Ten-year anniversary camping trip - Part IV: Final day, exploring oyster beds

We caught the low tide on the final day, so we waded out to an oyster bar to look for little critters and scope out all of the birds.  Laura counted over fifty herons on one huge sandbar!  The closer sandbar had some of Laura's favorites--white pelicans.


















We headed out to fish some more, and again came up empty.  We had intended to stay three nights, but a lot of rain and cooler weather were on the way the next day.  That, coupled with the slow fishing and the need to wash salt off of lots of gear the next day, motivated us to modify our plan to head out after lunch.  

Overall, the experience got a grade of B.  We got so lucky with with weather with overnight temps in the 50s and daytime temps in the 60s and 70s.  We also dodged a bullet with the bugs.  We had brought half-a-dozen different potions to try to fend off no-see-ums, but we only encountered them for about an hour the first morning during breakfast and again back at the boat ramp.  The rest of the time, the breeze and cool air made bug repellents unnecessary.  The wildlife and having our own private beach were great, and canoeing almost a mile offshore was pretty cool.  If we had caught more fish, we would have rated it a solid A, but we were still happy to have a fresh fish dinner and have a few more trout to share with family and friends when we got to Orlando in a few days.  We spoke to some airboat fishermen who said that they had also experienced slow fishing and the only luck they had was in 6'+ of water, so we didn't feel too bad since that was farther out then we would have been comfortable with in the canoe.


We had planned to stay in Steinhatchee that night, but we had such an early start that we decided to just drive all the way to my sister's house that night so we could wash gear in the morning, freeing us up to hang out with her when she got off of work.  We laughed at the idea of going out for an "anniversary dinner" because it seemed we just had several amazing dinners over the fire to celebrate, but seafood on the water in Crystal River was too good to pass up.  So we had a great meal at Margarita Breeze and even took advantage of our friend Doug's rule about having fruity tropical drinks when you can see the water.

Comments

  1. Laura OFebruary 18, 2019 at 12:04 PM

    Thanks for working on these blogs and photos! They are beautiful. I especially love the ones of you.....and the black and white one with the seafoam making interesting patterns. That one really leads the eye and has exquisite composition.

    ReplyDelete

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