Ding Darling

Days on cruise:  275

Sanibel Island is somewhat unique. Attached to Captiva Island, it’s a pretty, upscale community in terms of wealth, but has the New England sentiment that’s not ostentatious, so it’s attractive and laid back. Bike paths line all the major roads, and they’re grade-separated, have signs reminding bikers to look both ways at driveways and intersections, and also reminding car drivers that there’s an $80 fine for failing to yield to pedestrians or bikers. Traffic, both cars and bikes, is pretty awful here. Traffic cops help manage it at a number of intersections in popular winter months.

So at 9:00 we set off on our bikes with Craig and Barbara on “Blue Heron” headed for the J.N. Ding Darling National Wildlife Refuge, which occupies almost half the land on the island.

Bob and Cathryn set out a bit earlier than Craig and Barbara because Cathryn’s front bicycle brake was broken. A bike shop a mile from the marina took her bike into the back room 2 minutes after they opened, and 15 minutes later, for $19, it was repaired! What a deal. The adjacent bike rental facility had hundreds of bicycles, including the kind with big balloon wheels that work as wheelchairs on the beach for those who can’t walk in sand.

Five miles after leaving the marina, we were at the entrance to the Ding Darling National Wildlife Refuge.

Serendipity had us begin the 4-mile loop road (open to cars, bikes and pedestrians, one-directional only) at low tide, which meant the shore birds were feeding in the shallow waters. We saw lots of nice shore birds, but not very close.

Another spot further along the road afforded more sightings.

We don’t have any White Ibis at home on Puget Sound.

Lots of co-mingled species, and Barbara could identify all of them!

In the mangroves there were tiny black tree crabs we’ve never seen before.

Late in the journey Craig and Barbara spied and identified a Red Shouldered Hawk, a new sighting for us.

We had sad news of one of our Gulf Crossing Buddies yesterday. Don and Anita from “Limelight” are from Wisconsin and began their Loop in September. We never met them until the Gulf Crossing group convened in Carabelle, but have spent time with them in Tarpon Springs and Fort Myers. Yesterday we got a call telling us they were riding bikes and Anita was hit by a car, badly injuring her knee. She had surgery late last night at a Fort Myers hospital, and Cathryn talked with her for an hour on the phone this afternoon. Anita is working to stay upbeat, but the Loop is over for Anita and Don this year. We’re distraught by the news and hoping Anita has a quick recovery and they’re able to resume their journey next year.

Craig and Barbara came to our boat for cocktails, and we walked a half mile to dinner at the Lazy Flamingo with tasty seafood offerings and outdoor dining.

Sunday Cruise To Sanibel Island

Days on cruise:  274

Distance traveled:  19.6 miles

Travel time: 2 hours 28 minutes

Total trip odometer:  5,823 statute miles

Bill and Joy from Proud Lady came to say visit this morning before we all left Fort Myers; they’re heading east across Lake Okeechobee, and we’re moving south, so our paths won’t converge anytime soon. We’ve enjoyed our time with them since meeting in Carabelle and crossing the Gulf together.

For the second Sunday in a row, it was a warm, sunny BUSY day on the Caloosahatchee River, especially in the so-called Miserable Mile, where three channels converge and the posted speed is “Slow Speed; Minimum Wake”. Here fast boats, slow boats, both motor and sail, converge in a narrow channel unable to pass one another, and the Sherriff’s Boats sits nearby making sure we all behave ourselves. It’s a Manatee Zone.

Gotta love the Sandbar Party. We don’t see this in Puget Sound. Ever.

Arriving at Sanibel Marina, the only marina open to the public on this island, friends Craig and Barbara on Blue Heron (blue hull slightly left of center below) arrived just before us. Our slip is right in front of the restaurant with outside seating and a packed lunch crowd, so 17 people stood at our slip watching us pull in, taking photos and offering a round of applause at the end. Good thing we didn’t screw it up!

It’s great to see Barbara (on her bow), Craig and their sweet labradors Joey and Bailey again. We last saw them in Fairhope, Alabama in November.

Pretty place to spend a few days.

Grandma Dot’s is the well-known restaurant where we’re moored, and the four of us ate dinner there, walking a whole 50 feet from boat to table.

View of the channel coming into the marina, taken across the bow of the boat next door, with the Sanibel/Captiva bridge in the background and the white sand beach you better take care to steer around as you come in.

