What I Did on my Summer Vacation - Part 2

When I said calm...I mean Caaaaalllllllllm. :-D



Since the seas were so calm we could see lots of little animals under the surface. I found quite a few of these Lettered Olive Snails. Nicky thought they were pretty cool since they're like Sponge Bob's pet snail Gary. Well....they're like Gary in that they live in the sea and they're snails. There the similarities end. LOL





Around Wednesday...or Thursday? The days run together. The water started getting choppy and a storm started rolling in.


It sure made for some nice picture backgrounds. That top one is Nicky with my beautiful Mommy.

Since it was too choppy to really swim anywhere but the pool, we went to check out the bay. Apalachicola Bay is FULL of oysters, and let me tell you, I decreased the population a bit with all of the raw oysters I ate when we were there. ;) Mmm they were so good!

It's also full of Florida Fighting Conchs. (At least, I think that's what those are...) And the shells that have been abandoned by Conchs are all taken up quickly by marine hermit crabs. I didn't manage to get a good shot where you can actually see any of them, but they are pretty cool. By the way if I'm wrong about my identification of any of these things please let me know. ;-D

The things that look like rocks around the conch shells are empty oyster shells. They litter the whole shore of the bay.

Those are oystermen. They use those stick things to haul the oysters up on deck then they look through them to see which ones are big enough and which actually have oysters in them and aren't just empty shells. I wonder how many pearls they find on a daily basis... Of course, they might not even shuck them so then I guess they wouldn't find pearls. I don't know how that works.

That night we went crab "hunting." We took the boys down to the beach in the dark armed with flashlights and nets.

Finn didn't last long. He was in the Ergo on my back and he was out fast asleep in about 10 minutes so he and Grampa went back to the house, but Nicky is an expert crab trapper. We didn't keep them of course. It was really less crab hunting and more crab terrorizing. LOL After we looked at them for a few minutes we sent them on their merry way.

That night a HUGE storm rolled in. The power went out in the house from about 3am-7am. How do I know this since I should have been asleep? Well a BIG strike of lightening hit right outside the house and the bed Finn and I were in was RIGHT next to the metal framed windows. Being a girl used to lightening storms, I knew better than to stay near a window in lightening that close. I mean, it must have hit something next to the house. Did you know you can be struck by lightening through a window? Yup, you can! So Finn and I hightailed it out of the bed and to the couch. Well, Finn had been very restless anyway, and after that he REFUSED to go back to sleep until 6:30 by which time of course it was too late for me. I couldn't even get any darn coffee cause the stupid power was out.

Now, I've always been put at ease by the ocean. Even the ocean during storms. Something about it just soothes me, but there was something eeeeirie about that storm. It was crazy strong! The wind and rain were beating against the windows, and you couldn't see even the railing of the deck. I don't know if you're familiar with HP Lovecraft, but I was pretty sure there would be an attack of deep ones at any moment ready to haul me off as a sacrifice to Cthulu!

I do indeed have a highly overactive imagination. Yes, that's why I write. LOL

More to come, but this post is getting obscenely long. hehe