Mary Frances at her Carrabelle home:
The no-see-ums in Pensacola notified their Carrabelle cousins that sweet, tender John would make an excellent dinner and they were waiting. We arrived here late afternoon, so John first rinsed the salt off the boat and was hooking up the electricity just about dusk and ......... we had to go to the drugstore the next day to buy more antihistamines. It's a good thing the doctor in Pensacola prescribed such a large tube of steroid cream. John is now confined to the boat at dawn and dusk.
Town is close to the marina, about 1/2 mile, and there is an IGA right across the highway. Sidewalks come out this far, so we have been able to walk and bike. Friday, after John replaced the innertube in Mary's front tire, we rode into town to the local history museum and to the Camp Gordon Johnston World War II Museum. 20 miles of beach here were used to train soldiers in amphibious assault (think D-Day). We then rode west across the bridge to a small island. We need to buy a couple more tubes, as both of John's tires go soft overnight, but the Ace Hardware only had one. The family-owned hardware store was still closed for the Thanksgiving holiday so we'll check there later.
Carrabelle was originally a cotton shipping port, then lumber (like many Michigan towns). Next came fishing and now it's a quiet town that relied on tourists until the economy crashed.
A few fishing boats still base operations here:
John mounted the EPIRB (emergency beacon that will allow rescue crews to find us) we bought in Pensacola and worked on the "ditch bag"-the bag we'll grab to take in the dinghy with us if something goes wrong with the boat during the Gulf crossing. We should have had these for our many great lakes crossings!
According to the woman at the WWII museum, Carrabelle police actually used to operate out of a phone booth:
Low tide-these are a little bigger than the zebra mussels on Michigan dockposts:
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