Cruising the ICW - Little River, SC to Marthon, Fl - Cool Change Travels & Adventures: February 2014

Our Final Leg of Travel

On Presidents Day we stayed at our anchorage off Useppa Island for longer than planned. We worked on the next installment of the blog so that we could publish it to our followers today and we were in no rush to leave the peaceful anchorage. Just before ten it was time to pull the anchor and get underway. We were committed to again run on just one engine at a time for the second day. By traveling at 7 to 8 mph on one engine we can almost double our fuel mileage and at a price of $4.10 per gallon for diesel that is a great incentive. 660 hp and we are only using about 80 of those.

The intracoastal waterways on this side of the state are really pretty. There are many inlets, small and large, along the Gulf coast here. The constant flushing of the tides causes the water to be turquoise in color as opposed to the brown color on the east coast waterway (southeast FL being the exception).

We try to capture the color of the water but the photos do not do it justice.
Can you see the dolphin in the center, just under the surface?

We have been meandering behind the barrier islands and the many mangrove islands. Some of these islands are accessible only by boat and many have people living there anyway. This is a very fragile area and very beautiful.

Barrier islands separate us from the Gulf of Mexico all the way from Ft Myers to Gulfport.
This area is very susceptible to storms, similar to North Carolina's barrier islands, the Outer Banks.

A lot of boats on the water in a constricted place

We have observed that boats and people are out on the waterways everywhere. We believe that we have seen more boats on the water in the last two days than we have seen in all of the last three winters on the east coast. There are pontoon boats and all manner of fishing boats not to mention many large cruising boats and sailboats. Even the sailboats actually have their sails up here! It sounds strange but we truly do not see many sailboats under sail, even though we see lots of sailboats traveling the waterway.

I stopped writing in the blog and stepped out on the deck and snapped this photo from our anchorage,
It is 6:24AM and 56 degrees out this morning. Beautiful.

We have passed beneath many bridges along the way. Our timing for those that had to be raised or swung open has been almost perfect. We have had very little wait time over these two days. Just pure dumb luck.

Near Venice FL

Another Venice bridge

One of many openings

Many beautiful homes along the water.
Also we've noticed more modest homes than mansions along this route.

This is one of two car ferries traveling back and forth across the waterway near Stump Pass

Imagine this commute if you had to take a boat from your house to the mainland
and then travel by car to work.

Venice, FL home

Venice inlet

Venice, FL

Dolphins playing in our wake

Just 5 feet from our boat

They stayed with us for about a half mile along Longboat Key

No, the Repairs Haven't Stopped

A minor repair that I have been planning to "get around to".
Three of our four gas caps have had broken keeper chains since we have owned Cool Change. I happened to see some large brass chain connected to a pen on the counter of a hardware store. It turns out that the store stocked this chain.. I had not been able to find any chain of the variety I needed at marine stores. A dropped cap costs about $35 for the replacement. All the chain needed for four gas caps cost only $2 so I replaced them all.

Fuel cap and broken chain removed from throat of fuel filler.

A rag was shoved into the filler to prevent the old chain and the screw holding it from falling into fuel tanks.

New chains installed. I did remember to remove the rag!

And the Quilting Goes on Too!

Thanks to my Vero Beach sister-in-law, Donna. She helped me lay out these quilt tops on her driveway, sandwiching the top, batting and backing to prepare them for quilting. These child-sized quilts are small enough that I was able to complete the machine quilting and binding on the boat so....two big projects DONE!

This Attic Windows pattern is one of my favorites. Notice the three-D look you can get
just by carefully arranging the window colors.

This one features gorilla families.

Settling down near St. Petersburg, FL

Wayne did quite a bit of research, looking for a marina that might be a good spot for us to leave the boat here on the west coast when we go back home this year. On Tuesday, February 18th we pulled into Gulfport Municipal Marina in the small coastal community of Gulfport, located near the Skyway Bridge and just east of St. Pete Beach. Getting into the marina was a bit of a challenge. We realized as we approached the fixed bridge entering Boca Ciega Bay that we are about 6 inches taller than the bridge height at high tide. Just our luck - the tide was up so we had to backtrack another hour or so to enter the bay through a higher bridge. It was a beautiful day, though, and no great hardship for either of us to stay on the water a while longer. We wish we could bottle some of these views of the sunshine, the clouds and the water and give you all their full impact.

St. Pete high rises on the way to Gulfport.

We have settled in here for the next few weeks and have retrieved our car from Stuart. There's a lot to see and do in this area and we plan to revisit some of the places we enjoyed when we boated in this part of Florida years ago. Bradenton, Sarasota, Longboat Key, as well as both Tampa and St. Pete offer a relaxing atmosphere of life on the beautiful Gulf of Mexico.

