Destin, day 2

Hello again! This time I’m typing to you from the Maravilla clubhouse, which just so happens to have free wifi. Our internet still is not fixed, although it might be by tomorrow.

After we left Panera Bread and went back to the condo last night, we arrived to see a fire truck and a crowd of people outside the building. Turns out that a transformer blew, and we didn’t get the power back until about 10:00. In the meantime, we headed down to the beach with bucket and net in tow to see what kinds of friendly sea creatures we might meet.

The first one we met, before it got dark, was a jellyfish. We caught it, looked at it for a while, and then threw it back in. When it started to get darker we began to look for ghost crabs, those tiny white ones that come up out of the sand at night. At first we didn’t think we would have any luck, but before long they were everywhere! We caught about 12, and there are pictures of both the jellyfish and the ghost crabs on flickr.

This morning we went back to the beach to swim again. There was still a purple flag up, but I didn’t see any  jellyfish all day. Mainly I saw seaweed…there was lots more of it! We took our mask and flippers, so I swam around underwater in the seaweed jungle for quite some time. While I was down there, I happened to see something that looked like a ball of algae on the sand…but when I touched it with my net it moved. Turns out it was a pufferfish! You can see him in the flickr badge to the right. He hung out with us under our umbrella and attracted interested kids most of the day. I learned later that he was actually a burrfish, and that if I had tickled him on the stomach he would have readily inflated himself.

In a few minutes we’re going to eat at some seafood restaurant or another. Then we’re going to find some pre-inflated floats, because it turns out that out air pump is incredibly slow and our floats have leaks. Be sure to look at the pictures on flickr; see you tomorrow!

– Karen