Fort Myers - Estero Bay

To start the day, today I made my way to Eagle Ridge Golf Club in Fort Myers at around 6:30 am. It is well known that Florida is a golfer's paradise. The two courses I had the opportunity to play on confirmed this. They were beautifully designed, in excellent condition, and offer a very fair price-performance ratio during the summer season. Therefore, I highly recommend to all friends of the little white ball, if the opportunity arises, to play one or more of these courses!

The afternoon was relatively uneventful, apart from Nadi's record-breaking performance in our 6-meter pool. It is worth mentioning that she did not get dizzy during her one-hour swimming workout.

In the evening, our focus was on Estero Bay in Fort Myers, as it was supposed to give us the opportunity to see dolphins in the wild.

At around 7 pm, together with other tourists from all over the world, we boarded the boat at Snook Bight Marina. In addition to a meeting with Flipper, we were promised sightings of West Indian manatees and many bird species. The marine mammals and our winged friends kept their promise, but the big manatees stood us up. Well, as Buddha said so aptly: Be content with what you have! And we were. The many bird species would have been very exciting for any ornithologist, but to be honest, they were just a side show for us - we wanted to see dolphins in action... and they delivered. We were able to observe them playing together, they visited us - albeit very briefly - right by the boat and gave us a fantastic surfing performance in the bow wave of our floating tourist vessel at the end of the boat tour. The only downside was that we were always a second too slow for the perfect photo... it almost seemed like the creatures were luring us from the left to the right side of the boat and then having fun disappearing as soon as we pressed the shutter button. However, we managed to capture a few pictures... All in all, this tour is absolutely recommended and offers not only a variety of animals but also many other great photo opportunities.

Tomorrow, we will leave Cape Coral. The last stop on the Gulf of Mexico will be Clearwater Beach. See you tomorrow!