Map of this year's adventures
Wow! 700+ miles by boat this year.

Cool Change in its new slip at Gulfport Marina

The Sunshine Skyway bridge from the waterway between Bradenton and Gulfport,
looking across Tampa Bay towards St. Petersburg.

And here we are on the Sunshine Skyway bridge on the way
to retrieve our car in Stuart, FL on the Atlantic coast

Downtown St Pete Marina view

Live video feed of Gulfport Marina
Try this link for the web cam here at our marina https://mygulfport.us/marina/

Pelican Rescue

Today I observed a pelican that was struggling in the water about five boats away from ours. Every time that he moved his feet his head would go under water. It was in extreme distress. A fishing lure was hooked in its beak and also its webbed foot. Its foot and its beak were essentially tied closely together such that the more he struggled the more his head was pulled underwater. It was rapidly suffocating. I alerted the marina staff who came over with a net and together we cut the bird free of the fishing lure. I was holding the bird's wings to prevent it from struggling out of our control. For another ten minutes I held on as the bird became more alert and was breathing normally. When it appeared to gain strength I released my hold on the pelican and it jumped into the water. I watched it swim away for about ten minutes and when it was in open water it flew off and landed several hundred feet away where its comrades were sitting along the shore. Boy, did that feel good!

Old news

Colleen forgot to mention a fun time when we were back in Vero in January. She again had an opportunity to judge in the elementary division at the Indian River County Science and Technology Fair. This year I was promoted up to fifth grade and was so impressed with the projects and with the
level of organization on the part of the foundation that manages the Fair each year. The students' projects ran the gamut from studying angles that govern keeping roller coasters on their tracks to investigations of proper fertilizing for plants. It was so interesting to talk to the young scientists as they explained their experiments. As you may know, I have a special place in my heart for science fairs. Wayne and I met at one in Orlando 49 years ago.

Stuart, Fl

We finished out an enjoyable week in Stuart, getting to know new friends from Wilmington, NC, Howard and Joanne and their friendly dog, and meeting up with some of the Vero Beach Loggerhead Marina residents who boated in for supper at a favorite restaurant here. We enjoyed a superb meal at Sailor's Return two years ago and repeated it again. Howard and Joanne also introduced us to a tasty supper, adding sausage to Zatarain's Red Beans and Rice.

Hooray, a quilt show! The Port St. Lucie Crazy Quilters held their bi-annual show while we were in Stuart. Colleen enjoyed attending it. Interestingly, their featured artist was a member of my quilt guild in North Carolina, Susan Brubaker-Knapp. Susan specializes in thread sketching. Check her website at www.bluemoonriver.com to see some her beautiful pieces. You won't believe what she does with thread and a sewing machine.

An unusual landscape, composed of thread and fabric

Lots of work in this quilt.

On to Fort Myers

On Monday the 10th we left Stuart traveling to Ft Myers via the St. Lucie River, the east leg of the OWW (Okeechobee Waterway). The OWW wanders through a raw and untamed part of Florida. It travels 145 miles from Stuart on the Atlantic coast to past Ft Myers on the Gulf coast.. Our three day journey to reach Ft. Myers was 135 miles, 5 locks, one manually operated bridge, three railroad bridges, and several low bridges that we passed through after requesting an opening. In all, our average speed was 6 mph for the 135 miles. Our second overnight stop as we moved around the southern rim of the Big Lake was in Moore Haven, a tiny town with a welcoming city dock charging only $1/foot, What a deal! We were lucky that there was a book sale going on at the Moore Haven Library. Books were selling for $1.00/pound. We added five-and-a-half pounds to the boat.

Starting down the St Lucie river towards Lk. Okeechobee.
35 miles to the lake.

The St Lucie canal

We waited 40 minutes for the RR bridge just past this bridge to open after a train went by.

Finally getting going again

Some of the very limited boat traffic

In the first lock along the Okeechobee waterway. Ready to go up.

The St. Lucie lock, on the eastern side of the Lake, elevated us up a whopping 15 feet!

The wind was building and we were being pushed around by stern seas on the 10 mile jaunt along the shoreline as we proceeded to the protected rim route around the south portion of Lk. Okeechobee.

Once behind the protection of the grass flats, we were in "the ditch" bordered by the 13 foot high Hoover dike on our port side and the vast grass flats to our starboard.

Just outside the channel line we anchored early for the night among the fisherman.

Our back door view that night

See that man on the bridge.
He pushes that pole round and round and the bridge rotates open for us.

Next morning
Many airboats in this area but they are usually out in the grass flats where we don't see them.

This is the land of the beautiful palms.

And the land of constant construction to control the waters of the Okeechobee.