Vessel Safety Check

Days on cruise:  273

Saturday was a “get ready to go” day. We waited several hours for a guy from the Coast Guard Auxiliary to show up and conduct a Vessel Safety Check. He arrived about noon and was done in less than 20 minutes. He said we “passed with flying colors” as all of the required items were in order and ready for his inspection, having been organized by Bob in advance. We last had an inspection at Fort Pierce in early 2012, so that sticker expired. We’re told  the chances of getting boarded on the water by a Coast Guard or other official (time consuming and inconvenient)are greatly reduced if you have a current VSC sticker displayed on your window. Now we do!

This is the closest we’ve gotten to an alligator so far. Full disclosure is it is a fake one in a fountain at the marina. Looks real though!

Saturday afternoon we walked historic downtown Fort Myers. Lots of things commemorating the famous trio of Edison, Ford and Firestone, and this one depicts their frequent camping trips together. In sport coats???

Restaurants, park names, plaques and statues and more.

Mid-afternoon a knock on the hull announced the arrival of Anne and Jim from “Wild Goose”, a couple we first met in Canada’s North Channel and haven’t seen since Green Turtle Bay in September. They came for cocktails, and we had a good visit. They’ll close their Loop and cross their wake in the next week or 10 days, returning to their home in eastern Florida and undecided about “what next”.  Bill and Joy from “Proud Lady” were supposed to come too, but got held up on a nearby island visiting an old high school friend so couldn’t make it.

We had another pretty sunset.

All is well, and we’re eager to get moving again tomorrow.

Good To Go! Woo Hoo!

Days on cruise:  272

Next To Me is ready to go!  We have a new high tech battery charger, and a new combined start/house starboard 8D engine battery. Doug from Felix Marine did a great job installing both this afternoon.

He called at 11:30 and told us he’d be there by noon. He was right on time and immediately got to work installing the new battery charger. 8D batteries are monsters. They vary in weight, but all our research says they all weigh well more than 100 pounds. Not that we put ours on our bathroom scale.

Joe showed up to help Doug load the new battery, and they both exerted a great deal of energy getting it off the dock into our engine room, not to mention removing the old one. Bob was pleased to have two strong young backs on hand.

At the end of the second hour Doug packed up and said goodbye. Overall a very good experience with Felix Marine here in Ft Myers.

Look:  the new charger has LED gauges showing the number of amps being fed into each of  the batteries during charging, as well as amps drawn during discharge.  Bob’s excited to be able to see this data to learn what each of our typical uses draw, even if it is late in the trip. What geeks we’ve become!

A Play Day

Days on cruise: 271

Thursday was a play day. Thomas Edison and Henry Ford, very close friends and collaborators on numerous projects, both owned winter homes in Fort Myers long before it was any more than an unknown spot on the map. Edison bought his property in 1885, built his home, and his family enjoyed winters here until 1947 when his wife deeded the property to the City of Fort Myers for $1.00. It still contains all of the original furnishings.

Seminole Lodge, as the house was known, is a beautiful example of a post-and-beam home built from wood pre-cut in Maine and transported by ship to Fort Myers. It sits on the shore of the Caloosahatchee River just blocks from the marina where we’re staying downtown.

The many acres include a main home, a guest house, Edison’s office (on the footprint where his laboratory used to stand), a Caretaker’s cottage, some formal gardens, a 1500-foot pier (now mostly gone) and a pool with adjacent pool house.

Covered walkways connect the two buildings that make up the Edison’s home.

This Mysore Fig is more impressive than the photo shows. The roots are five feet tall and appear almost more architectural than botanical.

There are huge numbers of Royal Palms, 13 varieties of bamboo (whose fibers Edison used as filaments in his electricity experiments), and thousands of other plants and trees. Edison participated in experiments with Ford and Harvey Firestone, another friend, to test thousands of plants to identify the one that would yield the most rubber to meet the growing American demand for this product, to be grown domestically.

Henry Ford acquired the home next door to Edison’s in 1916, named The Mangoes for the many mango trees on the property. It’s much smaller, both house and property, but equally elegant for its’ time, and the fact that it was only used two weeks each year.

Both homes are built to take full advantage of breezes coming from any direction, as air conditioning didn’t exist.

