Tom and Cindy arrived late Thursday night. We slept in a little and then headed off to Tarpon Springs. Tarpon Springs is a wonderful little coastal community that has a strong Greek influence and is known for harvesting sponges. Here is a little history:
The beginning of the sponge industry for Tarpon Springs actually started in Key West in the early 19th century. Many fishermen would find the sponges washed ashore after storms. This led to the development of the “hook boats”. This was a boat that used a log pole with a three or four prong rake at the end to hook sponges from shallow waters.
The sponge industry boomed in the Key West area, when a sample shipment was sent to New York City in 1849, and they were easily sold. At this point, Key West was the only area that had established any sponge business. But, this soon changed when the sponge divers had harvest the sponges from the seas surrounding Key West, they moved further north and found large beds filled with different varieties. Soon after this event, the Key West sponge fleet moved to the Tarpon Springs area.
John Cheney, a New York business man, recognized the potential success of the sponge industry in Tarpon Springs. With the help of John Corcosis, John Cheney started the first sponge business in the area. Corcosis insisted on bringing Greek divers to the area to begin the sponge industry. In 1905, the first Greek colony was established in Tarpon Springs. Greek sponge divers began moving in large packs to Tarpon Springs in hopes of becoming rich, especially since in Greece the sponge industry was starting to plummet.
By the end of 1906, 1500 Greek sponge divers and workers had arrived in Tarpon Springs. The sponge industry grew tremendously in the 1920’s and 1930’s with a fleet of about 200 ships. In 1936, Tarpon Springs became recognized as the sponge capital of the world, and more that 2,000 Greeks had moved to the area. However, in 1946, a disease (red tide) attacked the sponges and killed almost all of the sponges. Then, the invention of the synthetic sponge also devastated the Florida sponge industry. By the 1960’s and 1970’s the sponge industry began to rebound, but the Mediterranean sponge divers were the leaders of the industry. But, in 1986, the Mediterranean sponges were exposed to a disease and nearly all sponges in the Aegean sea were destroyed. This cleared the path for Tarpon Springs to once again claim its title as the “Sponge Capital of the World”.
We drove around the community for half a day and we couldn’t resist taking this photo of one of the homes. It reminded us of the movie “My Big Fat Greek Wedding”. Which we ended up watching “My Big Fat Greek Wedding” on our “60 TV”. Last year Rusty installed a movie projector screen right infront of the partition in the salon. We then run the projector and show movies in our salon or on our sail. We have about 600 movies on hard drives. This projector screen also doubles as a privacy screen when guest our sleeping in the King size bed in the salon. Our table lowers and becomes a King bed. Love this boat!
There is little doubt that the occupants of this house are Greek!
We had lunch at Hellna, one of the more popular Greek Restaurants on “the strip” and just went in and out of most of the shops. We brought home a wonderful sponge last year so we didn’t get any more sponges. We came home and I fixed Hemphill Steaks and trimmings. Saturday we toured Clearwater in the car and had lunch at The Cheesecake Factory, one of my all-time favorite restaurants. I highly recomend this chain….the food is always superb. I had Wasabi Crusted Tuna which was out of this world and my most favorite desert,White Chocolate, Raspberry Truffle Cheesecake……YUM!!!
This morning we had breakfast at Clear Sky, another Clearwater favorite. The weekend passed way too fast. It was so good to see Tom and Cindy.
After Tom and Cindy left we readied SYL and decided to stage outside the marina for tomorrow. Rusty checked Passage Weather and talk with the weather GURU Chris and it was decided to leave tomorrow morning for Destin. It should be a 40-44 hour trip. Jono filled us up with water….we ordered pizza to have for the trip and went to fill up on gas. It was quite windy and as we were pulling into the gas dock Rusty was manuvering SYL, put it in reverse and gave it some gas…..it went forward…..instead of back and ran into the dock. Not enough to hurt SYL but…. The port engine has had shifter issues for sometime. The engine’s shiftered bit the dust…..and it was not great timing. We are pretty good about reduncey so Rusty got another shifter out and had it installed in no time. We are not anchored right outside the marina. We plan on leaving early toorrow morning for Destin.
Sea Yawl Later
Linda
This entry was posted
on Sunday, February 26th, 2012 at 9:37 pm and is filed under Uncategorized.
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
With havin so much content do you ever run into any
issues of plagorism or copyright violation? My blog has a lot
of exclusive content I’ve either created myself or outsourced but it looks like a lot of it is popping it up all over the web without my permission. Do you know any methods to help protect against content from being ripped off? I’d certainly appreciate it.
my page :: laser spine surgery michigan
Sorry we are so long in responding. We are not on the site much while we are state side. Our blog is just a personal journal that we created so our family could follow what is going on in our lives since we live such a nomadic existence. We love that others find somethings we do or say but have never considered copyright or plagorism issues. Thanks for the interest!
Sea Yawl Later!!
Linda