Days 385-391
Our plan for Tarpon Springs was to stay two nights and then go on to Fort Myers, which would take two days, and finish our Great Loop. After that, we would go east across the Okeechobee Waterway to Stuart where we would store the boat for a few months and perhaps take it to the Bahamas in the spring. We arrived in Tarpon Springs Saturday evening after a long and tiring day crossing the Gulf of Mexico from Carrabelle, and just fell into bed after tying up and walking the dogs.
Sunday morning we got up and took an Uber to Mass at a very nice nearby church, St. Ignatius of Antioch.
The Stations of the Cross in this church were unlike any we had seen before.
The church was right across the street from a Walmart, so after Mass, we walked over and stocked up on a few items. When we got back, we walked a couple of blocks from the marina to a seafood restaurant, Rusty Bellies. While we were there we saw a shrimp boat unloading its catch at the wharf right at the restaurant. It doesn't get any fresher than that! I decided not to have the shark.
Afterward, we walked around the main street that runs along the sponge docks. We had read that Tarpon Springs is the closest thing to being in Greece without actually being there. Greeks came in the early 1900's and established the town and the sponge trade here. The quaint main street is full of Greek restaurants and shops.
There are bicycles all over town decorated with flowers.
This is a shot of the sponge docks.
This statue dedicated to the sponge divers was also on the sponge docks.
A sponge market in a Greek shopping area.
This was a great idea! I wonder why nobody had thought of it before!
This is St. Nicholas, a Greek Orthodox cathedral in town. Sharon walked there one day and someone at the church gave her a guided tour including seeing the relic of St. Nicholas they have there.
There were seafood shops all over town. We thought our son Michael might like to know that apparently they had heard of his prowess with Blue Crabs and opened a store there dedicated to him.
There were many murals all over town depicting different aspects of sponge diving.
We thought the flower bikes all over town were just for decoration, but this fellow was riding one.
There was a trolley running through town that ran from Tarpon Springs to Clearwater and back with many stops in between. We bought a three-day pass for $5.00 each and rode the whole route to see what we might like to go back and see later. We wound up going back to a little Celtic-centric town called Dunedin. It was another interesting little town with a number of Irish pubs and a Celtic store.
We had lunch at a seafood restaurant at the Dunedin marina where I had a platter of blackened grouper cheeks. Many consider the cheek to be the best tasting part of the fish, but there are only two bite size pieces on even a large fish. When I saw them on the menu I could not resist a whole plate full. Delicious! Interestingly, while we were eating, the couple at the next table asked us if we were Loopers because they had seen Sharon's Green Turtle Bay T-shirt (the marina in Kentucky) and then told us they had done the Great Loop a few years ago. We swapped Loop stories back and forth for a while until we finished lunch. They lived in Tennessee and kept their boat at Joe Wheeler park in Alabama and had come back to Florida by car to see some of the places they missed when traveling by boat.
After we arrived in Tarpon Springs we found that the weather forecasters were calling for Hurricane Matthew, which had been in the southern Carribean, to turn north and run up the east coast of Florida. Considering that, we decided we should just hunker down in our protected location on the west coast and wait for the storm to pass. We spent Thursday getting the boat ready for a storm, because even though Matthew was on the east coast, tropical storm winds were being forecast for our location on the west coast. We added extra lines and chafe protection, took down the bimini top, and stowed all of the flybridge cushions in the cabin. I reset all of the fenders and then as a defensive measure I went to the slip next to ours and reset some lines on the boat there so it wouldn't break free in a high wind and damage our boat. It was a fairly large boat tied only with small frayed lines, and the owners never came to check on it, so I figured I did them a favor by retying it. The black arrow on the picture below shows our location.
In the early morning hours of Friday, we began to get some of the predicted wind and rain, and that continued for most of the day on Friday. We saw winds up to perhaps 35 to 40 mph and weathered them very well. We were glad we decided to stay in Tarpon Springs. Even though we were there for a week, there was plenty to see and do.
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