After anchoring, we took a dinghy ride up Frenchman Creek to check it out as a potential hurricane hole (2 tropical storms and one hurricane forming in the Atlantic in just a three day period had gotten our attention!!!). The creek has mangroves on both sides and looked like the best place I have found in the St. Pete/Clearwater area to anchor Enchantress if a hurricane or tropical storm is predicted to make landfall in this area while we are here.

Frenchman Creek runs between Maximo Park and the campus of Eckerd College. I lobbied hard for Amy to go to Eckerd College so I could move to Florida sooner than I did but to no avail. :-(. So we took a photo of the sailboats at the Eckerd College docks and told Amy to show it to Olivia and Laura (ages 6 1/2 and 5) and for her to tell them they could take sailing classes and marine biology if they go there. Never too early to start the lobbying efforts!!! ;-)

We spent a couple of days at Maximo Point and decided to go "treasure hunting" one day. If you haven't heard of "geocaching", it is a world-wide game of treasure hunting using a GPS. People hide small "caches" of trinkets and a log notebook all over the world and post the latitude and longitude on the Internet at www.geocaching.com. Then people try to find it using their GPS. When you find the treasure you log your find in the notebook and put the container back in its hiding place for others to find. If you take an item of the treasure you must put in another item.

We searched using the GPS which gets you in the vicinity of the treasure. Then we started searching the underbrush and trees and finally found the screwcap plastic jar painted with camouflage paint hidden in a hollow tree trunk covered with a palm frond. We were very excited! However, the little black snake that slithered away had the First Mate running out of the underbrush for the path and freaked out the Captain a bit!!!! We logged our find and replaced the treasure (while stamping my feet loudly to let any snakes know I was coming so they could leave the area!!!!!).

From Maximo Point we went to Treasure Island (hmmm....didn't look for treasure there so I guess that's a bit strange!). We anchored in a cove and took the dinghy to a supermarket with its own dock. Yup, a waterfront supermarket!! Now that's CONVENIENT as we usually have to walk a mile or so or take a trolley or bus to get our groceries when we are cruising and don't have our car. After spending the night anchored there we went back up the ICW to again anchor in Redington Shores.

In about a week we will go to Gulfport to put Enchantress in the municipal marina so that we can fly out of Tampa to Connecticut for a visit. Laura will be having her fifth birthday!! She is having a magician at her birthday party and Linda made magician capes for each of the kids who are attending the party.

Will update the blog after we return from Connecticut.