Statues of Thomas Edison and his wife Mina are on the property. Eidson was an astonishing genius who eventually held over 1,300 U.S. patents, and in addition to the light bulb, he was responsible for inventing early versions of phonographs, still cameras, film cameras and movie projectors.

It was a highly educational afternoon, and these men, who also enjoyed camping, boating, fishing and traveling together boggle the mind in their huge accomplishments and contributions to modern life.

Hanging Out in Fort Myers

Days on cruise:  271

Tuesday evening is “Dinner Out” night at Legacy Harbour Marina. Someone picks a restaurant, and off go a couple dozen people to share a meal. We participated and met a bunch of nice folks, many of whom did the Loop in the 2005-2010 timeframe and now keep their boats at Legacy Harbour to live here every winter. Don and Anita from Limelight (Gulf Crossing Buddies) arrived that afternoon, so were along too. Great to see them again! Afterwards Michael and Claudia invited everyone back to their 63-foot boat for more visiting and treats.

Wednesday we hung out on the boat and worked on projects. Boats our size are required by the Coast Guard to have 3 certified fire extinguishers. Our certifications expired in January, and we want a Vessel Safety Check done this Saturday, so Cathryn made arrangements for someone to come service 3 portable extinguishers plus the one in the engine room. We actually have 3 more on board, but didn’t get them certified.

Bob spent most of the day in the engine room.

We had developed a slow functioning drain from the shower, so he bought a snake at a nearby hardware store and took a variety of steps to get it unclogged. In the process, he found the sporadically-performing float switch on our shower’s sump pump, so replaced that too. Voila, no more standing water in the shower while we bathe!

We also tired of running our engines in the marina to keep the 8D batteries charged, and learned it wasn’t working on one of them anyway, so Bob bought a small, portable automotive battery charger at an auto parts store and hooked that up to the ailing 8D to see if we could resuscitate it. No luck, so he called Felix Marine to tell them to add a new 8D battery to the plan when they come to install the new battery charger. Meanwhile the other 8D battery continues to work like a champ.

The cold front finally disappeared, and the weather has been perfect: 60-ish at night and 80-ish in the afternoons. Wednesday night Don and Anita from “Limelight” and Bill and Joyce from “Carried Away” came to our boat for docktails. We all provided appetizers, and 3 hours later no one needed dinner, so we called it a night. We had lots of laughs and good Looper stories.

 

Thursday morning found us headed along the waterfront to the Farmer’s Market.

As always, there were gorgeous fruits and vegetables, potted herbs, and lots of food booths.

Seagrass planting pots were an item we’d not seen before.

Mid-day today “Carried Away” left for destinations east . . .

and an hour later, “Limelight” also left for a different destination.

We got a call from Joe at Felix Marine telling us our new battery charger arrived from Atlanta today, so a technician will come to install it and the new 8D battery tomorrow afternoon, Friday.  Woo hoo!  We’ll be good to go again.

Battery Charger

Days on cruise:  269

Yesterday Joe from “Felix Marine” showed up to take a look at our faulty battery charger and tell us what’s needed. Among other things, he says it’s probably original to the boat (1986) as it contains transformers, which are very old technology. Anyone surprised to hear we need a new battery charger? We weren’t.

For those geeks/nerds (like us) interested in such things, the battery charger is what converts the power coming from either a shore power electrical cord or the stand-alone generator (when anchored out) into stored energy in our 8D house and starter batteries. Without a functioning battery charger, the only way we can keep these batteries running (until we get the new battery charger either Friday or Monday) is to run the engines for an hour or so twice a day, during which time our two 65 amp alternators can re-charge the batteries. Otherwise the batteries will discharge so far that we’ll be unable to start the engines. Starters use a lot of power! And 8D batteries are large (about 150 pounds each) and expensive, so we don’t want to harm them by letting them discharge further than is prudent.

Legacy Harbour Marina is conveniently located in downtown Fort Myers, and the grocery store, drug store, liquor store and lots more are within 2-3 blocks. So we’ll stay here for a week, work on boat projects, exercise regularly, as well as enjoy some of the local sights and people.

Fort Myers, FL

Days on cruise:  267

Distance traveled: 35.7 miles

Travel time:  4 hours, 6 mins

Total trip odometer:  5,803 statute miles

We both slept badly Saturday night stewing about the problem with the battery charger, and Bob even managed to dream about a variety of other catastrophes befalling the boat. Isn’t the mind a weird thing in the middle of the night?

