Ten Thousand Islands - Our second home!

After spending the night in Marco Island and refueling etc, we left early and anchored at our beloved Tiger Key in the Ten Thousand islands. Its only about two and half hours at our speed to the anchorage from Marco Island. Every time we are here I can feel myself exhale and just breathe. I feel at my most creative when we are here. I write, draw, collect things to make onboard with shells and driftwood and exercise. We eat well (besides faaaar too many cocktails of course) and loose a few pounds. In short it’s a connection with my soul. Now who doesn’t love that!

It does take us a while to settle down after running around at the speed at which our lives are lived nowadays. Its a struggle to just accept that there's nothing you HAVE to do to that fills our normal days. I equate it to a monkey mind wandering when you’re trying to meditate or pray. After a day or two, we don’t know what day it actually is and we have to go look at the calendar. We are in bed early and up early. I like to call it 9pm boaters midnight!

During our first 10 days at Tiger Key, we visited Camp Lulu and had coffee on the beach there, had lunches at different islands and went into Everglades city as usual at the Rod and Gun club one Friday. I set the table for our date night and we even had a flamingo party all alone lol

Each evening we do a very long walk along the island, talking and picking things up as we go. Cali absolutely loves the ocean and it brings us so much joy to see her living her best life too. Leash free, wet and exhausted every day. She tries to catch baby fish in the shallows ALL day long, digs her tennis ball so deep into the sand we think she’ll disappear! Every evening we go up on the helm to watch the sunset and have a cocktail and she loves this as much as we do.

On perfect nights I’ll use my bathtub which I so love. We have a water maker onboard which Shaun installed so I don’t have to worry about conserving what we have in our tanks.

We went back to Marco Island on June 6th to pick up some amazon orders, refuel and fix our bedroom AC so we stayed the bight at Rose Marine. In the morning we washed the boat and headed back the islands this time we would anchor at White Horse.

Its as beautiful here but not as remote as our anchorage. Little tour groups file in twice a day on the weekends but besides that, we have it all too ourselves anyway. During the week I study in the mornings after working out and we get into a nice lull of a routine without TV, noise and so on. There is much to be said for the sound of water lapping against the hull, the birds singing and the loud breaths of the dolphins swimming by to spark creativity. Shaun helped me make a bunch of driftwood and shell pieces which we both thoroughly love to do after picking up all the pieces we find along our beach walks.

Some days we have lunch on the beach, sometimes cocktail hour on the beach, on another island and other days we stay onboard and I set the table for our date nights. I love making the every day moments special which no one has time for back at home in the rat race lol

We decided to stay put at White horse for the remainder of our time here in the Everglades. We have to make our way back up towards Fort Meyers so that we can put Happy Wife out on on the hard while we travel for the next few months due to hurricane season. It started with a bang and we had 25 inches of rain over 3 days here. It was the most rain we’ve ever experienced consistently since owning our boat. It just did. not. Let. up!! On top of that we spun the prop on the dinghy so we ordered one to a marina about 8 miles away which Shaun had to ride to to fetch in between pouring showers going at a snails pace. He repaired it on the dock there and raced back to Happy Wife just in time!

A couple of days turned into two weeks somehow before leaving for Cayo Costa for the last week on board.

We had such a lovely time here, as always! A beautiful sunset dinner, yoga on the beach, talks and walks.

We made our way through Fort Meyers to anchor after the first lock on our way to hauling out Happy Wife for the hurricane season.