Real Estate Views from St Pete

We're often creatures of our environment, and our childhood experiences. My husband, George, and I both grew up by the water - he by a lake in Concord, Massachusetts, and I by the ocean in Newport, Rhode Island. Different types of water - different reactions. He finds a lake calming, and hates the violence of waves crashing against the rocks or the shore; I, on the other hand, find lakes boring, and love the changes of the tide, and find crashing waves soothing - even foghorns (prevalent in Newport but not in St Petersburg) are pleasant background.  So where to go and what to choose when we moved to Florida - an interesting challenge. I ruled out inland Florida because it has many lakes but no oceanfront. George ruled out being directly on the Atlantic or the Gulf of Mexico. We compromised on a seawalled canal, just a few hundred feet from Boca Ciega Bay, a beautiful wide body of water that separates St. Petersburg from the beaches on the barrier islands. We have tides, and dolphins, and schools of fish, an occasional manatee, and an interesting "parade" of boats heading to or from the marina at one end of our canal. Occasional we get whitecaps, and often it's as still as a mirror. Our family and friends can fish from the dock or the seawall; we can take our boat to lots of restaurants for lunch and tie up at their docks. We're both happy here, and for a couple who used to move every couple years for decades, it's amazing that we've been in this house for 11 years.  I'd like to move to one of the luxury condos downtown where I could walk to everything and still be by the water, but he's not about to leave his grounds, or put his boat in a marina, or deal with a condo association.  So - we live here, and I work downtown. Again, a compromise.