Well after spending  Sunday, July 25th getting everything back on the boat  for fishing we got home at about 3:30. Everybody showered up and sat down to rest from being in the 100 degree day walking up and down those stairs to the boat. At 4:45 the phone rang and it was BP! They finally activated us which gives us a chance to make up some of the money we lost on this season. That was the good news we’d been waiting for. The only down side of it was that we had to get all the fishing stuff off the boat before 6am the next day. So off we all went to undo everything we’d just done. We were all tired but happy to have the opportunity to make some good money….finally!

We’ve had a pretty good run with them and have had the opportunity to do some interesting work. We have been taking out the “water quality” guys for the past week. Every other day Mark takes them to a specific spot, we drop the anchor, shut off the engines and generator and they take samples of the water. Today they took samples of the soil on the bottom too. They are a nice bunch of guys and we really don’t know who they work for but we enjoy having them on board. Captain Mark has been putting them dead on the spot.

When we don’t have a water sampling day we are patrolling parallel to the beach in a line with 4 other boats extending out about 3 miles looking for anything suspicious in the water.  We’ve gone way down to Grayton Beach and to Navarre but mostly we stay in the Destin Ft. Walton area.  So far, so good. They’ve found a few things and they were cleaned up right away so basically nothing much is getting past us. Yesterday I found a palm tree stump. Took a few minutes to figure that one out!

They are down sizing here quickly and we know that our time on this BP program is probably very short but we are thankful for at least having some time to help make up for the lost fishing season we’ve all experienced. One great thing for us is that we never had to get out in all the heavy oil which would have caused problems for the boat mechanically and damaged the hull.

Soon we are going back to fishing, probably any day now so go ahead and give us a call to book your trip. Stay tuned for some exciting news about the Destin Fishing Rodeo in October. I will write about that in the next few days.