Good morning from Clearwater Beach Marina. We arrived here last Wednesday after an easy run down from Tarpon Springs. The Gulf ICW was a little shallow, as we saw 3′ under the bottom of the boat. I do not like it that shallow! We did move on a high tide, and we will continue to only move near high tide.

After arriving here in Clearwater Beach, we were greeted by very windy and cloudy weather. As someone said, Florida is broken. I hope it gets fixed soon. We did get a chance on the second day to walk to the beach with Memphis and found out the town is not dog friendly. She is not allowed on the beach or in any of the restaurants. (This is the opposite of Tarpon.)

We have had plenty of time with the high winds and cool weather to eat at many of the local restaurants and enjoy some fresh seafood.

We also took some time to brush up on our golf game with some fellow loopers!

Now for the fun part. We woke up the other morning with crows everywhere in the harbor and sitting on all the boats. We did not realize that this was a sign of what the day had instore for us.

Mid-day we received an email from the harbor notifying us that the storm arriving overnight would bring flooding to the harbor. We had 40-50MPH winds from the east, then southeast, then west, and finally northwest. East was fine, southeast brought 2-3′ waves into the harbor along with the high tide. This arrived at 1:30AM. I spent the next 2 hours retying and securing the boat.

The dock we are tied to is usually 3-4′ above the side of our boat. The dock and our bikes ended up 1′ under water. This meant loosening the lines all night so the boat would not go under. It also meant the dock was being lifted by all the boats tied to it. We dock was badly damaged and we hope they will let us stay here until 1/2/23.

A lot of cross members holding the dock on the concrete pillars washed away as the dock was floating off of them. There is about 30 yards of the main dock that look like this down toward our boat.

About 3:30am the winds continued to the west and the waves started to decrease. I actually got some sleep from 4-7am.

We survived the night without much sleep and the boat is fine. I thought I brought way to many lines on this trip, but we used every one of them for our boat and the one next to us to make sure we were both secure. Who Dat looks like she is caught in a spider web.

These two pictures are the next morning assessing what was left. As you can see, I have double lines on every corner of the boat just in case one line broke. After finding out we were all good, it was time for some breakfast off the boat.

Yes, it was 9am and we both had a mimosa. We felt like it was evening after being up most of the night riding the storm out. (And we needed one.)

This was the first time in my boating life that I prepared a ditch bag with our wallets, phones, computer, and items to survive off the boat for a day, just in case the docks broke, and we had to abandon ship. I have not even thought about this while tide to a dock in my life.

The winds are supposed to keep blowing for the next few days from the northwest and north. We are well protected from these two directions, so we will just hear the wind hauling but should be calm in the harbor.

Not all the boats around us survived the storm and surge.

We did take a walk to the beach yesterday to see how rough the Gulf is, boy we don’t want to go out now!

Today, Monday, they will continue on the 1000-hour service for our engines. This is just routine service, and they should be done by Wednesday we hope.

Bradley arrives on Saturday for Christmas on the boat with Amy and I. We can’t wait, but will miss seeing William, Erica, and the girls.

Hope you have a great start to your week and I will post more as we continue through the week.

If you want to see any videos of the storm, the currents, and dock damage, send me a text and I will forward them to you. Amy is still in bed, so you will have to give me a break on this post!