7. Naples.

Here we are, surrounded by multi-million dollar mansions, so close we can see into their high ceiling banquet rooms. Is it as though we were anchored in one of those crescents up by Bayview and Laurence, but we are in a canal street in Naples, Florida. The mansions are immaculate. The grass is cropped, the patio furniture neatly aligned. All is ready for a glossy fashion photo. But there is no one to be seen: no lawn parties; no champagne brunches on the dock; no servants airing the Afghans; not even a shriveled old couple on the lazy boys sipping a fine vintage. At night, these somber mausoleums show no lights, not even a flickering TV.

Ashore, Naples has wide streets with grassy medians and rows of Royal Palms. It is wonderfully spacious and with out a trace of trash. But the town seemed quiet, as if under curfew. We trudged about discovering fine banks, lawyers offices, jewelers, and stores offering antiques, and ‘Arte’; all discretely ostentatious; but nowhere to buy sliced loaf and a liter of two percent. We were in the wrong area.

We were returning to the boat in respectful silence when a flock of birds, screaming like hooligans, swarmed the royal Palm above our head. They had gorgeous blue-green wings, bright red beaks and long diamond shaped tails. The bird book says that they are not natives but Rose Ringed Parakeets imported from India as exotic toys. It seems that some of them escaped their custom cages and have become vulgar street parrots, reproducing shamelessly, and rejoicing in freedom and the fruit of Florida. They sure cheer the place up.
We can recommend this anchorage. The holding is good. There is very little current and the mansions provide good protection from all directions. And it is quiet.

6. Fort Myers Beach

The sheltered harbour behind the slip of sand they call Fort Myers Beach, where the shrimp boats tie up and where cruisers used to anchor, is full of moorings now. You have to pay to stay. But it is a good harbour and that is the way things are going.

Fort Myers Beach has avoided the sophistication of other costal resorts. No high-rise condos here: cottages, wooden motels with rotting skirts, ‘Weekly rentals’, and communities of mobile homes that never move: an oasis for the thrifty. On the beach you can meet brittle boned seniors striding stiffly or an unshaven man pulling on a cigarette, which seems to require considerable suction, cupped in one hand. But everyone nods or smiles whether they have teeth or not. The main street offers ‘Voted Best Beach Ware’, ‘Tattoos’, ‘Body piercing’, ‘Tanning’ (Tanning in Florida?) and the intriguing ‘Treasures from underwater wrecks’ which include shells, stuffed toy dolphins and lighthouse ashtrays.

A local tells us that the shrimp boats have not been out all summer. What with the high price of fuel and the low price of shrimp it is not worth it. The fresh shrimp served in the waterfront restaurants come frozen from Asia.

5. Fort Myers

You know when you are back in salt water. You can smell it.

We just got through the lock when…
PSHUT! PSHUT! A pair of dolphins sprang up right beside the cockpit making us both jump. They sank into the brown water and then reappeared every 30 seconds or so with that percussive expiration that took us by surprise each time. For the next hour and a half they accompanied us down the estuary always surfacing right beside us in the cockpit never at the bow. We felt we were taking two frisky dogs for a walk. One had a white scar on its dorsal fin, the other a black spot. Why do they do this? Does the noise of the boat confuse the fish and make them easier to catch? Does the boat provide sonic camouflage that conceals the pressure patterns of a hunting dolphin that fish must know?

They dropped us off at Fort Myers seven miles down from the lock.

Welcome to the Bay of Mexico!

4 La Belle, Florida

Cruisers should love this place.
The town dock, which has power, water and garbage disposal, is free. The library, with its smiling librarians and internet, is right on the dock. And all this is courtesy of Captain Barron, skipper of the Caloosahatchee river ferry, who brought livestock and people up here in the twenties before there were roads. He bequeathed his dock and his large riverside property to the town on condition that they provide free dockage to passing sailors… in perpetuity. La Belle is small rural town in the citrus belt. Trucks piled with oranges lumber down the main street all day. You can pick up nice fresh oranges on the sidewalk at the traffic lights where the trucks turn onto highway 29 for the juice factory. The quiet back streets are lined with ancient Live Oaks covered in bromeliads and Spanish moss. Their muscular limbs reach right out over the street as if each of these hairy giants was about to wrestle with its partner on the opposite side. In a cottage under this spooky canopy two ladies run the “Free Secondhand Bookshop.” Two rooms are packed with books all nicely classified. “Just help yourself.”

