All About GOD - Growing Relationships with Jesus and Others
Creatures from Other Places (Florida and the Caribbean)
These photos are from a month long trip to Florida and a two-week Caribbean cruise most of May of 2012 as a graduation and farewell gift for my German friend Annea as she prepared to return home to Stuttgart, Germany to begin working on her Doctorate. She had never seen the ocean and tropics before. In November, she would return to the area on her honeymoon. I will try to stay with the nature theme along with adding a few general photos of interest. Sunrise and sunset photos from the trip are posted at the end of the discussion "The Glory of Scenery touched by our God".
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Permalink Reply by Ricprimus on
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Palm Harbor & Crystal Beach
4, 5 miles south of Tarpon is the small community of Palm Harbor, mostly working middle class residential, although the Innisbrook resort lies within it for the rich. Lived in PH 86-90, nice Denny's restaurant for wee hour snacks, and the Ole Schoolhouse restaurant is an all time favorite of mine, sadly it's closed down now. About midway in the city on the Gulf is a tiny village, Crystal Beach made up of small cottages centered around a tiny park. A focus was it's small beach, maybe 100 feet of sand and a grassy area. On either side of he beach are mangroves and oyster beds, and north end had a 200 foot pier. I bought a small cottage on the water and lived there 90-2000: it was a daily sunrise/sunset ritual to have a coffee while watching the dolphins play/feed. And I did a lot of thinking wading in the oyster beds watching the various snails, starfish, seahorses and horseshoe crabs doing their thing. Another beach like TS, not on the map and only a few locals ever were about. Quaint small Methodist church by the beach that had a wonderful electronic chime tower that played several songs every hour. Photo here is of a bit of the beach looking north, my cottage was about 150 feet to the north on the park road. CB is a wonderfully serene area off the beaten path. -
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My cottage hadn't changed much in 2012, two tiny bedrooms, one bath, living room; I had it set up almost solid with shelving and wall to wall art equipment for my studies at Ringling and the art festivals and gallery work. During the 10 years I lived there, I was joined by Barbara ("Cousin It") 90-92 and Rachel ("Squeaky") 96-2000: we did a lot of intense art and living those years. One of the more contented periods of my life.
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One of the things I learned from the locals was "crabbin". During the hour or so as the tide went out, the blue crabs would migrate to deeper water. During this time, we would take a length of string like 20 feet long, tie a piece of chicken to an end and toss it off the pier in the 2-4 feet of clear water. Eventually a crab would come along and start munching away, and we'd slowly pull it along until close enough to scoop it up with a net on a 10 foot pole. Not the type of crab you would boil and eat the claws, with blues you would crack open the claws and the main shell and pull the meat out to shred and make salads or a wonderful rice/crab stuffing for inside of broiled fish. Locals used to hand cast and net mackerel from small boats and cook them in smokers: delicious but never was good at casting hand nets. During low tide you could wade out in the now shallow deep areas with seagrass and fill a bucket of bay scallops, but that was seasonal, Sept and October. Photos is of a 8 inch blue crab some kids had caught while I was showing Annea the pier.
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Dunedin & Honeymoon Island
Five or so miles south of Palm Harbor is the next small city, Dunedin: this city is a sister city of Dunedin, Scotland and has a large population of Scottish descent. It has a marvelous park of winding creeks and ponds and every winter host the Dunedin Art Show, one of Florida's finest (and most profitable). I could live half a year off this 3-day show, and the other half off the Palm Harbor and Tarpon Springs shows. (There is a reason why I choose the central west coast to live in). Other splendid features of Dunedin are a several mile causeway out into the Gulf to Honeymoon Island and the Dunedin City Marina right at the causeway (cheapest boat rentals, docks and storage for boats along with classes for kayaking, sailing and powerboating). I took the Coast Guard sailboat classes in 90 and monthly rented a small sailboat nearly every weekend until I bought one. Soon as I got out of the SUV with Annea at the Marine I saw Nick, the old gentlemen who bought it from me in 2000 before my move back to Ohio. Photo is of it, a 25 foot Catalina. If you're not familiar with small cruise capable sailboats, visualize looking out of the windows in a 7 foot high, 8 foot by 22 foot apartment/college dorm room with forward bed, table and chairs, a kitchen with freezer/fridge/propane stove and cabinetry; it had a electrical system for AC that ran off batteries or a cable while docked. Though I never built up the nerve to do it, it was fully capable of sailing to the Caribbean islands. I did spend many weekends with Rachel exploring all the gulf islands from Miami to Pensacola. A good many people at the marina live full time on boats of this to the 40 foot range. I had planned after my parent's passing to return to Florida and purchase a 30 to 35 foot version, which gets into all the amenities of a typical small apartment efficiency, and can handle sailing to Europe. -
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Here's a nice photo up on the Dunedin causeway to Honeymoon Island looking across one of the fishing piers toward a part of Honeymoon State park. That's one of the numerous beginner sailboat classes going on using 15 foot dingy type sailboats.
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After a short drive on the causeway you come to Honeymoon State Park. It was named Honeymoon Islands during WW2 when the government built small apartments for military members to stay at to rest and recuperate before returning to the war. Needless to say, the government soon found it also needed to build a small chapel for the many marriages and honeymoons that occurred here. Today it is a state wildlife park featuring a woods surrounded by natural beaches. More of a local resident hangout, tourist's like the daily raked, artificial white beaches such as Clearwater Beach. This is the Gulfside beach with natural sand, washed up seaweed bits of driftwood and other debris: how a real natural beach looks.
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When Annea saw this, it was her first experience with sea shells and she began stuffing her sling bag with the broken, sun bleached shells littering the beach and squealing like a child. It took about 14 minutes before she finally yielded to my telling her to throw them away and that I had some stops planed where we would get way nicer shells. Still, she kept a large baggie full.
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A chilling sight about 20 feet out from where we were wading, Annea pretty much climbed on top of me when I had her look from searching for shells: but....
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It takes a few months of beach going, ocean watching to learn the difference between a shark and dolphin fin. Dolphins about anywhere on gulf west coast, usually chasing schools of mackerel or at just social play.
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They are highly intelligent and social, and very curious.. here Annea had moved around the front of the pod trying to get a closer photo and these two decided to take a good look at her (I'm sure they thought she was worth looking at, I sure did) and I captured this nice "dolphin popup" shot.
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A perched Osprey wondering why we was bothering his fishing concentration.
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