Florida Discoveries 31: Steve’s Farm in Walnut Hill

06. August 2012 · Comments Off on Florida Discoveries 31: Steve’s Farm in Walnut Hill · Categories: Uncategorized · Tags: , , ,

Steve’s Farm is in Walnut Hill, Florida, just below Atmore, Alabama (home of Wind Creek Casino).

This past Saturday the family headed to the northwest corner of Florida for some catfish fishing.  I know that sounds strange, hauling so far up north when we have amazing fishing all around us, right?

We’re first heard about Steve’s Farm through our Cub Scout pack, they had an outing up to the farm earlier this spring.  We had other plans on that day, but we had promised the kids a trip up to the farm.  Especially since Timmy had won a brand new Shakespeare fishing rod and reel as a door prize from the May Cub Scout meeting.

The farm is about an 90 minute drive from our house in Navarre.  It’s run by a Mennonite family and everyone who helped us out was so incredibly nice.

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Florida Discoveries 26.5: Now We’re Olin Marler Spokespeople!

15. July 2012 · Comments Off on Florida Discoveries 26.5: Now We’re Olin Marler Spokespeople! · Categories: Uncategorized · Tags: , , , ,

Where are our royalties?

Today we took the kids parasailing (new blog post coming soon!) and we used the same business, Olin Marler Fishing Service, that we did for the deep sea fishing earlier this month.  So when we were checking in, Jacob pointed out that Dave and I were in one of the pictures in the window.

This was with other pictures of people showing off their catches.

A professional photographer took pictures of each group and this was the one she took of us, but we didn’t purchase…although at $10 for the print, it was a relative bargain.

But we didn’t have to buy the print because the same photographer had taken this picture with Dave’s iPhone at the same time.  See?  We’re even posed the same way.

Florida Discoveries 26: Destin Deep Sea Fishing Trip

14. July 2012 · 4 comments · Categories: Uncategorized · Tags: , , , , , ,

I’ll refrain from the more gory pictures of chum and cigar minnows with their eyes stabbed out, ha ha. But here’s the boat’s catch. There were 10 of us fishing, so we each were allowed to take home two red snapper and many other kinds of fish as well.  Dave’s biggest red snapper catch is on the farthest right of the top row, and my lesser amberjack is right next to it.

Yep, I’m quite a bit behind, but I wanted to share Dave’s and my latest Florida adventure.

While the kids were in the northeast visiting with the grandparents, on July 3rd we booked a half-day (6 hour) fishing trip out on the Gulf of Mexico.  We had SO MUCH FUN (yes, I’m shouting this).

Our boat, the Gulf Breeze.

We chose Olin Marler Charter Boat service for our trip, since that’s the same company we used for our dolphin cruise in April.  The Marler name is a fixture in Destin: “Uncle Billy” Marler was one of the founders of Destin and served as the fishing village’s first postmaster.  The founding families’ names are everywhere in Destin: street names, company names and even tied into the names of the boats.

Olin Marler offers several options for deep sea fishing trips: the “party boat” which holds more people on the boat but costs less, the group charter: a smaller boat experience that accepts an assortment of smaller parties, and the truly private charter, where a single group pays for the full cost of the boat trip, regardless of how many people are in the group.

We chose the middle option, since we didn’t want the chaos of a large group but weren’t about to pay for a full boat all to ourselves.  Our group charter was able to accomodate up to 30 people on board, but there were only 10 of us.  It felt very fortunate to not be on such a crowded boat.

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