Finally on the West Coast

We are underway northbound in the Gulf of Mexico, just a mile or two off the coast, bound for Pass-a-Grille, just north of the Tampa Bay entrance. We are headed to Clearwater for a few days, to connect with good friends Karen and Ben before they go gallivanting off to various conferences and family visits.

Saturday morning we lingered a bit in Moore Haven, taking advantage of dock power for some welcome morning heat and topping up our water tank, before dropping lines to continue downbound on the Caloosahatchee. I had reached out to our friends Laura and Ben in Fort Myers to see if we could connect over dinner, and the earliest they were available was Monday, which gave us a leisurely transit of the river.

With some extra time on our hands, we set our sights on LaBelle for the evening, which meant we'd only have one lock, at Ortona, for the day. That proved an excellent strategy, as Louise was hit with a bout of allergies the likes of which neither of us had seen. It had started on Friday, but by the time we reached the Ortona Lock on Saturday she was barely functional, declaring she was not up to doing another lock.

Vector at anchor in LaBelle, as seen through the bridge. This is as close as we can get.

We dropped the hook upriver of the LaBelle drawbridge, off-channel just outside the cable area (map). It was not even 2pm. I used the downtime to fix a few things, and Louise crashed for a while, exhausted from all the sneezing. We were hoping it might pass by dinner time, but when that rolled around she was still miserable and did not even feel like eating.

I splashed the tender and headed ashore stag, swinging past the new LaBelle Yacht Club patio restaurant, which has a dock. The far-too-loud live music drove me away, and instead I landed at the town courtesy dock, eventually ending up at Forrey Grill, an Italian joint where I ate at the bar. I was prepared to bring something home for Louise but she still had no appetite.

Once back aboard and settling in to my evening video-watching routine, I noticed our Starlink had become glacially slow. I never figured out why, but I suspect it was related to them discontinuing our previous plan and forcing us on to a more expensive but lower-performance plan just in the last few days. Our AT&T hot spot was running ten times faster, so I just turned the Starlink off. When I turned it back on yesterday the speed was much better.

The LaBelle Yacht Club, new since our last visit. It looks nice but the music was loud.

Sunday morning Louise was just fine, almost as if the allergy thing had never happened, and we weighed anchor and continued downriver. The traffic was not bad in the morning but picked up throughout the day, and we had a 20-minute wait at the Franklin Lock. One of the downstream gates was inoperative, and the other was working at reduced speed.

As we approached Fort Myers we began to see damage from Hurricane Milton. Nothing nearly as severe as what we saw post-Ian, but still significant. We proceeded into the anchorage at dead slow, "clutch ahead," since we had no way of knowing if the storm had done anything to the unmarked channel, wherein we normally have just a foot below the keel. We made it in without incident and had the entire anchorage, normally full of long-term boats, all to ourselves (map).

No doubt Milton had a hand in that, but there are also no services here now whatsoever since Ian. No place to get water, or empty waste, or even to safely and conveniently land a dinghy. The two downtown marinas have been shuttered since Ian, and only a small section of exposed concrete-and-steel bulkhead is available to get ashore. That's where we landed the tender Sunday evening for dinner.

The bar at Forrey Grill, which was tucked in the back and not visible from the dining room, where there was a long wait. It's not as purple as it looks in this photo.

Tying up and disembarking even in the moderate chop from the south wind was a challenge, as was securing the dinghy so it would not be bashing hard parts into the bulkhead. As we were doing that, we realized it would be completely untenable Monday evening, when winds were forecast to be NW and there would likely be 2-3 footers bashing into this seawall.

We had a nice stroll around town, which is still vibrant as ever, and landed at long-time favorite Capone's for dinner. I texted Ben to let them know we'd have to wave off for Monday evening unless we could find a different place to land. Their Sunday plans had evaporated, and so they met us after dinner at Sip & Sizzle, a new steak-and-cocktails place, for drinks. We spent well over an hour nursing a couple of drinks and catching up; it's always great to see them.

My antipasto salad came with this plate of garlic knots. These two got saved for breakfast.

Monday morning we were pinned in the anchorage until the tide came up above zero from its low of -0.5'; we had arrived at +0.5' and had just over a foot under the keel. After lunch we weighed anchor, squeaked back out of the anchorage, and continued southwest in 30-35 knots of wind and a small-craft advisory. Vector has no trouble with this, and underway with the stabilizers working is more comfortable than bouncing at anchor, but this weather had what is often a nightmarish section of waterway blissfully devoid of other traffic.