The town was never French and is not particularly beautiful. An early pioneer named it after his daughters Laverne and Belinda.

This will be the last stop on this cross country ramble. The next lock will drop us into the tidal estuary of Fort Myers.

3. Lake Okeechobee

We are sailing from the Atlantic to the Gulf of Mexico right across the middle of Florida.

First you have to cross Lake Okeechobee. That is the big hole you can see in the middle of Florida even on a world map. It is about 40 miles across and mostly only a few feet deep. Although it is right in the middle of Florida it is only 14 feet above sea level. That is how flat it is here. It would not even be that high except that, during a drought, some farmers built a dike around it to claim more land for sugarcane. The dike burst and was replaced by a larger dike (which is now being heightened again).

Once across the lake, you enter a waterway dug through the swamp. All kinds of fishing birds live here. The poor fish: the ospreys, kingfishers and pelicans dive on them; the anhingas and cormorants swim after them; big blue and little green herons hide in the reeds to mug them. It is a bird watcher’s paradise. There are thousands of birds. There must be lots of fish.

We are delighted to find that this route is almost deserted. We have only seen a few boats all day. Last evening we dropped the anchor by the reeds at the edge of the waterway and watched the sun set through the smoke from the burning sugarcane fields. A pair of traveling Manatees swam by rising to give a moist sigh every 100 meters or so. This time of year the manatees are migrating. They don’t like the cold. They travel hundreds of miles, always in water less than 20 feet deep, to find warmer water (or the discharge from an industrial plant). They seem to be able to navigate accurately between their summer and winter feeding grounds but no one knows how. At the St Lucie lock a retired couple wearing red armbands labeled ‘Volunteer Manatee Watch’ counts the animals as they lock through. They told us the manatees wait politely by the lock gates until they open and seem to know exactly where they are going.

At dusk we were invaded by a zillion tiny bugs. I guess that is why there are so many fish.

2. Preparation

There is the stuff you expect: cleaning, polishing, varnishing, painting the bottom;
and then there is the unexpected.

The electric fuel pump has burst its diaphragm and refuses to deliver fuel to the engine. The holding tank for the marine toilet seems to be under some sort of pressure and won’t accept any contributions.

“No Sir, they don’t even make that fuel pump any more.”
The new model is, of course, completely different and this means rearranging all the fuel lines and the wiring. It turns out that a mud wasp has sealed the holding tank vent so tightly that it takes a whole day to chip out the little architect’s cement.

But it is warm and dry and we have lots of good company in the yard including old QCYC members Irmgard and Ron Cameron (who had the Alberg 30 ‘Rough Bounds’) and Robin and Mike Skinner (who, way back, had the wooden folk boat ‘Banyana’) here seen with Moya celebrating the day’s minor triumphs. And although Indiantown is a bit rough it has the Seminole Inn. This elegant mansion was built by a railway baron in 1920. His niece Wallis came to the opening. She was married to a sailor at the time but later moved up market a bit and became the Duchess of Windsor.

1.Indiantown, Florida

We arrived here two weeks after hurricane Wilma barreled its way through Indiantown.

The stop sign at the side road to the Indiantown marina, kicked to the ground by the wind still lies flat on its face in the sand. The boat yard is an awful sight. More than 30 boats were knocked off their stands. In front of us, a CC 43 lies on its side like a beached whale but the spade rudder, stuck in the ground, remains vertical. Behind us, a felled Benneteau’s mast has taken out the rigging of two neighbours. All three masts are folded like wet milkshake straws. To the left a prostrate Hunter, pierced by one of its stands, bleeds fuel down its hull.

And yet it is all so arbitrary. In the midst of this chaos, ‘Golden eye’ is upright and unscathed. Moya’s home-made cloth hatch covers, kept in place by a strip of white underwear elastic sewn in to their rims, are just as we left them.

How lucky can you be?