houses that look like pastel confections --

 

I think that there must be a rule that says your vacation home must be painted a color that looks edible!