3/13/2020

This morning we got an early start, departing the Marco Island anchorage before the usual crowd of tourists got started in the rental boats.  That was a good idea.

Once we got into the ocean we had long runs on straight lines, a good job for the autopilot.  We went a total of 57 nautical miles (66 statute miles) with only one turn in the plan.  We headed south to clear Cape Romano Shoals, and once there we turned southeast to head for the Little Shark River anchorage.  For the most part we were out of sight of land, though we had good radio communications with other boats in the area.  We could hear the Coast Guard all the time, and could have talked to them had we needed.  The only hazard along this route is the crab pots, shown below.  The floats aren’t the issue, but the line down to the pot can get wrapped in our propellers and other running gear and disable us.

We have begun seeing lots of flying fish.  These jump from the water using large fins on their sides like wings, and they will go 10 feet or more in each jump as the skip along the water.  We have seen some go more than 50 feet like this.  These are hard to photograph, but a couple photos are shown below that have small splashes where the fish skips off the water.

I blew up the second photo to show the fish a little better.  You can see the fins on the sides being used like wings.

We are anchored tonight inside Everglades National Park, about ½ mile off Little Shark Island which is shown below.  The island appears to be mostly mangroves, but we think there is other wildlife around.  We anchored out this far because of the reputation for ferocious bugs.

Tomorrow we will continue on to Marathon, midway down the Florida Keys, where we will stay for a week.

3/12/2020

After departing the Reinken’s house we traveled back down the Caloosahatchee to the Gulf of Mexico.  There is an inshore channel that goes most of the way to Naples (Wiggins Pass), and picks up again from Naples down to Cape Romano Shoals, but these are too shallow for us.  So out into the ocean we go.  We did get a hazy view of Naples as we passed by offshore as shown in the second photo.

The weather this day was unusually calm winds and virtually no waves.  The sea was like glass, so it made for a boring passage.  There isn’t much to see on these trips other than water, water and more water.

Marco Island seems like a boom town at the moment.  Lots of building, and lots of activity on the docks.  The waterfront mansions are impressive, though I don’t know I want to own one.

There is lots of boat activity in the harbor here, and we saw one boat get pushed sideways by the tidal current striking a piling amidships.  It was a sickening sound.  We also had a rental boat cut across right in front of us, nearly causing a collision.  I was glad to get into the anchorage where we will spend the night.

Tomorrow we will go back out into the Gulf to transit around Cape Romano Shoals, and into Everglades National Park.

3/10-11/2020

After extending a couple days at Burnt Store due to high winds, we finally got underway to visit our friends, Dave and Barb Reinken, at their house in Cape Coral.  We met them through the DeFever Cruising Club, and saw them last in August in the Canadian North Channel on Lake Huron.

On our way from Burnt Store we had to pass through Charlotte Harbor, then Pine Island Sound, and finally up the Caloosahatchee River.  These areas are wide and shallow, so it was necessary to stay in the channel.  With the large population centers of Cape Coral and Ft Myers there was a great deal of small boat traffic.  You can’t see many boats in the photos below, but you can see some of their wakes after they passed us.

Cape Coral is an unusual city layout.  It was built with extensive canals throughout the neighborhoods so that almost every resident’s house is on waterfront.  The canals all have access to the ocean through the Caloosahatchee River.  The canals are narrow as can be seen below, and sometimes not very deep.  The city dredges the canals periodically, particularly after hurricanes silt in the waterways.  The first photo below shows the canal we are in.  We had to come down this canal and spin the boat in place before tying to their dock.  There isn’t lots of room in here.

Dave and Barb have an older house they have remodeled, and it is a great place to stop.  I especially like the outdoor pool with the Lanai room, essentially a huge screened enclosure.  They invite DeFever owners to stay at their dock, and it was an enjoyable visit for us.

This post is about the red and green signs and buoys that we follow while navigating the waterways.  These always mark the sides of dredged channels, and often mark shoals, harbor entrances, and other spots to help mariners find their way.  Red markers on posts, called daymarks, are always triangular signs, and greens are square.  Similarly red buoys have conical shaped tops and are called nuns, and greens are square tops and are called cans.  Buoys can come in many sizes from very large sea buoys to small markers in private channels.  The photos below show a variety of markers and buoys.

Markers are always numbered with greens having odd numbers and reds even.  These run sequentially from the sea entrance, or from some defined point along the ICW.  Sometimes it can be confusing which marker you are seeing, so it can be important to match the marker number to the chart.

The simple memory aid for markers is ‘red-right-returning’, or when returning from the sea keep red markers to the right (starboard).  That seems simple enough, but as it turns out it can be anything but simple.  The photo below shows the entrance channel to the marina we are in at the moment, and is looking out toward the sea.  In this case, while transiting in the direction shown, you would need to keep the green markers to the right, and reds to the left since you would be going out to sea.  And you can also see the shoals encroaching on each side of the channel.

