Caloosahatchee

We are anchored in Glover Bight, a small basin off the Caloosahatchee River in Cape Coral, Florida (map). We are a stone's throw from the Westin Hotel and the Tarpon Point Marina, where Blossom is tied up. Tarpon Point is also the home marina for our mutual friends Brad and Lorraine, who have a Nordhavn 55, Adventure, which is similar to Blossom.


View from our deck of Glover Bight and the Westin. We met the couple on the blue ketch; they painted their steel hull with Rustoleum, which looks fine to our eye.

We had a nice cruise yesterday from Useppa Island, which started out very serene. We passed tony Captiva and Sanibel Islands, rounding the southern end of Pine Island and making our way across San Carlos Bay to the mouth of the Caloosahatchee.

As we entered the dredged cut across San Carlos Bay, however, we were suddenly inundated with a flood of boats heading in the other direction. It seems all of the Fort Myers area gets in their boats Friday afternoon and heads out to the various island destinations in the bay. Our draft mandates we stay more or less in the center of the channel, and oncoming boats were passing to both sides of us. It was, honestly, quite nerve-wracking. I had to get on the radio more than once to warn an approaching boat that we could not veer off, and all of these guys were going great guns to get out of town.

It did not help that in the middle of this, the computer that runs the chartplotter had a BSoD. I could not take my eyes off the "road" even for an instant, and poor Louise had to reach around me to resuscitate the machine and restart the plotter. Fortunately, we always have a fully separate and redundant backup running at Louise's station on the pilothouse settee.


Sunset from the dock.

We had a very nice dinner aboard Blossom with Martin, Steph, Brad, and Lorraine. We learned that the stretch where we encountered all the boats is known locally as the Miserable Mile, and Brad gave us some current information about the Okeechobee Waterway, since they just came through in the other direction a couple of months ago,

In a short while we will continue east and north, through Fort Myers and into the Okeechobee Waterway.  It will be a short day, stopping at Calusa Jack's Marina, the last stop which can accommodate both our boats, for certain, before Moore Haven at the lake.