That said, in the middle of the narrow and shallow section known as the Miserable Mile, we came face to face with a pair of small pusher tugs, each with a barge on the head, and hundreds of feet of dredge pipe strung between them. They were struggling in the wind, and as a result, taking the whole channel. They never answered the radio on any channel, nor did they respond to my whistle signals, and I ended up dredging the mud at the edge of the channel avoiding them. Sadly, there are never any consequences for this sort of behavior unless there is a collision -- we missed by mere feet.

Passing two tugs with dredge pipe very close aboard.

The high winds were supposed to clock around to the NW by evening, and so we tucked up in the corner of Pine Island Sound, just off the south end of Pine Island, a familiar stop, and dropped the hook (map) as close to shore as we could get. The winds stayed westerly, and stiff, the whole night, so it was not the best choice. Even so, we braved the waves by splashing the tender and heading ashore to the Waterfront Restaurant in St. James City for dinner, which was good. They have 16 dock-and-dine slips, but we were the only boat.

Tuesday I had figured to weigh anchor first thing and continue north past Cabbage Key and Boca Grande, all the way to Englewood or maybe even Venice. Louise-the-weather-router pointed out, however, that if we waited a day, we would have a perfect two-day window to go all the way to Clearwater in the gulf. That would bypass the perennially shallow stretch south of Venice, a few timed drawbridges, and whatever unknown challenges might still exist from Milton.

We're the only nut jobs arriving by boat.

We made it a short day and stopped at long-time favorite Cabbage Key (map), where we tendered ashore for dinner at the inn. This place is packed to the gills at lunch, the inspiration for Jimmy Buffet's Cheeseburger in Paradise, but it's downright quiet at dinner time, and we've been coming here for a decade. They weathered both Ian and Milton, and sometimes it feels like they could last forever, with many of the structures now 75 years old.

Yesterday we weighed anchor and headed toward Boca Grande, where we expected to anchor for an easy exit at dawn this morning for an all-day run to Eggmont Key in Tampa Bay. But by the time we were passing the tip of Cayo Costa, gulf conditions let us just continue out the inlet and make a day run to Venice. I called the yacht club there to be sure they had room for us, as there is no place for us to anchor in Venice.

This sign on the rest room made me chuckle.

After passing the tip of Gasparilla Island we made the hard right into the unmarked "swash channel" leading north from the inlet. We've used this channel before, but we were nervous enough about what Milton might have done (hurricanes often move, close, or open these sorts of channels) that I called TowBoatUS for a report, and also solicited reports online from folks who had been through since the storm. We found no less than 11' in the swash channel.

It was not flat calm yesterday, so we had a bit of a bouncy, but tolerable, ride. We arrived to the Venice Yacht Club right around 4, and had to wait a short while to get to the fuel dock, where we took on a bit of fuel and pumped out our tanks. We normally do that at sea, but here on the west coast it is required to go out beyond nine miles, adding 3-4 miles to our trip. I was expecting the fuel to be cheaper than it was, so we only added 100 gallons, instead of the 700 I had planned. We used a bunch more fuel coming the long way around, and this will tide us over until we are back on the east coast.

Vector at anchor in Pine Island Sound, as seen from St. James City.

We could have stayed right there on the fuel dock, but that would have us backing out through the mud at low tide this morning, so after pumping out we moved around to the T-head and tied up for the night (map). We had a nice dinner at the outdoor tiki bar adjacent to the pool, but we were glad to learn that Wednesday is Pasta Night in the dining room, which smelled great. After dinner we had a nice walk, but we had to turn around at The Crow's Nest because the jetty and its park are closed and fenced off, the aftermath of Milton. We saw many buildings still being remediated from being inundated by storm surge. We returned to the bar for dessert after our walk, but had missed the last slice of bananas Foster cheesecake by mere minutes.

This morning we dropped lines just before 9am and slipped back out the inlet. Seas have been getting progressively calmer throughout the day, and the plotter has us arriving to the anchorage by 4pm. Had we left from Boca Grande we would have had to anchor in Tampa Bay, but our departure from Venice is letting us get all the way to a more protected anchorage inside the Pass-a-Grille inlet.

Tomorrow we will have a short day in the gulf to Clearwater. We've usually anchored there, where the city has a free day dock, borrowing a car from our friends. This time, however, we've booked a dock, to make things a bit easier and also so we can land the scooters, as Louise is looking forward to some more time on her new steed. We'll be in Clearwater until the 20th, and you won't hear from me again until we are on our way back south.