Happy St. Patrick’s Day and a revised Irish Blessing for those that boat

I’ve had a few requests for a tour of the marina so here it is. We’ll start at one end and work our way around the marina so you can get an idea of what it looks like.

As we leave the boat out our back transom

This is right behind our boat, we backed into the slip

Behind us

This is looking down our only finger

As you can see they have no cleats on this dock, which is quite common around here.  That took a little getting used to on my part, learning how to tie to a piling instead of a cleat.  So, I basically tie any way I can to make sure the boat doesn’t go anywhere and then Gary comes and tweaks the ropes.

This is my little buddies Watering dish 🙂

Looking down our pier to the right

We are the last slip on the dock so we have a little walk to shore, but nothing like the walk we used to have at Aqua.

5 Mil Boat with 5 fishing poles

This boat is in the middle of the outside dock.  Look at these reels

They go for about $1000, and they even have covers!

We think BearTrax should stock them 😉

Almost to the end of the dock

Here is the bath house

At this point, although there are other boats with couples aboard, they have all left them here to go back to their houses.  So I pretty much have the woman’s heads/showers all to myself.

Laundry and Carts

Laundry costs are not too bad, $1.50 for wash and $1.00 for dry.  These are brand new machines as their other ones got flooded out last year.  They are large, so it only takes a couple of loads to do the laundry.  It is hard to fold your unmentionables with all those men hanging around there though :).  They also have carts that we can use to haul stuff down to the boat which comes in very handy.

Parking lot

Up in the parking lot they have storage sheds for all the big boats.  Kind of like dock boxes but much bigger.

Sanders Yacht Service

Walking down the drive you’ll come to Sanders Yacht Service.  They have two service centers.  This one is for their “little” boats, the other one, on the ICW is where the big boats go to be serviced.  Like our million dollar neighbor.

90 Footer

The marina also has a common area where they have picnic tables under cover.  We have had a few “docktail” parties here in the past

Covered picnic area

As we round the corner of the drive, going toward the street entrance to the marina, we see they have removed the covers from the palm trees, must be a sign of warmer weather to come.  The little shack there is used by people who have para-sailing, jet skies, dolphin watching etc for you to try out.  They usually don’t open till right before we leave.

Rounding the corner

To the right of us is Fishers Restaurant

Fishers

The bottom is pretty casual and the upstairs is suppose to be white linen.  Needless to say we have never been upstairs 🙂

Down the walk to the Ships Store

Then you turn right and go down the walk to the ships store.  You can see Fishers has some seating on the left.

Fish cleaning station

They have a nice big fish cleaning station by the ships store.  They also have a smaller one at the end of our dock.  Now we just need some fish to clean 😉

And here is the ships store

Ships Store at Orange Beach

They also have a Realtor and a boat broker on site in case you feel the need.

Green Grass

In case you have forgotten what this is, it’s green grass :).

As we go around the right of the ships store we see my buddies boat

Little Buddy

you can even see the tip of ours sticking out.

Back of Ships Store

They have a nice little spot at the back of the ships store that is in the shade most of the day.  When we sit in our pilot house, we can see it from our windows.

This is a building off to the left of the gas dock.  Apparently, during the summer when they have the big fishing tournaments, the boats line up for hours with their catches to get them weighed here.  Sometimes it takes well into the night to get everyone weighed.  It is apparently, quite a mad house…..sounds like fun :).

They have more docks to the left of the ships store, some commercial, some not.  As you can see the majority of the boats here are sport fishermen’s

Sport Fisher boats

and the roofs are high enough to handle their very high tuna towers

If you follow the dock all the way to the the enterance of the marina, there is a house with a small sandy beach.  Apparently the owner of the marina owns this house.  If you walk this dock at night you’ll see they have 3 buoys marking the entrance to the channel leading in to the marina.  One bouy is a “No Wake” and the other two are the red and green markers.  Pretty cool that they light up (although I think the red one needs a new bulb 🙂 ).

No Wake

Green bouy

Red Bouy

On nice days, there is quite a bit of boat activity here.  The slip that we have, which is across from the gas dock and right off the main channel is really nice to watch the comings and goings of every boat in the marina.

So now you have the tour, in case you can’t come and visit us while we are here.  But if you’re in the area, be sure to stop by.  We always have something on ice :).