Out and about...

It's been a week since we've taken Wild Blue out. No, we're not tired of boating already... since we're just home for a short time, we've been working on "projects"... the boat, the trailer, the 5th wheel, and the house. This morning, it was just too nice to NOT go out...

Check out the weather station: 76º at 9:46 am...

Sunny with a nice SE breeze. A couple hundred yards out of our canal, we saw the first dolphins of the day, a mother and baby who swam close to the boat and gave us a "tail slap." Nice way to start.

A quarter mile further, and we stopped to watch more dolphins (this time I had the camera out)...


We turned down the ship channel...


I tried out a car mount for the Droid on the boat...


Yeah, that is going to work nicely with the Navionics app. We were kicking back, heading towards the Gulf, when we saw this in the distance...


We're in the narrow part of the ship channel, so we moved as far as we could to the south side of the channel. In between that shot above and the next one below, a fishing catamaran (looked about 35') blasted up close to us. He slowed down enough to get off plane... I'm sure he thought he was being courteous, but the result was just the opposite - on plane, he was putting out about a 2' wake, as he slowed to displacement speed, his wake picked up to about 4'... with us in fairly shallow water. I had to turn into his wake, as he pushed the throttle forward and disappeared. I had my hands full, but got the camera back up in time to get this...


Hard to see, but there were dolphins surfing the bow. This big thing kicked way less wake than the fishing boat.


Off the south tip of South Padre Island, we hung around and watched more dolphins playing...


A few boats were out and about, too. We watched these guys fishing from their Hobie kayaks...


We heard two of the fishing excursion boats talking about their catch..."Yeah, we have a family of 9 onboard and we've caught about 150 whitings. We're slammin' 'em!"

Knowing we had work waiting for us back home, we turned around and headed back. Saw some of our dolphin watch friends, and this boat, setting buoys and daymarks...


It was nice to have a "morning off". Back at the dock, Joan worked on putting some insulation on the v-berth walls while I put waterproofing on the bimini. Plenty of other chores kept us busy the rest of the day, but this was a nice break.

Little Izzy didn't get to go out with us - she looked forlorn when we got back...