Day 4 April 8, 2010

We are adapting to a life on the water.
Yesterday we traveled from the Crow's nest @ Venice FL to Tarpon Point Marina @ Cape Coral, a distance of about 57 miles. The entire travel was along the Intracoastal Water Way which is scenic all along the way and wide in places and narrow in others and deep in places and shallow in others. Lots of boats encountered going with us and going against us. The weather was as good as it gets as it was perfect.


We opened our first bridge that we could not pass beneath and we encountered one of the sail boats that had been docked at the Crows Nest with us, a couple from New Zealand. We discussed whether the couple sailed her across or whether they had her shipped over. My guess is that they sailed across. There are so many small boats, mostly sail, in the open ocean that are going from one foreign port to another.


We settled into Tarpon at about 4:30 in the afternoon, hooked the boat up to electric and water and then moseyed down to a tiki bar they had on site called the Naught Mermaid to celebrate. We came away with a 5 piece set of plastic ware for the boat with their logo which will be happily used from time to time aboard the Salt Shaker.


We met some nice folks there but could not stay long since we our intentions were to travel as far as we could go today east along the Okeechoobee water way toward the big lake.


Due to our late start, around 11:00 in the morning we only made 38 miles as opposed to 57 miles the day before. But we were able to nestle in at the gas dock at a really "in the country" marina called Port La Belle Marina at La Belle on the waterway. They were closed when we arrived but were available to discuss things with them and the kindly allowed us to remain at their gas dock until morning. Perfect because we are about 75 gallons short of a full load and I always feel good with full gas. From my days of flying small air planes I guess.


We did our first lock today. It was the Franklin Lock which lifted us all of about 2 feet for the next section of the waterway. We went thru the lock with 3 other boats, one of them a power boat and the other two were sail. It happened that we were assigned by the lockmaster to be the first boat in the string so we were less than perfect in our anticipations about what to do when but the boat behind gave us helpful hints over his radio and the lock master was super helpful and handled us like we were unsure which we were, unsure.


There are some boobs who have boats and we encountered one of them today along the waterway. He had what must have been a 50 footer, layed out like a trawler but with European styling and with a plaining hull. He passed us going about 30 knots making waves in this tiny 200 foot or so canal that we guessed to be about 4 feet. The waves went to the edges of the canal and slapped against the sea walls that were in this particular area and reflected back just as big as the originals. There were 3 people on a jet ski that encountered these waves and all 3 of them were launched off of the jet ski in 3 different directions. A boat ahead of us went over toward them  just in case any assistance was needed but all three ex passengers were able to swim back to their waiting machine and climb back aboard. This boob with a boat is the one I blame for causing all my beer in my beer fridge to be tipped over. "Jerk!:


The trip so far has exceed all of our expectations by orders of magnitude. Pat said we will probably be in better physical shape when we return home that when we left. It is physical stuff.


I will post this first and then try to post some pics that we thought would be interesting. We are accumulating a camera full of stuff.


Tony n Pat