Sarasota 1/11/2019

We left Clearwater in the morning and traveled about 50 miles on the ICW to Sarasota. It was a beautiful, sunny day.  It took about 5 hours.  We had to go under many bridges, so Karl took down our antennas, so we did not have to ask for a bridge opening.  If you need a bridge opening, you need to call the bridge operator on the radio and ask for an opening.  Sometimes, they will open it “on demand,” but usually they open it on the hour or half hour.

We arrived at Marina Jack’s in the afternoon.  It is always a flurry of activity to get into a new marina and into a slip, especially if we are not familiar with the marina.  Karl contacts them on the radio, getting instructions on which slip we are in.  I get the lines ready.  Karl backs into the slip, which sometimes is challenging if the weather is bad or windy!  Everything seems to happen at once.  We have headphones, so we can communicate with each other.  Before we had the headphones, it was difficult to hear him and we ended up shouting at each other!  This led to miscommunications and sometimes unpleasant exchanges!  We now call the headphones our “marriage savers!”

Marina Jack’s is a top notch marina with “floating concrete docks.”  Downtown Sarasota is just across the street with plenty of shopping and restaurants!  There is a very nice waterfront park next to us with many people walking their dogs and playing with their children. Salty loved it!

We arrived on the weekend, so the marina was busy!  There is an open air restaurant on site, with live music playing.  We enjoyed a drink there and listening to the band.

On Saturday, we discovered an Art Festival in downtown Sarasota, literally across the street from us! It was a lot of fun to walk through the exhibits.  We ate lunch at an outside cafe and enjoyed people watching!  It has been a while since we have done that, just living in the moment and enjoying life!

We returned to the boat and watched a heartbreaking basketball game between Florida State and # 1 Duke.  The score was back and forth, we really thought FSU was going to upset Duke, it came down to the final 2.5 seconds!  But Duke landed that last 3 pointer!