Day 218, November 28, 2012 (Tarpon Springs to Clearwater Beach): Tarpon Springs is a fun port of call. Turtle Cove Marina is a good, quiet refuge, a short walking distance from the touristy main street. The marina is not listed in many cruising guides.

On the short walk up to the main drag one can find the historic sponge docks, a fish market, and lots of Greek restaurants that are reasonably priced. There is more to Tarpon Springs, though. The rest of the everyday town is spread up and down South Pinellas Boulevard. Don’t expect to provision unless you want Greek stuff in the tourist area or you have a car to go to the grocery stores about two miles away. Taxis are not always close at hand and courtesy cars don’t exist. The Jolly Trolley runs on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday and its  route includes a selection of grocery stores.

Loopy Kiwi and Last Resort straggled in around 10:00 the next day after a calm 18-hour overnighter. Freya and Don from Last Resort visited for docktails but the Loopy crew did not make it.

Traveling the GIWW to Clearwater is spectacular for the bird life and the dolphins. We had a visit from two small bottle nose dolphins. They rode our quarter wave for miles and seemed to like our selection of music on the sound system—Handel’s Water Music!

Here, there are 12 cormorants resting on “G1.” Apart from being excessively unattractive in flight they produce prodigious quantities of guano that fouls (fowls?) the buoys. The mark pictured is a flashing green powered by a solar panel only when rain has washed the corm-crap off of the solar element!

This pellie is skimming in its early morning reflection on the Anclote River in Tarpon Springs. The pellie aerodrome below is the roof of the bathhouse at Clearwater Beach (Municipal) Marina.