February 16, 2009: Ingram Bayou/Orange Beach

We had a fun weekend in Mobile with Martha and Gil enjoying some of the Mardi Gras festivities. We spent Sunday night on the boat and shared our breakfast this morning with the pelicans fishing in the river. So today we have rejoined the adventure and around midday we headed out across Mobile Bay. We crossed paths with a parade of traffic including a new huge hydrofoil ferry built for Hawaii, a freighter, a sailboat, a tug pushing a crane; we passed several oil drilling platforms.

We also saw the famous Mobile lighthouse (hexagon on stilts) which was built in 1885 and is on the National Registry of Historical Places. During WWI, when the lighthouse keeper and his wife had a baby, they kept a cow at this lighthouse! The water was rough this afternoon with difficult surf until we reached the Gulf Intercoastal Waterway on the east of the bay. Near Orange Beach, there was a marina with a restaurant, called LuLu’s where we stopped for an early supper. LuLu’s was owned by Jimmy Buffet’s sister and had a cool atmosphere, wooden planks, porch overlooking the water, and a huge sandy playground along one side. Tom had a Cheeseburger in Paradise and I had the seafood gumbo. Tonight we anchored in Ingram Bayou at dusk.