Crossing the Gulf to Clearwater Beach, FL

We had a wonderful trip across the Gulf, but it took us a whole extra day to get here! We left Pensacola Sunday morning, and hardly had any wind, but it was pretty lumpy, and poor Pete threw up after a couple hours of rocking around (he should've eaten his breakfast!!) Things calmed down when we got to deeper water, and both dogs were great the whole trip! I'd forgotten how gorgeous it is on the boat at night with all those stars, falling stars, satellites, and UFO's (kidding!). We took turns with 3 hour watches, starting at 8 pm, and only saw a few boats all 3 nights! It was like having the Gulf of Mexico all to ourselves! I was on watch yesterday morning listening to the radio and heard they were about to launch Space-X at 3:45 am from Cape Canaveral, so I woke Daren up so he could see the red streak in the sky. It was pretty cool to see it! How many people are up at 3:45?! A little yellow bird landed on our bimini top just before dark Monday night and spent the night inside the cabin, safe from the 2 bird dogs, then flew off the next morning! It was so cute, I took a picture! Yesterday morning, after 50 hours of motoring, we ran out of diesel! It was SO nice and quiet, and we had just enough wind to do 3 knots, so we didn't put the 2 jerry cans of diesel in until this morning, on the way in to Clearwater, which we decided was better than Tarpon Springs and a bit farther south. Our whole trip was 325 miles, took us 69 hours, with an average speed of 4.5 knots and a max of 8! (Aren't GPS's fun?) Also, we love Raytheon, our autopilot! We arrived at Clearwater Municipal Marina at noon today and topped off the diesel and water tanks. It's $2/ft/night to stay there... $72 for our boat, so we joined the boats anchored nearby! We rowed back to a waterfront restaurant and treated ourselves to lunch and groceries with the money we'd saved by anchoring! : ) A new friend from the anchorage, Stephanie, said this is the boat-friendliest town they've been to! She and her husband, Peter have 2 dogs on their 30' sailboat Tally Ho! We all walked our dogs on the beach and came back to our boat for a great visit. They've been all over the Caribbean and Bermuda and Cuba, too. We'd love to get to know them better, but are anxious to get down to Ft. Myers, and plan to leave in the morning.