We left beautiful Cabbage Key at 9am and headed south. The mostly very narrow dredged ICW channel was tedious at times, in that it was a sunny Sunday in February, so LOTS of boat traffic was out.

All the sailboats we called on the VHF to arrange slow passes didn’t have VHF on board or weren’t using it; all the Go-Fast boats were going fast and waking us violently; there were lots of “Slow Speed, Minimum Wake” zones for manatees, which kept us going at slower than usual speed. So we settled into it and figured it wasn’t a real long day, and “this too shall pass”. And that’s what happened, of course. Maybe we were a little grumpy from lack of sleep.

On our way we passed North Captiva Island, then Sanibel and Captiva Islands. North Captiva used to be part of Captiva, but a 1921 hurricane created this new pass, below,  and since then they’ve been separate islands. A bridge provides access to Sanibel and Captiva, but North Captiva can be reached only by boat.

Pulling into Legacy Harbor marina at Fort Myers, we were astounded to have our lines caught by Marc and Michelle of “Marc’s Arc”, Loopers we met in Norfolk, VA last year who closed their Loop in Grafton, Illinois last September. They have good friends who winter in Florida, are down here for a visit, and saw our boat come in. They came on board Next To Me to visit and it was great to catch up with them!

We checked into Legacy Harbor Marina where we hope to arrange a battery charger fix soon. It’s a nice marina, and there are hordes of Loopers here, though almost all of them are folks who completed their Loop in previous years, so we don’t know them.

Super Bowl parties were being planned, of course.

Mostly it was an uneventful day, just moving toward being able to return to carefree boating, anchoring out when weather conditions and our interest align, and enjoying the sunshine and relatively warm weather compared to most of the nation. Looper Midnight will come early tonight.

Cape Haze, Punta Blanca, Cabbage Key

Days on cruise:  266

Distance traveled:  16.3  and  5.4 miles

Travel times: 2 hrs, 11 mins   and   56 minutes

Total trip odometer:  5,767 statute miles

Just like living on land, some days on the boat don’t go as planned. In our last post about dragging the anchor in the very high wind at Cape Haze anchorage, we returned to Cape Haze Marina. We hoped to stay only one night, but the wind was crazy high, so we stayed two. That was okay, as we got some boat projects done: little stuff like cleaning, canvas snap repair and the like.

It’s nesting season for the ospreys, and everywhere there are pairs of them sharing nest-sitting duty.

This morning it was 43 degrees when we got up, and 58 inside the boat. It’s supposed to be warm here! Residents keep telling us the weather is unseasonably cold. OK, at least it’s sunny and not raining, so we’ll stop whining. And we have friends in Michigan who must be rolling their eyes when we complain about night-time lows of 43 degrees.

We left Cape Haze Marina this morning and headed south to Cayo Costa, settling nearby in the beautiful Punta Blanca North anchorage. We hung out on the boat for awhile to watch the wind die and make sure our anchor was secure, and it was.

Just before heading out in the dinghy, while checking the electrical panel, we heard a loud click: the sound of a relay flipping. We checked all the relays and saw the “battery converter” switch was off, and we know we leave it on ALL the time. 

We’d been running the generator briefly, and several times as Bob flipped the relay back on, it immediately switched off again. OK, turn off the generator and see what happens? Same thing. He checked a handful of other items, including electrical connections, and couldn’t determine the source of the problem. Unfortunately without the ability to recharge our starter, house, and inverter batteries, we can’t anchor out. Shoot! Up came the anchor and off we went to Cabbage Key Marina a few miles south. Didn’t we just do this two days ago for a different reason?

So instead of exploring Cayo Costa for the afternoon, we explored Cabbage Key by walking the Nature Trail on this boat-access-only island and climbing the water tower to see the view from on high. Pretty, and sub-tropical, unlike places we’ve been until now.

At 6:00 we headed into the Cabbage Key restaurant for a delicious dinner of grilled grouper and asparagus, and picked up local stories of the history of the island, including why there is almost $100,000 in $1.00 bills taped to the walls, posts and ceilings of this place! They claim almost $10,000 in bills falls off the walls each year, and they donate it all to charity. Quiet place on a Saturday night before the Super Bowl, so we assume everyone is staying home to attend parties tomorrow.