When following a waterway that parallels the coastline (called an intracoastal waterway or ICW) the same color markers are used, but they are also marked with a tiny yellow triangle or square depending on the type of marker they may be.  These are hard to see from a distance, and sometimes it can be confusing.  The markers shown at the top of this post are all ICW markers as they have the yellow marks.  The convention for the ICW is that red marks stay to the land side, or you could think of it as red-right-returning to Texas.

Another thing that has to be accounted for is places where two channels cross.  These intersections can be marked with a green over red, or vice versa, with the top color being for the primary channel, and the lower color for the secondary channel.  It is often hard to know which channel is primary, and you often have to study the charts to understand what the markers are trying to indicate.

Now this is where it can get very confusing.  Sometimes you can be following a channel that is a primary red-right-returning, but is also marked as an ICW with reds and greens kept to the opposite sides.  One place this happens is in Kings Bay, Georgia (buoys shown below) where the markers are for the primary channel for entry to the submarine base from the sea, but the same channel is also the ICW.  In this situation the markers marked as reds, but with the yellow square for an ICW green, and the greens are also marked with an ICW triangle.  This is a place where seeing the yellow marks becomes especially important.

I also saw a marker shown below that incorporated all of these twists.  This marker is at Longboat Pass (hence the ‘LP’ marking) at the north end of Longboat Key.  It is marked as a red over green, and it has a an ICW yellow square, meaning it is an ICW green.  This marker’s meaning is the primary channel is out to the sea through Longboat Pass, and if going that way you would keep it to port (left).  If you are following the secondary channel southbound, the ICW, you would keep it to starboard (right), which is what we were doing.  If you got it wrong in either direction you would have been hard aground.  The marker is shown on the chart in the second photo, and I annotated it with an arrow.  The yellow dashed line in the photo is our path through this area.

I hope this gives some insight into following the navigation markers and the need to be paying attention all the time.

Our visits with friends in this area are continuing.  We were lucky enough to hook up with John and Kay Brownell, another former VQ CO.  We had not seen them since the late 1980’s in Spain.  They invited us to dinner at their new-to-them beautiful house just outside the development we are in, and we had them visit the boat for drinks.  It was great fun to catch up on our life experiences in the years that have passed.

We also have been enjoying seeing some of the local wildlife.  There are ospreys circling and squawking all the time, and we saw one land on a piling near our boat while he ate his dinner.  It’s unusual to get this close to one, though I think these are pretty used to having people about.

In Sarasota we began seeing manatees, but were unable to get a photo until now.  These drift in and out of the harbor with the tide.  The photos below were taken immediately adjacent to our boat, and they give an idea of the size of these animals.  Most weigh about 1000 pounds, and they are also known as sea cows.  One (not pictured) had obvious scars on his back from a boat propeller, though he obviously survived the incident.  It’s hard to know if the boat that hit him was traveling too fast or if the animal swam up underneath the boat.

The people in this development are mostly Canadians or from the Midwest.  They still have a sense of humor as you can see in the photo below.

We may extend here a couple days because the high wind predictions before we move on to Cape Coral.

3/1-8/2020

I will break this post into multiple entries due to the time we are spending here.

It finally feels like we are in the warmer Florida climate.  Palms are abundant, as are a range of tropical plants.  After our long sojourn in chilly Mississippi this feels like we are back to having fun again.

We were lucky enough to meet up with our friends from Wisconsin, Wayne and Terry Kolberg and their friends Dale and Marcia Thompson.  They are all retired from Reinhardt Food Service, and Dale and Marcia live in this area.  Nice people!

We also got to visit with parts of our family, the Hoyme’s and Metcalf’s, and to have them see the boat.

A special treat was a visit from Brian and Kim, and their daughter Lily who we had not met previously.  Kim reminded me that the last time we saw them was in 2014 at a wedding in Greece.  It seems impossible that it has been that long.

Lily seemed to enjoy the boat and meeting Sinbad, who of course was delighted with the visit.

2/29-3/1/2020

On Saturday morning we departed Sarasota and continued south, passing through Venice and Englewood before emerging into Gasparilla Sound.  Much of this stretch of the ICW is shallow with a well-marked, dredged channel through it.  You must stay between the markers or you will certainly be aground.

We have begun to see mangroves along the sides of the waterway, a sure sign we are getting further south.  A couple photos of these are shown below. Normally you expect to see these in remote swamps, but these are preserved in the midst of development.  The barrier islands here are heavily developed with some very expensive real estate.

Along the way we passed several bridges, but only needed to open a few because the low tide enabled us to get under the bridges.  The tides in this region are unusual to my experience.  Normally there are two high and two low tides each day, but in this region there is only one high and one low.  There are only a few places in the US with this phenomenon.

