Friday morning dawned bright and clear. The wind has died down so we will be able to travel through the Gulf to head north, but first breakfast! Eric made me something different this morning, a cheese omelette, with a side of bacon of course :).
It took about 1/2 hour to get to Sarasota Bay. We were probably a little bit later than we should have been to arrive, but we did get some fish. I caught a keeper trout (with multiple short ones) and Eric got an good-size Jack Crevalle. He also got a nice blue fish which he plans to smoke and use for fish dip.
When the bite stopped, we headed south, staying in the intercoastal waterway and came upon a pod of dolphins. They’re just so hard to get a good photo.
We found another place to fish, the ‘middle grounds’, which looked decent. We got several bites, but no keeper fish. The tide’s wrong so we might be back at a different time this week before leaving to go home. We located a place to eat where we can dock the boat. It’s called Casey Key Fish House. One of the Venice shopkeepers mentioned this place and it had good reviews. But before we got there we had to go through one of Florida’s last swing bridges. With our T-top, we only had inches to spare when going underneath. We took the rods out of the holders, laying them down and also adjusted the antennae. Good things the tide is going out and not high tide. This is our second time going through it and we actually saw it in use for another vessel that was too tall. Interesting to see it work. The bridgekeeper comes out of the office, walks onto the middle of the bridge, then works the mechanism to get it to swing out – while they are in the middle.
Just past it is the Casey Key Fish House at Marker 32.
We both had sandwiches. Eric got fried grouper (left) while I got a fried snapper (right) sandwich. Both were good, along with the fries and the cole slaw.
There was a large group celebrating someone’s birthday and by 3pm they were feeling no pain (and being rather loud).
It was so nice to see the sun, I had to throw in another blue sky/white cloud photo. Unfortunately, with all of this sun, I got a bit too much of it and have a sun burn. Clouds are nice when they don’t have any rainstorms inside of them.
Since we ate lunch so late, there wasn’t really a need for dinner. We snacked on munchies we had around the house and it was plenty to eat. Eric still had to clean the fish we caught earlier in the day.
We tried our hand at surf fishing again as the tide was coming in. Unfortunately it is a late tide so we didn’t go to the beach until after 8:30pm. It got dark quickly.
Darden Travels 