Here comes Irma ….

I figured I will get caught up before old Irma shows up. Hoping for the best but fearing the worst. Robin and I left Big Pine on Tuesday after Labor Day and returned to St Pete. Monroe county officially declared a county wide evacuation on Wednesday in the keys. This morning pinellas county declared an evacuation in our neighborhood, so we are now double evacuees. 🙂

We spent today putting up plywood over non-impact windows on the st Pete house. And robin signed the plywood in hurricane tradition. We have weathered 3 storms here in this house over the past 10 years. This one is in another league all together!

Before we left the keys we put everything inside and buttoned up pretty tight. We still weren’t sure on the storm’s path so we did not empty freezers and stuff. I am afraid we will return to stinky bait freezers and a robins brand new kitchen freezer will be a bit ripe as well!

I have the Woody Too up on the lift as high as possible and tied down to the house and a cleat. We are expecting 120 mph winds and > 5 feet in storm surge. Hope it is still there when we return.

Effects should start over night tonight, for now all we can do is check out the cameras, and hope for the best.

Before all the gloom and doom of hurricane prep, we did hit the water. The water was flat and beautiful, and we got a really nice afternoon chasing the bugs.

Robin and I got our 12 lobster limit in a couple hours. Really glad we found them!

We hit a spot we call the Spanish key toilets. It is a cut through a bar that divides 2 of what we call basins, relatively deep pools of water separated by wide shallow salt flats. You can really only dive there if you time the tides, because the currents are absolutely nuts! We call it the toilet because someone dumped a coupe toilet bowls and tanks there which make some pretty good lobster structure. The cut is 10 to 12 feet deep, so I always dive it with a tank.

This dive we hit the slack perfect, and I got to spend about an hour really checking out the cut. I found an awesome coral head, 2 really good ledges, a bunch of big sponges, a 55 gal drum cut in half and 2 sets of toilets. All the structure was holding lobsters!