The Corp of Engineers has piled rocks of assorted sizes along the waterway several miles apart.
Apparently they want to be ready for a breach.
Two years ago the Corp was increasing the height of the dike by 3 feet.
They must know something that the original designers did not.

One of the many water gates of various sizes that drain down the lake in the wet season.

This is ash accumulation that rained out
of the sky as the cane fields were burned.
We had to dab them carefully to wash them off.
They were sticky sugar.

Cane fields being burned off after harvest.

I read an alert in Cruisers Net that said to hug the coffer dam that was placed on the OWW
to facilitate the building of a new spill gate.

This guy had not read the notice and he was fooled by the red ball next to the green on the left side of the coffer dam.
He was hard aground and begged us to pull him off. Going against my instincts to assist on the waterways, I had to refuse due to the high winds and the close proximity of the steel walls of the coffer dam.

We spent a night tied to the city dock in Moore Haven, just past the last lock on the lake.
Only $1 per foot dockage with electric and water.
This is our view at 6:30 AM as we left the dock

Moore Haven temperature when we arrived

These two boats were together.
A captain and crew were transporting them for the owner.
They left Moore Haven after us by 20 minutes, caught and passed us in a cloud of black smoke.
We caught them again at the next lock. This had occurred the day before also.
The captain told us that he was the hare and we were the tortoise.

We arrived in Ft Myers at the City Marina just in time to miss this mess caused by 30 mph winds.

There are many varieties of birds everywhere you look and the towns and houses are few and far between. We see a few alligators but they steer well clear of our boat, which suits us just fine. The Lake is a fisherman's paradise.

Ft. Myers - Will we be lured to linger here again?

You may recall that two years ago our plan to travel Florida's west coast was stymied when we stopped for a few days in Ft. Myers and then couldn't tear ourselves away for a month. This year we planned to stay for two days and were able to "escape" after four. Ft. Myers celebrates Thomas Edison's birthday all the month of February so there are many things to see and do. Our first night we attended a marina pot luck with a Valentine's Day theme. We adapted Howard and Joanne's red beans and rice a bit, supplementing it with a rice blend that includes wild rice. It didn't last long.

Four winters ago we met friends Jann and Gary at the mooring field in Marathon in the Florida Keys. They have gone on to make The Great Loop trip and we've stayed in touch but haven't been able to meet up very often. It was Jann who helped me to start a Stack n' Whack quilt two winters ago. I stacked and she whacked. Lots of fun. Jann brought her sister Jill, who is also a quilter, by the boat for a quick visit on the 15th. What a treat that was.

Jill, Colleen, and Jann

We stayed in Ft. Myers long enough to see the yearly nighttime fireworks and parade. Appropriately enough, the parade honors its famous winter resident, Thomas Edison, with a big display of electrically enhanced floats and parade participants. On Sunday, Feb. 16, Wayne made a quick trip to the car show and then we fueled up and set off west on the Caloosahatchee River to connect with the GICW (gulf intracoastal waterway). Eeek! We've calculated that we're getting 1.63 miles to the gallon of diesel fuel on our most recent leg.

Fireworks before the Edison Light parade in Ft Myers

One of the many floats in the parade

Heading for Bradenton

We are anchored tonight a little north of Sanibel Island, just off Cabbage Key.
We traveled only 32 miles today after choosing to cross Charlotte Harbor tomorrow. During our travels Sunday we saw more boats on the water than anytime in the previous 3 winters. The water here is a lovely green as opposed to the brown color on the east coast. Inlets and passes are many and the water is constantly flushed. Dolphins accompanied us all day.

Where we are today Monday Feb 17th

The sunset was too pretty for me not to take a photo while writing the blog tonight.

I just snapped this photo from tonight's anchorage just off Useppa Island, inshore and north of Sanibel Island. Look at Useppa Island on Google Earth. Cabbage Key is just to our west 500 yards. Two sailboats and one powerboat are anchored near us tonight.

More photos for your viewing

One of the locks opening for us to enter

Early morning view on the rim route around Lake O

Hey. I got my butt soaked sitting on this deck waiting for the lock doors to close.

What? I should be watching the charts? Can't you navigate a canal w/o me?

Many different sites on the Caloosahatchee River portion of the OWW.

There were a number of horse farms along the river.

Alpacas??

The last lock coming up

Most of the power plants on the waterways are no longer oil & steam plants.
They are rebuilt as turbine powered natural gas units.

Waiting for another of the 5 locks

He wants to beat us to the locks. Or he has plenty of $$ for fuel.

Sailboats are limited to a 46 foot mast height by this RR lift bridge. A local marina will strap
water filled barrels to boats up to 55 feet tall to tip them under the bridge.