Day 344 - Sixmile Creek to Murphy Creek, FL

     

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    		The motor yacht "Integrity" The Loop

    Day 344 - Wednesday, April 5th: Again, dear Reader, we know you don't know where Sixmile Creek or Murphy Creek are!  We promise they are in Florida, on the St. Johns River, somewhere between Jacksonville and Sanford, Florida.  What?  You don't know where Sanford is either?  Well, you need to do the Great Loop!

    No frogs or alligator noises last night!  It was much cooler, so we guessed the urge to mate or claim territory or whatever wasn't so great, and the animals slept like we did.

    We were up early anyway this morning to check on Howard Gamble.  Who is Howard Gamble, you ask? He is the third member of the Gamble family (Sara, Gary and Howard) aboard Proctor Anne.  Get it?  "Proctor Anne…Gamble."

    Anyway, a few days ago Howard had eaten a loose fishhook that still had meat on it off a dock.  YUK!  Sadly it went all the way into his stomach and, well, after some traumatic hours, Sara and Gary got him to a veterinarian clinic near Sixmile Creek.  About 24 hours after serious stomach surgery and removal of the hook, Howard was cleared to go home.

    Here is Howard in the dim morning light on the back of the boat, his favorite place.  He feels like he has been kicked in the stomach by a mule.  But, he is on pain medicine:

    It was a cool and moist morning with dew on the decks and fog on the creek.  Bill is conversing with Howard:

    We got underway on glassy water; it was beautiful:

    The fog got a little thicker as we moved out onto the river.  On went the radar:

    A short hour later it was clear, sunny and beautiful.  We passed this generating plant that all the literature swore was a coal-fired plant.  We wondered….

    As we entered a wide section of the river, we lined up on this "range."  We have mentioned these ranges before:

    The river was flat calm and we had it all to ourselves on this mid-week day:

    Our destination for the night was a pristine winding creek, Murphy Creek.  It is touted to be a great creek to motor around in the dinghy and look for turtles and alligators.  This is what it looked like as we headed into the creek to anchor:

    We spotted a great place to anchor:

    We dropped the hook, lowered the dinghy and went exploring.  There were many clumps of lily pads and we noticed blooms forming on these.  We've noticed alligators hiding in these clumps sometimes:

    We spotted many turtles basking on logs.  The sad thing is they were very shy and would slide into the water before we could get close enough to get a good picture.  This one old guy didn't seem so afraid.  Maybe he didn't want to give up the one spot of sun on that bank!

    Aha!  There's an alligator going down!

    This is the largest alligator we've seen; he's about 10-12 feet long.  It is very disappointing that the picture is so poor.

    After a couple of hours in the dinghy, we headed back to the "mother ship."  She sat waiting for us:

    The anchorage was perfectly lovely and quiet.  We felt like nobody had ever been here before:

Position tonight: N29 35.055 W081 38.622

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