We anchored at Cayo Costa State Park, a very large anchorage.  Photos of the anchorage are shown below.  This area is very shallow, and entering the anchorage was daunting.  Just as we got to the shallowest part our navigation iPads both crashed, a problem we learned later that was due to it being a leap day.  We got in OK, but it wasn’t comfortable feeling our way without charts.

The next morning we awoke to relatively high winds, and the realization our anchor was dragging very slowly in the sandy bottom.  The sailboat in the photo above was not dragging, and was about 30 feet from us.  Other boats in the anchorage were also dragging, some in the first photo becoming unusually close.  We finally gave up at midmorning and departed, but not without churning up lots of sand with our propellers.  Thankfully no harm was done.

After transiting up the Peace River we went into a marina at Burnt Store.  This is a large, mostly retiree, development based around a marina.  We will stay here for a week to visit friends and parts of our extended family who are vacationing in the area.

2/27-29/2020

We planned to go to Sarasota for a few days to visit a former condo neighbor.  Our plan was to stay on a mooring ball to avoid the very expensive marina here.

We departed Tarpon Springs and went outside into the ocean.  The seas started out as expected, 2-3 feet, but for a while they became 4 footers.  That isn’t dangerous, but it wasn’t fun.  We came back inside the barrier islands at the Tampa entrance, and continued south to Sarasota.  Unfortunately we were a little later than we planned, and a cold front came through before we could get settled.  There weren’t thunderstorms, but we did have to maintain the boat in position in the waterway for about 20 minutes in unusually strong winds and rain.  The raindrops felt like hailstones.  It wasn’t fun, but we got it done.

Staying on a mooring ball is lots like anchoring.  The marina provides a tested, strong line that you tie to, and then you use your dinghy to go ashore to their dinghy dock.  That allowed us to do some minor reprovisioning, and Sinbad had several romps ashore.  The cost is about a tenth of tying up in the marina, but you have to provide your own electrical power.  Not a problem for us.

Unfortunately we were unable to visit our friend here.  She had a bout of pneumonia.  Maybe we will be able to visit again before we leave this part of Florida.

Downtown Sarasota is an attractive and expensive place.  There seem to be many New Yorkers here.  Palm trees seem to be common now.  We thought the cooler weather comfortable (around 60F), but locals complained of the cold and were dressed in winter jackets.

We will move on towards Cape Coral on Saturday.

The downtown river consists of mooring walls where the boats bring the product ashore, small shipyards for boat maintenance, and restaurants.  The street scene is more of the same.  Some views of this is shown below.

We had dinner at the restaurant shown in the second photo above.  After dark the waiters brought out old loaves of bread, tore them into pieces, and threw them into the river.  The catfish were in an incredible feeding frenzy, some actually getting out of the water by jumping on the backs of others.  It was quite a sight.

While we were at Tarpon Springs, I had a call from a former coworker, Les Nelson.  While I don’t miss work, I do miss the many great people who I was privileged to work alongside, and Les was definitely one of them.  He and his wife, Barb, abandon the Minnesota cold around this time of year, and they were nearby on their way to Bonita Springs for a month.  It was really great to see them and catch up on old times.

We also had a chance to meet up with our cruising buddies with whom we crossed the Gulf.  There is always a sense of camaraderie that develops among groups that together face and overcome some obstacle, and this group was no exception.  All I can say is these are all great people.

After leaving Tarpon Springs we plan to go offshore for about 50 miles to avoid the many bridges and no-wake zones on the Florida ICW.  We will see if this is a good decision.

2/19-26/2020

I will break this post into two because of the length.

After the long crossing of the Gulf of Mexico we needed a few days to rest.  I also really like Greek food, and Tarpon Springs has a history as a Greek village as described below.  So, in support of my waistline, we spent a week here.

The west coast of Florida is one of the few areas in the world where sea sponges grow naturally that are commercially viable products.  There had long been a cottage industry of harvesting sponges here by cutting them from their roots.  In 1905 a Greek immigrant introduced the concept of diving for sponges using old school hard hat equipment, and the sponge industry here took off.  Sponge diving was practiced in Greece, and that expertise allowed the immigrants to establish the industry here.  This led to a Greek community forming in the town including Greek Orthodox churches, and, importantly to me, a slew of Greek restaurants.  The photos below show some sponges at the tourist traps in the town, the statue of the sponge diver, and a historical marker about the history of Greek settlement.

The old part of the town is along the Tarpon River.  We couldn’t get our boat up here because of the limited mooring options for boats our size, so we had to stay at a marina partway up the river.  We then launched our dinghy and used it as a taxi to go back and forth to the downtown area.  The photo below shows us starting out on one commute with our boat in the background.