We Sent a GoPro to the Bottom of the Ocean in a Homemade Submarine!

Pretty cool Freddie! They found that school of snapper & caught their limit quickly.

Sarah made a good point regarding the excellent job the captain did keeping the lines untangled because there were quite a few people fishing on the boat.

Thanks for sharing it Freddie

Right now in South Florida the seaweed is outrageous, stinky & unfishable. 

We went out this morning & spent the 2 hours in the ocean trying to keep seaweed off our lines/bait. Usually I'm pretty patient but this was just terrible. Haven't seen it this awful in years. 

Usually a little seaweed is a good thing as fish will be staged under it but the volume now is unreal. Not good.

@Midnight1

 How have you been doing there lately my friend, other than battling the stinking seaweed? 

Freddie, things are good & hope they are with you as well.

I read where visitors coming to Vegas is down impacting hotel occupancy revenue; is that correct? Do you see signs of it?

Normally we're up in Michigan during the summer but the boss has a bunch of remodeling projects going on, so we'll be here until next March/April.

Today they added 6 more people to my Wheels on Meals route & it's so fucking depressing seeing the elderly/poor in need of so much. It really screws with your head. 

Midnight-

Here is the latest on what's happening in Las Vegas. Complaints are coming at a time when Vegas has seen a sizable drop in visits. In June, hotel occupancy rates fell 14.6% versus the prior year, according to CoStar, a global provider of real-estate data, analytics and news. They were down 12.3% for the current month through July 19th of 2025.

“Very little of the drop is a Vegas issue,” said Steve Hill, president and CEO of the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority. Hill pointed to a significant decline in travelers from Canada as a critical factor, since Canadians have traditionally been the city’s biggest international market.

Specifically, Hill said the number of Canadian visitors has declined around 20% in Las Vegas. That dovetails with a broader U.S. trend, which shows a decline of nearly 19% in visits by our northern neighbors. The fact that they are not getting the value they used to get for their dollar is also a HUGE factor. 

In 2015, the average daily room rate in Vegas was $124.42, according to CoStar. In 2024, it was $209.54, an increase of nearly 70%.

There’s a reason that Vegas has a $9 cup of coffee, experts say, and that those $10 steak dinner deals of yesteryear are largely gone: Vegas hotels no longer rely as heavily on gambling revenue. Those steak-dinner deals were often loss leaders aimed at getting people inside to play the slots or hit the craps table. The younger generation does not come here to gamble. They come for the clubs and shopping, unlike what the people of our generation used to. 

Lastly the market has corrected itself. During covid a HUGE amount of people visited Las Vegas because things were cheap and normally Las Vegas was out of their budget, those people are also upset because now they are totally priced out. You can't come here for a weekend with less than $1,000 cash and they would and then you'd see them complaining at the hotels front desk about the room and service to get some money taken off of the bill, so they'd have gas money to make it back to California. I still love this city and in living here since 1999, it will re-invent itself again like it always does. 

A neighbor came back from Vegas 2 weeks ago & what ticked him off were the "resort" fees that hotels charge which then get taxed 13% by the county. We do something similar in Florida & you really get nailed renting a car here. He stayed at the Bellagio & it was like 50 bucks a night. Is the "resort" fee for using the facilities in the hotel? I thought that was included in the room rate. He also bitched about the long walk from the Monorail train to the Strip. He's not a big player & tends to complain a lot. His wife is the poker player. He also bitched about the UBER prices fluctuating based on the time of the day but I told him it was the same thing in South Florida. 

He kept wanting to show me picture of the Bellagio Gardens & they were beautiful but I can't look at 20 or 30 pictures of plants/flowers. He did love the Downtown light/music performances & he felt safer down there than the Strip. It's definitely a different vibe. He was stunned by the Hoover Dam & its engineering history. His wife won a "high hand" poker promotion with four Jack's & that made their trip.