Oh Golly, Eau Gallie!

Eau Gallie is where we headed once we finally left Titusville. I’m pretty sure the name of this Florida city must be pronounced something like “oh golly”, right? I mean I did take a couple of years of French in high school (from a teacher who spoke only French and Spanish nonetheless!) and I think I’m at least close, but if I’m wrong, please feel free to correct me!

It had been so hard to pull away from the dock in Titusville, but we finally did it, in pea soup fog. Ugh. It was supposed to burn off by 9am…so we waited until 10:30am to leave…and around 2pm the fog finally burned off. So much for the forecast! We dropped anchor at 4:50pm in front of a restaurant/bar named Squidlips. Squidlips?!? Where do people come up with these names!

Shortly after hitting the sack that evening, we heard a pretty loud thump on the hull near our heads and couldn’t figure out what the heck it was. Manatee? Probably not. They swim so slowly they wouldn’t have made such a loud thump running into the boat. Dolphin? Probably not either. They’ve got their echolocation magic and I doubt they would have run into us. So what the heck was it then? We got up to investigate. There were indeed dolphins swimming nearby, as evidenced by the “chuffs” of breath we could hear in the dark, and when we shined a flashlight at the water we could see that the dolphins were stirring up fish, and these fish were jumping out of the water everywhere in an effort to avoid being the dolphins’ dinner! It had to have been one of these fish that hit the side of the boat. Mystery solved. Back to bed.

The next morning was the start of another travel day as we were really itching to get further south, but the dolphins were making it soooo hard for us to weigh anchor! They were on all sides of us swimming, playing and eating, and they were just so damn entertaining. There were also pelicans (and a few seagulls) taking advantage of this and dive bombing the fish that were being stirred up by the dolphins. It was like we were in the middle of our own little Sea World show! Here’s a little taste of it for your viewing pleasure!

So, what’d ya think? Pretty cool, huh?

At some point in our trip I also decided that we should try to keep a record of the different birds that we see along the way, so I added the Audubon Birds app to my iPad and have slowly been adding some of our bird sightings. Here’s a few that we (O.K. Jim, not me…) have actually managed to capture in decent photos.