Now you see them, now you don't . . .

Rewind back to last Thursday morning.  Imagine soundly sleeping and at 5:50 a.m. being gently awoken to the sound of voices and spending the next 10 seconds have a conversation with yourself that goes something like this:

"It is still dark out."
"My that is odd, why am I hearing voices?"
"I should only hear voices that clearly if I left the window open."
"OMG!  It rained last night, what if I left the window open?!?!?"

Still dazed and confused, immediately spring out of bed to feel the curtains . . . . they are dry.  Whew, what a relief.  Lift the blind . . . .   the window is closed.  Hhmmmm . . . . still hearing voices, and something that sounds like bees.

Upon going up to the galley and looking out the front windshield, there is a sea of red, green and white lights in the bay.  Hundreds of them!!!   All moving around, all over the place.  It was 142 bass boats preparing for the 7:00 am start of a bass fishing tournament.  Each had their navigation lights on and all the red, green and white lights were beautiful - like Christmas lights all moving around in the bay.  The voice was the official with a loudspeaker checking in the boats by their number as they parade past the fuel dock to check in.  It was chaos!!!  Amazing, wonderful, new chaos.  Having never experienced something like this, the coffee pot was started and Hilary got dressed.  One of the boats had decided to use Took the Plunge as a mooring site and had their boat tied off the cleat on the swim platform.  Hilary spent the next 45 minutes chatting with the two gentlemen in the boat.  They explained it was a 3 day tournament and that the boats would all come back in around 3 or 4 for weigh in of the days catch.  It was pretty interesting.  Before starting, there was an invocation and then the National Anthem which is a favorite of Hilary's.

At about 6:50, 10 minutes before the start, Hilary walked up to the mouth of the marina to watch all 142 boats pull out in a pre-arranged order while the official with the loudspeaker counted:  1, 2, 3, 4, etc to dismiss all the boats.  One of the pictures below is a video pan of all the bass boats immediately before the start.

Bass Boat Team that tied to Took the Plunge

Now you see them . . .

 . . . . and now you don't.

Another beautiful sunrise

Monument marking entrance to Florence, AL Marina

The bass tournament was Thursday, Friday and Saturday morning so the entire morning ritual was repeated on Friday before we pulled out to head onto Joe Wheeler State Park.

CJ has decided Bert's lap is an excellent place to ride while underway

We are now at Joe Wheeler State Park for the Great Looper Rendezvous in Rogersville, AL.  We will be here until Friday, October 26th.  More about the trip to get here including locking up 90' in the next post.  This blog post needs to come to an abrupt end so Hilary can go sit on the aft deck and watch a Sweetest Day wedding ceremony that is going to occur about 50 yards off the back of the boat on the patio of the conference center.