FRIDAY NOVEMBER 6

Spent the day catching up on boat chores. Our Verizon service doesn’t work here. Ross checked out the courtesy van for a while and drove around until he found cell signal. He made several calls to marinas so we have a number of options depending on what Ida does. Everyone is keeping a close eye on the weather.

We are definitely fresh water folk who are now salt water newbies. No more floating docks and cleats. We now have to tie up to a dock piling and consider the tide factor in to it. Heck, I was just starting to figure out the dock and cleat thing. The photo is the boat in the slip as low tide. Ross got up last night and checked on the boat at high tide. He said at that point the boat was lifted so high we would have had to get off the swim platform to get on to the dock. I take his word for it, and you’ll have to take mine. No way was I getting up at 2 a.m. to take a picture.

There are several commercial shrimp boats in this marina. We went to buy some fresh shrimp off of a boat where we saw a crew. But just our luck, their boat had generator problems and had to come back in. No shrimp. Visiting with them I found out they take the boats out at night. There is a huge outrigger on either side of the boat and net attached. On the ends of the outrigger are gigantic spotlights. They turn them on to attract the shrimp. Dang, I wish they would have had some shrimp!

We used the courtesy van and went to a busy little fish joint in Fairhope named Market By The Bay for dinner. Fellow Loopers Liz and Bob Stagg from “Second Wind” joined us. It wasn’t a fancy place by any means, but good, reasonably priced chow. Ross and I both had the fried shrimp dinner and hush puppies. Very good!! More about hush puppies some other time. I’m not entirely sure what they are, but I’ll find out and report back. But know this, the choice was French fries or hush puppies. They are good! Bob had the gumbo and said it was excellent. Being a native Alabamian I figure he knows gumbo. It was “First Friday” in Fairhope so many of the shops were open late and there were street musicians. We wandered around for a while before going back to the marina.