I certainly can't pawn this off as an official logbook entry, but I've got to tell you about my last few days. On Thursday, I got up around 6am and left for the Dry Tortugas. I arrived around 7pm, and anchored off of the southwestern corner of Garden Key (home of Fort Jefferson). Witchy Woman had arrived 2 or 3 hours before I had, so we got together and made some spaghetti for dinner. We got up Friday morning around 8:30 and toured around the Fort, and then went snorkeling. We first snorkeled around the Fort to get the feel for it, then we took off to find a few wrecks. This place is lined with wrecks, because the unmarked reefs were extremely hazardous to ships back in the day. One particular wreck that was specacular was the Avanti. It was 261ft. long and sunk in 1907 in about 30-40 feet of water. Pieces of the wreck are still sticking out above the surface. It was awesome...I've got pictures, but my current computer limitations aren't allowing me to put them up yet. Most of the underwater pics didn't turn out too terribly well, but I'll show them to you as soon as I get a chance.

To all of you who have been asking about whether or not I've seen a shark yet- the answer is finally yes. In fact, I've seen/swam around 2. Under one of the huge coral heads that we dove around, I saw about a 5' nurse shark (and I've got a picture of it!). Amazingly (for those of you who know about how I am with the sharks...), I swam within 3 or 4 feet of the thing. It was quite a thrill. After that, when we went to dive on the Avanti, me & Winston saw about a 8 foot reef shark. We're not exactly sure what kind, because it was swimming away from us, but it was there nonetheless. Believe it or not, I actually think that I've about conquered my fear of the whole shark thing. Craziness. In addition to swimming in the presence of sharks, we had tons of barracuda cruising by checking us out. I mean, these things were 4 and 5 feet long...grinning their teeth at us the whole time. It really was cool when you realized that they weren't going to bother you.

Hmm...ok, enough of trying to explain to you the wonders of the underworld...I'll do more of that when I'm able to show you a few pics (no matter how crappy they turned out). By about 3:30pm we had snorkeled and dove everything we wanted to do and decided to go ahead and head back to Key West. I stayed within eyesight of Witchy Woman the whole time, and we had a great sail back. We probably sailed at least half of the trip back (it's rare to be able to travel a big distance without using the motor a good bit of the time). One huge thing to mention about the trip back...the moonrise. About 45 minutes after the amazing sunset, I noticed this bright red spot on the horizon. I thought it was some form of lighting from a huge boat, but before I knew it, the moon rose above the horizon like a huge flaming ball. It was simply breathtaking. As I stood their watching it, I could barely hear Hammer on the radio in the background “there are some things in this world that most people will never see, my friend...and this is one of those things...”