The Christmas Season is in full swing and the next few weeks will feature multiple Holiday Lighted Boat Parades in Northwest Florida.

The 1st up is the Fort Walton Beach Parade on December 2nd at 6pm at the Landing on Brooks Street.

Next is the San Destin Parade on Saturday the 8th at 6pm. The San Destin Parade is visible from Baytowne Marina and the Village at Baytowne Boardwalk.

Finally, the Destin Harbor Parade will be held on December 9th at 6pm.

Our partner website, EarthNC.com has posted a Google Earth Map with more than 50 Parade Locations across the U.S.

Light winds and cool weather combined for a great day of racing during today’s Destin World Championship Offshore races. After a 2 hour delay to replace our port engine raw water pump, we motored out to Turn 5 south of Henderson Beach State Park to watch the races and act as a volunteer Patrol Boat guarding the race course from spectator encroachment. Please click on the photo thumbnail to browse our photos from today. Besides the race boats, we captured quite a few spectator boats and of course the Angel Flight helicopters.

The Offshore Super Series returns to Destin for their 2nd annual Destin World Cup races on October 29th. The Race Village this year will be at the Destin Commons with racing to occur along the Destin waterfront east of the pass similar to last year. Official Race information can be found at DestinWorldCup.com. We’ve put together a simple map to show the various venues below.

Offshore racing is exciting to watch, whether from land or sea. We invite you to browse our past coverage, videos, and photos from last year’s Destin Championship and this year’s Thunder on the Gulf races in Orange Beach.

Nothing like a 844lb Shark to make your day when fishing. This has been a banner year for large sharks along the Emerald Coast. The story has been picked up by the national media.

Quoting the Kansas City Star:

Bruner and his fishing buddies were on a 52-foot charter boat with Capt. Robert Hill, about 70 miles southwest of this beach city in the Florida Panhandle.

The fishermen first noticed the big mako because it kept eating grouper and scamp they had hooked.

“It was like ‘Jaws,’” Hill said.

Hill hooked a two-foot amberine on as bait and tossed it out. The shark eventually hit it.

After the long fight, the shark was gaffed and eventually gave up after its tail was roped. But even then, the men could not get the big shark in the boat. They tied it to the stern with three ropes and made the four-hour trip back to land.

Be sure to link through to the article for more pictures.

While the traditional North American boating season runs from Memorial Day to Labor Day, September and October mark one of our favorite times on the Gulf Coast. Daytime temperatures are ‘moderating’ into the mid-80’s and nighttime lows on the water finally get to the low 70’s.

When the weather so beckons, we usually find ourselves running down to Spectre Island, a small island in Santa Rosa Sound on the Gulf Intercoastal Waterway about 5 miles west of Fort Walton Beach. Spectre offers a deep water harbor off the ICW and quiet beaches for the kids. Evening during the summer, we usually have the island to ourselves if we go out during the week. Click on the photo to see some highlight pictures from one of our trips out.

Our partner website EarthNC.com has been scouring the web for user-generated Google My Maps of interest to boaters. They’ve started posting their finds in their ‘Featured Maps‘ section. Even better, with EarthNC’s new TakItWithMe My Maps Embedding Tool you can paste any My Map on your own website with easy links to Google Earth, a large map, and even download to GPS in some cases (see our example below). Read the rest of this entry »

We missed the Emerald Coast Poker Run this year due to conflicting schedules with the Offshore Super Series powerboat races over in Orange Beach. By most accounts the poker run was a big success this year, but it was tempered by an accident in Destin Pass during aerial filming (not part of the official event). Fortunately no one was killed, but some of the passengers did receive major injuries.

The accident victims were gracious enough to release the video of the accident to help promote boating safety. Read the rest of this entry »

We put together a short video clip from the Sunday afternoon Offshore Super Series race at Orange Beach. The sound doesn’t really do the race justice, but it does give a good sense of the action as boats got plenty of air time in the 2-4′ seas. Be sure to check out our Offshore Racing Category for more photos and video.

Sunday’s races were anything but boring as the competitive spirit and choppy seas combined for great action. DestinSharks had a front-row seat at Turn 4 thanks to Rod Koberg from SouthCoastSegway on his 42′ Trawler ‘Antares’. It will take us a few days to go completely through the 650+ photos from yesterday’s race and the more than 1000 photos for the weekend, but in the mean time, please click on the photo at left to enjoy our ‘Sunday Race Highlights’ album. These photos have not been cropped, so click on the thumbnails to see the full pictures. Read the rest of this entry »

Thanks to the wonders of cell-phone data plans, we’re able to offer highlights from today’s opening of Thunder on the Gulf 2007 - Offshore Super Series at Orange Beach, Alabama. Spectators braved the heat and sun in large numbers and parking was scarce along the waterfront. Read the rest of this entry »